How did the food industry get us to stop asking the question: is sugar toxic? It all starts with a secret PR campaign dating back to the 1970s. For forty years, Big Sugar deflected all threats to its multi-billion dollar empire, while sweetening the world’s food supply. As obesity, diabetes, and heart disease rates skyrocket, doctors are now treating the first generation of children suffering from fatty liver disease. The sugar industry is once again under siege. They dodged the bullet once. Will they do it again?
Tag Archives: industry
Medicating Normal
Millions of people worldwide are physically dependent on commonly prescribed psychiatric drugs. While these drugs can provide effective short-term relief, pharmaceutical companies have hidden -from both doctors and patients- their dangerous side effects, addictive nature and long-term harm.
Combining cinema verité and investigative journalism, Medicating Normal follows the stories of those whose lives have been torn apart by the very medications they believed would help them. Expert testimony and undercover footage reveal a systemically corrupt industry.
Medicating Normal is the untold story of the disastrous consequences that can occur when profit-driven medicine intersects with human beings in distress.
Princes of the Yen
Princes of the Yen reveals how post-war Japanese society was transformed to suit the agenda of powerful interest groups, and how citizens were kept entirely in the dark about this. History is now repeating itself around the world.
Based on a book by Professor Richard Werner, a visiting researcher at the Bank of Japan during the 90s crash, during which the stock market dropped by 80% and house prices by up to 84%. The film uncovers how the Bank of Japan pumped up and then crashed the Japanese economy, with an aim of inducing change. Today, what happened in Japan 25 years ago is repeating itself in Europe, with an aim of centralizing power in the Eurozone.
The film shows why it is important for central banks to be accountable and transparent. It also explains how International Financial Organizations such as the IMF seek to impose conditions on countries that are mainly of benefit to dominant Western interests. For anyone interested in understanding recent developments and the significance of the establishment of institutions such as the AIIB and the BRICS led New Development Bank, Princes of the Yen provides the background.
Princes of the Yen reveals with clarity the control levers that underpin the dominant ideology of the 21st Century. Piece by piece, reality is deconstructed to reveal the world as it is, not as those in power would like us to believe that it is.
“Because only power that is hidden is power that endures.”
An Invisible Threat
We cannot see the waves, we cannot hear them, we cannot touch them, but they are all around us, invading the air, irradiating our body and the environment.
An Invisible Threat looks at the relationship between microwave technology and health, investigating the conflicts of interest among industry representatives, politicians, scientists and consumers that leave us unprotected to the effects of radiation.
Wireless networks irradiate microwaves indiscriminately across cities, villages and the countryside of all developed countries. This increasing exposure disturbs the biological processes that are essential for the healthy growth of human beings, animals and plants – it especially affects children and teenagers.
The reasonable doubt that has arisen from independent scientific reports regarding the harmful effects of these technologies has led the Council of Europe to recommend its members countries apply the Precautionary Principle. In June 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a body of the World Health Organization (WHO), admitted for the first time that microwaves produced by mobile phones could be “possible carcinogens”.
Our investigation delves into three groups: the telecommunications industry (mobile telephone companies, MMF); official organisations (WHO, IARC, ICNIRP) and official scientific reports (BioInitiative, Interphone, CEFALO).
In parallel, An Invisible Threat takes in the daily life of Minerva Palomar, a woman affected by the electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome and the obstacles she needs to overcome in order to lead a normal life.
An Invisible Threat has a clear international focus, dealing with a social issue of global importance. Microwave effects are currently being analysed and debated in almost all developed countries. The question is, are we prepared for the answers.
The Digital Drug Industry
Drugs have never been more marketed than they are now. The most recent European Drug Report refers to this as an “uberisation” of the drug market, with it now being easier to order a gram of cocaine than a pizza. But with this ease of access and glossy marketing has come a dark outcome; a sharp uptake in drug use in children, as young as 10. The world has been hit by a wave of deaths of children who have taken Class A drugs such as ecstasy, and many have been found to have bought those drugs on Instagram and Snapchat. Tir Dhondy investigates how easy it really is to pick up, and whether it’s possible to regulate this digital wild west.
Pot Farm
The war on drugs is over. The world is rehashing it’s pot laws. Medical marijuana trials are set to begin in Australia. A controversial new industry is emerging…
Meet Max and James. They’ve decided to become farmers.
Max is a computer genius and James is a hustler, they’re clever city-slickers, but they’re ready for a tree change. They’ve never farmed before, they’ve got masses to learn, and they’re borrowing a whole lot of coin to get this venture started.
They’ve bought a banana plantation in Byron Bay, and they’re gonna turn it into a Pot Farm.
A couple of years ago Max had leukaemia, and during chemotherapy smoked pot to help with his nausea and lack of appetite. He was the only one not throwing up in his ward. He knows it works, so now he and James have bought a banana farm, and are going to grow pot. Legally.
Byron Bay has one of the biggest concentrations of illegal cannabis in Australia. So on the up side there will be a very skilled (and eccentric) advisors available. On top of this, they’ll employ WOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) from all over the world.
But they’ll also have some pretty unhappy locals if their low-THC marijuana cross-pollinates and ruins the abundant illegal varieties.
They have in hand a coveted license to grow cannabis at less than 1% THC (the stuff that gets you high), with which they are hoping to produce medical oil. It’s well-documented that hemp oil is a wonderful product for patients, as it has such a low THC content, it’s very safe, especially for parents not wanting to get their kids high!
But the laws and bureaucracy are so complex with their new paranoid-level regulations that they are pushing the proverbial uphill for miles, especially when the government decides that hemp oil will not legally be used for medicinal purposes. It looks like all is lost, until they meet Mukti the white witch, who makes vaginal lubricant. With their magic ingredient they can help ladies orgasm. Another noble venture.
This has the potential to turn Max’s wife Kirby around. She’s not so keen on her hubby’s plans to farm marijuana in a mozzie-infested backwater with their baby Archimedes in tow. And Kirby and James aren’t so keen on each other either. But she does like the sound of the lube. And so do thousands of Italian women, it seems, through their new Italian investor.
If their incredibly ambitious plans fall in a heap, they will have borrowed to the hilt and sunk two million dollars into their venture for nothing.