Warning! Just About Everything Will Kill You

By Alan Caruba

According to a new book, “The Healthy Home”, every single room in your home or apartment is lethal. You would be better off living in a tent in the woods somewhere as far as the authors are concerned.

Among the life-threatening hazards is the need to remove your shoes before entering your home to avoid walking around “unwittingly in car oil, pesticides, animal waste” and other “toxins.”

And did you know that “non-stick pots and pans release potential hazardous fumes and particles into the air such as toxic gases, carcinogens, and global pollutants”? Cook a meal and die!

And, please, get rid of those wrinkle-free sheets because they can “expose you to the chemical PFC (perfluorochemicals)” that are “linked to reproductive and development toxicity, as well as cancers of the bladder and liver.” There you are, getting what you think is a good night’s sleep and, instead, you’re under attack by your sheets!

This hideous book goes on to explain why fluorescent light bulbs “will make you feel drained and lethargic” and “electrical appliances create EMF’s (electromagnetic fields).”

It’s not just one book. There’s “Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” We are informed that “From bug spray, to ‘tuna salad, the new lead paint’, to her own deck made of pressure-treated wood (which contains the carcinogen—and developmental neurotoxicant—arsenic)”, the author goes off on a paranoid bender.

As we all know, everything is an environmental crisis. Air! Water! Fossil fuels! Nuclear energy! Food! If you believe Al Gore, the seas are rising, the poles are melting, and we just have to reduce carbon dioxide, a gas upon which all life (along with oxygen) depends.

Those of my generation enjoy sending around lists of things we did when we were growing up in the 1930s and 40s. They remind us that we slept in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints, there were no childproof lids on medicine bottles, and when we rode our bikes we did not wear helmets.

We ate cupcakes, cookies, white bread, real butter, and bacon. We did not have play stations, Nintendo’s and video games, or televisions with 150 channels. This list goes on, but the point is that, unless it was raining, we were outside playing! We got tons of exercise, lots of sunshine, and no one was constantly warning us against everything, real or imagined, that could kill us except against playing in the street. And we did that, too.

Life Expectancy at All-Time High

So what are we to make of the latest news that says that life expectancy in the United States is at an all-time high?

The latest report from the Centers for Disease Control says that, in 2009, life expectancy exceeded 78 years for the first time ever. When my Father was born in 1901, life expectancy was 47.3 years. He lived to age 93. Mother lived to 98!

How insane are all those people producing research study reports like a recent one from Wageningen University in the Netherlands noting that insects produce far less greenhouse gases than cattle and pigs do, and would be “a viable alternative to eating meat”? That’s right—the Greens want you to start eating bugs to save the Earth.

The latest big scare is nuclear radiation from the Japanese nuclear reactors, the result of the biggest earthquake to hit that nation in years. In the U.S., you will get more radiation just getting a suntan in your backyard this summer.

It may not kill you, but a $14 trillion debt may kill the economy of the United States if Congress doesn’t get around to cutting the insane waste of money the government spends every day such as the $60 million that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is giving three public universities, $20 million each, in Florida, Iowa, and Idaho to study the “impact that global warming will have” on crops and forests? Only there is NO global warming. The Earth has been in a perfectly natural COOLING cycle since 1998.

I am all for a healthy lifestyle. Too much of anything is likely to be bad for you, but the odds are that you are among the millions of Americans who will live to age 78 and well beyond.

© Alan Caruba, 2011