I took this gullibility test today and I was not pleased with my results. Needless to say, I got an "F"
Here are the shocking answers:
Answers & Explanations
Drinking milk helps people lose weight.FALSE. The milk / weight loss myth is a clever marketing gimmick dreamed up by the dairy industry to sell more milk by exploiting the desperate desire of Americans to lose weight. Not only does milk not cause weight loss, it contains pus, rocket fuel chemicals and actually promotes heart disease, asthma, constipation and various allergic reactions. To learn more, visit the NewsTarget
dairy products page.
Silver fillings are safe to put in your teeth. Otherwise, dentists wouldn't use them.
FALSE. Silver fillings are nearly 40% mercury -- one of the most toxic heavy metals known to man. A single drop on your skin can literally kill you. A single drop in a lake poisons the entire lake. Silver fillings (actually "mercury fillings") generate mercury vapor in your mouth, which you repeatedly inhale or swallow. This puts mercury directly into your bloodstream where it causes birth defects (if you're pregnant) and nervous system disorders like Alzheimer's disease and dementia. To learn the proper way to have mercury fillings removed, see the NewsTarget mercury page.
Cattle in the U.S. beef industry are routinely fed chicken poop, animal blood, expired household pets and other undesirable food sources.
TRUE. The feeding of chicken litter (feces + feathers + other unknowns) to U.S. cattle is a USDA-approved feeding practice that is necessary, says the USDA, to reclaim the valuable nitrogen in chicken poop produced by chicken farms. People who eat non-organic beef are often eating secondhand chicken feces. Don't believe it? Try this Google search and read for yourself.
People who watch television are not persuaded by television advertising.
FALSE. Everyone who watches advertising is persuaded by it, but no one thinks they are. Consumers believe they are rational decision makers when, in fact, they act on emotional associations embedded in their minds by clever advertising. That's because television advertising is designed to bypass the rational mind and install positive associations with brands, companies and products that later translate into measurable, consistent behavior modification in consumers. This system of influence works very well. If television advertising didn't work, advertisers would have stopped using it long ago. Discover how consumers are easily manipulated by reading Health Seduction.
Food manufacturers offer coupons because they want to help people save money.
FALSE. Food companies offer coupons because they want to sell more of their products, and they know that consumers incorrectly believe that using coupons saves them money. In reality, nearly all coupon-promoted foods are priced at very high markups to begin with. Unprocessed foods (vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, etc.) almost never have coupons, yet they represent the best value in food for your dollar. People who use coupons are getting ripped off even as they think they're getting a bargain.
The history taught to American children in public school is true and accurate.
FALSE. American history, as taught to American schoolchildren, is more a collection of lies and distortions than actual history. From Columbus to the Vietnam War, politically correct American history consistently paints Americans in a glorious light while ignoring shocking accounts of actual historical events. Read, "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn to learn real, uncensored American history.
Many common grocery products (including yogurt, fruit drinks and candy) are colored with an ingredient called "carmine" that is actually made from insects: dead, ground up husks of female cochineal beetles.
TRUE. Just about every container of strawberry yogurt, for example, uses this insect-derived food coloring. Aside from the gross factor, carmine also poses the threat of causing a rare but fatal allergic reaction known as anaphylactic shock. See the CSPI warning on carmine to learn more.
My government would never knowingly lie to me.
FALSE. All governments lie. They lie about war, the economy, the money supply, and even medical experiments on humans. The question is not whether governments lie, but why they lie. The answer remains consistent: to maintain control. To keep its population in line, every government must shape the information its population receives. In countries like China, this is done by directly owning and controlling the media. In freer countries like the United States, this is achieved through indirect influence over the media. To learn alternative information the U.S. media usually censors, visit Truthout.org or The Memory Hole.
Pharmaceuticals cost so much only because drug companies need more money to invest in finding cures for disease.
FALSE. Drug companies spend far more money on marketing and advertising than on R&D. The "we need money for R&D" plea is a marketing gimmick used by drug companies to make consumers feel better about buying drugs at monopoly prices. That's why Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any country in the world: sometimes 30,000% or more over the actual cost of drug ingredients. And what about drug R&D costs? Much of the research used by drug companies is actually paid by taxpayer dollars via the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to research universities. Learn more by reading the drug racket page at NewsTarget.com.
The Federal Reserve is a branch of the U.S. government.
