The Hundred-Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are Destroying Your Health

by Randall Fitzgerald

Book Overview

In a devastating expos in the tradition of Silent Spring and Fast Food Nation, investigative journalist Randall Fitzgerald warns how thousands of man-made chemicals in our food, water, medicine, and environment are making humans the most polluted species on the planet. A century ago, when Congress enacted the Pure Food and Drug Act, Americans were promised "better living through chemistry." Fitzgerald provides overwhelming evidence...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452288398
• ISBN13: 9780452288393
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Loved it, very informative!

Great information

"If there was any danger, someone would tell us!"

As Al Gore's movie makes "inconvenient truths" about global warming more understandable, this book will open your eyes to the unintended damage being done to you, those you love and and every other creature on the planet. In a story that makes clear the need for this book, the author stands outside a Wal*Mart. Shoppers are rushing past a state-mandated sign that warns of chemicals inside that are "known...to cause cancer, birth defects and other reproductive harm." He stops a shopper to ask if she had thought about the sign. She brushes past with the dismissal that, "If there was any danger, someone would tell us!" Well, you are being told. If--like the shopper and most of the rest of us--the signs with the bold letters aren't clear enough for you, this book certainly is. Fitzgerald is a professional writer, rather than a scientist, activist, politician or scholar. This may be why his book is an enjoyable read and easy to understand. And it's unburdened by the technical complexities or alarmist attacks that are too common to writing on this topic. Also to its credit, the book goes beyond gloom and doom to offer practical solutions that you can begin right now. Although nothing quick or easy is promised, the case that we need to do something is made starkly compelling. Getting informed is the first step, and this book is information that we all need now to make better choices concerning every detail of what we eat and how we choose to live.

Fitzgerald's book is not abstract

Fitzgerald goes where few would dare in this meticulously researched Magnum Opus on the rise and ubiquity of unsafe and largely untested synthetic chemicals passing as food, medicine, and their undeniably extreme impact on our ability as a species to maintain our health and civilization. Impressive... Fitzgerald's book is not abstract, it is not philosophical, it is not a cheap attempt at self or product promotion, and it is completely devoid of finger-pointing or blame. Even when he identifies the culprits that have generated, maintained and profited from what he calls "The Synthetics Belief System" (a century old attempt to equate the application of synthetic chemical "discoveries" to food, medicine and consumer goods with notions of identity, self-worth, and the myths of "progress, all promoted by the processed food, pharmaceutical and chemical institutions... and our blind belief) he convincingly points that it is we consumers, we employees, we stockholders, we government officials and the electorate that are ultimately keeping this pattern of "accelerating degeneration" in place...all because we have come to aggressively demand all this synthetic chemical "food stuff" and "medicine stuff" and "consumer stuff" as our birthright. We have been taught an awful lesson. The implications are such that our actual birthright (a state of "naturally occurring health" as he puts it, where the body burden of synthetic chemicals is allowed to be eliminated, a point he drives home in the book by chronicling a experiment in detoxification himself) has been deftly robbed from everyone on the planet, including the planet itself it seems. We have become entirely dependent on stuff that is clearly destroying our health. In fact, we are complicit in this attack on everybody's health by maintaining our habits, which in turn are heavily reinforced by everything we hear and see everywhere on a daily basis. I saw how my purchase decisions are not only destroying my health and the health of my family (even my kid's ability to reproduce) but how MY consumer choices are in fact destroying people everywhere, animals everywhere and the very ecosystem we entirely depend upon. I'm a Gen-X'er with a predilection for healthy living. He's a Baby Boomer. Regardless, everybody everywhere is confronted with this super-massive problem. Like the old Palmolive ad kept repeating on TV when I was a kid: "You're soaking in it!" That's the problem nobody wants to talk about. Luckily Fitzgerald offers us a framework in which to begin dealing with these realities, not just talk about it like some novelty item that is as dangerous as any WMD. I'd say the Synthetic Belief System is the WMD we need to be talking about as citizens of all countries. Read this book.

Offering an eye-opening view of real health issues.

THE HUNDRED YEAR LIE: HOW FOOD AND MEDICINE ARE DESTROYING YOUR HEALTH pinpoints the dilemma of chemicals in everyday products which are affecting health - and tells what to do about it. It comes from a newspaper reporter and investigative writer who here attacks the lies perpetuated by the chemical, pharmaceutical and processed foods industry, offering an eye-opening view of real health issues. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

Not to be Ignored

Randall Fitzgerald's "The Hundred Year Lie" is the most important, convincing and blunt health-related book I've read since Colin Campbell's "The China Study." My immediate reaction after finishing this book was fear, but it was followed rather quickly by a sense of empowerment and determination. I am recommending this book to friends and everyone in my family. Mr. Fitzgerald has packed an enormous amount of alarming and scientifically-based information on a wide range of topics that directly impact our health and quality of life into an engrossing, well-organized and shocking book. Even though much of this information has been available (with a bit of effort) for some time, I have not seen it organized so ingeniously or presented in such a stark, authoritative and grounded fashion. By "grounded", I mean that it is alarming in its content but not hysterical in its tone. Hundreds if not thousands of scientists worldwide have been trying to sound the alarm about the effects of synthetic chemicals on our environment, bodies and reproductive capacity for several years, but because the information is so upsetting it has not been readily accepted or discussed by the larger population. In one of the book's most mesmerizing chapters, Fitzgerald crafts a painstaking, revealing time-line of our last century in which it becomes possible to fathom the causes and effects set into motion by the introduction of synthetic chemicals, drugs and food additives to our lives. It becomes virtually impossible to accept that the exponential rise in cancer, heart disease, birth defects and diabetes are wholly unrelated to these trends in our dietary habits and exposure to unregulated toxins in our food, water and environment. Mr. Fitzgerald deftly juggles a wide variety of subjects, but the chapter that most outraged me is his chapter on the effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on the reproductive potential of many species--including the human being. I knew that entire populations of amphibians and fish had been decimated by herbicides, fungidcides, pesticides and plastics, but I had no idea the extent to which the human population had been impacted. Among the many facts presented in this book worth careful consideration is that ten percent of American couples are unable to conceive, and that a recent study of in vitro fertilization revealed that 80% of three hundred embryos sampled from healthy women in their twenties were genetically defective (the actual percentage was probably higher, as only eleven chromosomes were tested). If that is not enough, consider that a 2001 study in China "found that 85 percent of university students tested were infertile." Am I the only one who finds the implications of this chilling? And Fitzgerald provides page after page of this sort of information along with a bibliography whose sources verify it. I had trouble believing, for example, that in Canada there is a grossly disproportionate ratio of fema