FALSE. The Federal Reserve is a private organization, owned by member banks who are, in turn, owned primarily by wealthy investors. The Fed is neither owned by the U.S. government, nor answers to it. Most Americans, of course, mistakenly believe their own government is in control of the U.S. dollar and national fiscal policy. To learn more, visit The Reality Zone with G. Edward Griffin.
Banks offer to finance home loans because they want to help people own their homes.
FALSE. Banks are in business to make money, just like any other business. They loan people money solely to make a profit. That's why they only loan money to people who seem like a safe bet. If banks were in business just to hand out money for the public good, loan officers would never reject a loan application. Most homeowners, by the way, end up paying for their house three times over by the time their loan is finally paid off with the bank.
The fluoride added to drinking water is sourced from naturally-occurring fluoride mineral deposits.
FALSE. The vast majority of the fluoride added to drinking water is fluorosilicic acid, a toxic byproduct of coal plants. This fluorosilicic acid is collected from pollution scrubbers inside coal plant smokestacks, filtered, liquefied, then sold to cities as fluoride treatment. It contains no naturally-occurring mineral fluoride whatsoever. Most cities and water municipalities lie to their residents and say they're using "naturally-occurring fluoride," when, in fact, they are buying toxic waste fluorosilicic acid because it's much less expensive. To learn more, visit NoFluoride.com.
Surgical procedures must be proven safe and effective before being practiced on patients.
FALSE. There is absolutely no requirement that surgical procedures be proven safe or effective before being performed on any number of patients. Unlike drugs, surgical procedures are not "approved" by any centralized safety agency. As a result, literally millions of unnecessary (and dangerous) surgical procedures are performed on Americans each year. Learn more at the NewsTarget surgery page.
Private gambling and internet gambling has been outlawed because the government wants to protect people from the evils associated with this activity.
FALSE. Gambling is only outlawed when the government doesn't get a cut from the activity. That's why sports betting in New York is illegal, but the New York Lottery is perfectly legal. Where casinos are allowed in the United States, they always pay a cut of profits to the cities and states that allow them to set up shop. It's nothing more than a classic "protection fee" that promises casinos legal safety as long as they keep sending money to the State. The legality of gambling has nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with dollars and cents.
Inflation is a natural side effect of a healthy, growing economy.
FALSE. Monetary inflation, which saps the buying power of your dollars, is intentionally caused by the expansion of the money supply which is, in turn, controlled by the Federal Reserve. The net effect is a hidden tax on Americans' income and savings (a tax most people never notice). In an honest economy, the money supply would remain constant, and the annual inflation rate would be zero. Inflation is not natural, it's a manipulation that acts as hidden taxation.
Prescription drugs approved as safe by the FDA are safe to consume on a long-term basis.
FALSE. FDA-approved drugs have killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and all murders over the last twenty years combined. Even the American Medical Association openly admits nearly 100,000 deaths each year due to approved prescription drugs. New drugs are approved primarily for profit reasons (to hype a new patented drug), not safety reasons (many times, the older drugs are far safer). In reality, most new drugs are simply medical experiments, and American consumers are guinea pigs. Even the drug side effect reporting system at the FDA is entirely voluntary. Learn more about prescription drugs at NewsTarget.com
The U.S. is the most technologically advanced nation in the world.
FALSE. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and many European countries easily eclipse the U.S. in terms of bandwidth, wi-fi and overall connectivity. Japan leads the world in hybrid vehicle technology and robotics research. Canada is a world leader in fuel cell technology, far surpassing the United States. India now graduates ten times as many engineers as the U.S., and China is fast becoming a major technical contender as well. The U.S. has fundamentally lost its manufacturing technology base, and its universities no longer dominate the world's technical learning institutions. Although the U.S. is still a technology player in the global marketplace, it is clearly no longer the most technologically advanced nation in the world.
Processed and packaged meat products (hot dogs, bacon, sausage, etc.) are preserved with an ingredient that both the food industry and the USDA absolutely know causes cancer.
TRUE. The ingredient's name is sodium nitrite, and it's found in practically all packaged meats at any grocery store in America. Both the food industry and the USDA have known for decades that this ingredient, when consumed, creates a class of chemical compounds known as nitrosamines which are highly carcinogenic (cancer-causing). The USDA actually tried to ban sodium nitrite in the 1970's, but was overruled by the food industry, which wanted to keep using the ingredient because it turns meats bright red, making them look fresh. Learn more shocking information at the sodium nitrite page on NewsTarget.com.
Buying a home is one of the best financial investments you can make, and home prices will always continue to rise.
FALSE. This lie is promoted by banks and proponents of the real estate industry. Much like the dot-com boom (and bust) of 1996 - 2001, the current housing market in the U.S. is a bubble just begging for a correction. How do we know? There are several ways, but some no-brainer signals include the sharp increase in no-down-payment home loans, the increasing reliance on "interest-only" payment schemes, and the increasing glut in homes for rent (purchased as rental property by people who are betting on price appreciation alone to earn them a tidy profit). When the big housing correction comes, hindsight will be 20/20, but right now, the U.S. population is in a real estate investment frenzy.
Medical schools give doctors a solid education in nutrition, disease prevention and healthy lifestyle habits.
FALSE. Med schools primarily teach disease pathology and the treatment of symptoms of disease. Very little time (if any) is spent teaching doctors about nutrition and healthy lifestyles. This is why Dr. Andrew Weil, an M.D., describes his own colleagues as "nutritionally illiterate." It's also why doctors are, themselves, both terribly unhealthy and generally incapable of teaching patients how to make healthy choices. They are, however, fantastic technicians and very knowledgeable about the physiological and biochemical markers of disease. Overall, doctors are great at diagnosing symptoms, but terrible at knowing how to address the root causes of those symptoms. Learn more at the physicians page at NewsTarget.com
The mainstream news outlets (cable news, national newspapers, network news) in America accurately report war events in Iraq.
FALSE. The first casualty of war is, of course, the truth. The U.S. media, both liberal and conservative, deeply distort war news by primarily relying on Pentagon reports that use a variety of distortions and linguistic tricks to keep Americans misinformed about actual events in Iraq. Solders wounded in Iraq who later die in European hospitals, for example, are never counted as Iraq war casualties. U.S. helicopters are never "shot down," they are always reported as merely crashing. U.S. missiles never kill innocent women and children, they merely cause "collateral damage." Iraqi men defending their homes are not described as freedom fighters defending themselves against occupying invaders, they are called terrorists and insurgents who engage in cowardly suicide bombings. To read the real story of what's happening in Iraq, visit sites like RawStory.com
The United States of America is a Democracy.
FALSE. Actually, the United States of America is a Republic, not a Democracy. A true Democracy (direct Democracy) would allow individuals to directly vote on legislation and do away with Senators and Congresspeople. To learn more, read, "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" - a statement by Congressman Ron Paul.
Anything that hasn't been scientifically proven isn't true.
FALSE. There exists an entire universe of knowledge science has yet to discover. Truth is truth, even before science recognizes it. Gravity worked just fine even before scientists studied it, for example. And just a few decades ago, scientists thought there were only four vitamins. There is much that is true, even though it is currently questioned or even discredited by mainstream science. The one thing about science that's 100% predictable is that the definition of "scientific truth" will evolve and expand, often contradicting past truths.
Vitamin E is dangerous.
FALSE. The recent headlines about the dangers of vitamin E all result from an organized assault on vitamins that used blatantly distorted science to produce a false conclusion. The vitamin E studies used for this assault relied on a variety of dishonest tactics to assure a negative outcome. These tactics include using synthetic vitamin E instead of natural vitamin E, relying on extremely low doses, conducting studies on elderly heart attack patients who were near death to begin with, and excluding studies that used healthy people. Learn more at the Vitamin E page.
When you deposit money in a savings account at a bank, that bank holds your money for you until you ask for it back.
FALSE. Banks do not hold your money, they use your money as a reserve and then lend out ten times as much money to other customers. The entire U.S. banking system is a fractional reserve system, meaning only a fraction of your money is held in reserve. Banks are counting on the fact that only a small percentage of their customers will ever ask for their reserves on any given day. Most of the time, that assumption is entirely true, but when national currencies run into trouble and people demand their savings, this fractional reserve system magnifies both the single-bank risk and the systemic effect of bank runs.
All the clean hydrogen we need to power the world is already contained in crystals at the bottom of the ocean called gas hydrates.
TRUE. The mainstream U.S. press doesn't talk about it much, but the world's hydrogen problems have a ready solution. Frozen ice crystals found off the shores of Canada, Japan, Russia, Iceland and other nations with Northern shores contain vast quantities of clean, frozen hydrogen -- enough to power the entire world far beyond the limits of petroleum reserves. The U.S. press doesn't talk much about gas hydrates, preferring to focus on hydrogen derived from either natural gas or petroleum (resources the U.S. tends to own or control).
In 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on civilian populations in Japan in order to force Japan's surrender and "save a million lives."
FALSE. Although this was the "official" history taught to U.S. schoolchildren, we now know that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on an essentially defeated Japan. Japan was, in fact, attempting to initiate surrender negotiations even before the bombs were dropped. The primary purpose of bombing Japan was to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that the United States not only had nuclear weapons, but was willing to use them, thus cementing America's nuclear stance during the ramp-up to the Cold War. This explanation, of course, remains highly debatable, but the fact remains that even U.S. military leaders estimated no more than 50,000 Americans would be lost in a D-Day style assault on Japan. It's a huge number of lives, yes, but nowhere near one million. The two nuclear bombs, by the way, killed at least 200,000 Japanese civilians.
Having a baby is a patent violation because the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office routinely grants patents on human gene sequences found in all humans.
TRUE. Patents are now routinely awarded for human gene sequences, animals and even seeds found in nature. One U.S. company was awarded a patent on Basmati rice, a grain that has been grown in India for generations. Monsanto recently applied to patent a pig. Hundreds of individuals and companies now own patents on human genes, meaning they have been granted the right to charge royalties on all gene replication (i.e. making babies). This practice of stealing intellectual property from nature and claiming human ownership is called Biopiracy. See this Wikipedia entry to learn more.
People should avoid all exposure to the sun (or use sunscreen) in order to protect their health.
FALSE. Exposure to the sun actually prevents breast cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer and a long list of other diseases, including osteoporosis and depression. Exposure to sunlight results in the creation of vitamin D in your skin. It is this vitamin D that controls the growth of cancer tumors and enables the absorption of essential minerals like calcium. The myth that sunlight is bad for you is promoted primarily by the sunscreen industry and its professional allies (dermatologists). See The Healing Power of Sunlight and Vitamin D to learn the truth about ultraviolet radiation and your health.
There is no cure for cancer.
FALSE. There are, in fact, many proven cures for cancer used all around the world with excellent results. Nearly every indigenous culture has at least one cure for cancer, including the American Indians, Australian Aboriginees, Peruvian natives, and so on. The U.S. cancer industry simply doesn't want anyone to know cures exist because it profits from the management of cancer (i.e. dependence on drugs, chemo, radiation, etc.). Promotion of alternative cures would deprive the U.S. cancer establishment of its power and profits. This is also why today's cancer industry virtually ignores genuine cancer prevention and, instead, focuses on treatment (drugs and surgery). To learn the real story, read Dr. Samuel Epstein's new book Cancer-Gate, or visit the cancer page on NewsTarget.com.
All foods and beverages are safe to consume in moderation and can be part of a balanced diet.
FALSE. This is a marketing lie promoted by companies that manufacture disease-promoting foods and beverages (like soft drinks). This distortion claims that all foods are essentially equal, and therefore it really doesn't matter what you eat. In reality, some foods (like soft drinks, white bread, etc.) promote diabetes. Other foods (margarine and any food containing hydrogenated oils) promote heart disease. There are yet more foods (processed meats) that cause cancer. These foods cannot be part of a balanced diet because they imbalance the diet and promote disease. For a complete listing of these dangerous foods and ingredients, read Grocery Warning.
Most common diseases (cancer, heart disease, diabetes) are caused by bad genes and bad luck.
FALSE. This myth is promoted by organized medicine as a way to disempower patients and make them think there's nothing they can do to prevent disease. Diabetes, for example, was exceedingly rare just a hundred years ago. Doctors often had to travel hundreds of miles to find a patient with the disease. Cancer and heart disease were similarly rare. Since our gene pool hasn't changed in a hundred years, the explanation for these disease must be found somewhere else -- namely, in our processed foods, lack of exercise and exposure to modern environmental toxins. Disease is not a matter of bad luck, it's a matter of simply cause and effect. To learn how to really prevent disease, read the NewsTarget.com disease prevention page.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a genuine brain chemistry disorder that must be treated with drugs to help children.
FALSE. This so-called disease is entirely fictitious and has no measurable physiological basis whatsoever. Hyperactivity in children is actually caused primarily by poor nutritional habits (consumption of refined sugars and food coloring) and can be easily corrected in less than two weeks by taking children off all refined carbohydrates and food additives. The ADHD "disease" was invented to sell drugs and boost the power of the highly corrupt psychiatric community, which increasingly "discovers" fictitious diseases and treats them with mind-altering narcotics. To learn more, visit the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.
