Healthy Candy, Bad Friends and Super Weeds!

It seems counter intuitive that Kiera Butler, (Author of “Do Multivitamins Really Work?”) would start worrying about her health by buying the closest thing to candy available. Her impulse to buy multivitamin gummy bears at Target seems driven by the idea that the vitamins are less than bad for her compared to regular candy. Kiera takes subtle pride in finally realizing the supplement industry has been selling her on the idea that the gummies are “the only thing that stands between me and scurvy”. Then just one sentence later it is acknowledged that it is “increasingly rare” for people to be getting all of their health needs from food. She implies that scurvy is something never heard about in America, so clearly the vitamin craze has no bearing on such a disease. While humorously suggesting that it is silly to take a gummy supplement, Kiera simultaneously reinforces the need for some form of added nutrition. She is at a crossroad, and begins to ask health experts about everyone else’s nutrition.

According to the Kiera’s sources, “there is virtually no evidence that they (multivitamins) make healthy people healthier”. The massive missing piece to this statement is perhaps the vitamins are maintaining health, not necessarily increasing it. It seems counter intuitive that Kiera would give up the gummy bears after years of taking them. However if they have been working, she never would have known the difference because she never wound up sick. Kiera’s logic first told her that, thanks to the availability of gummy vitamins, her purchase could satisfy more than one need. After dedicated use over the course of a few years, Kiera finds that she has no health problems and no deficiencies. She then decides that because everyone else is over generalized into a group of already healthy people who should stop taking vitamins, she should too. It is counter intuitive that Kiera would not only go full circle back to not taking vitamins, but also make a point to invest in actual candy.

It seems counter intuitive that US-based money lenders like “LendUp”, “Lenddo” and “Moven” would go to the internet so find the truth about potential customers. These companies, using special agreements, browse the social media profiles of potential customers in order to profile them and their acquaintances. The general rule of thumb is that bad acquaintances equals a bad potential customer. The article “Your DeadBeat Friends Could Cost You a Loan” by Erika Eichelberger, goes into depth about many ethically unacceptable issues that could come from using this new form of customer screening. There is a potential risk for discrimination against socially undesirable customers and a glass ceiling being formed. What the article does not explicitly mention is the level of faith these companies are placing in the validity of what they find online. While a customer may create an image for themselves online, it is in no way required to be an actual representation of them in physical life. The companies like Lenddo that feed on this information to develop statistics revolving around the social lives of individuals may be getting an entirely different picture online than they will get in person. All of these services assume that the friends (good or bad) of a potential customer reflect the customer.

It seems counter intuitive that one of Monsanto’s most beneficial solutions to weeds could cause an even larger problem. Monsanto has spent millions of dollars on producing plants like “cotton, corn and soy” that are resistant to RoundUp. RoundUp is what every weed dreads, a deadly cocktail of glyphosates that murders anything that is not immune to its chemical sword. For years Monsanto tried to find a gene they could implant into their crops that would enable them to be sprayed and left unharmed by RoundUp, leaving weeds dead and crops growing steady. Eventually Monsanto found the problem gene they needed in mud created from runoff of their products. What they found was that while Monsanto scientists had been trying in the lab to produce a solution, organisms outside subject to the runoff of RoundUp tests had already developed the genes necessary to thrive in the toxic environment. This was great news for the scientists working with Monsanto, they now had the gene! Sadly after a few years of usage, something began to seem wrong. Ever since implementing RoundUp immune genes to the crops, weeds had been filtered seamlessly out of the fields. However, a new research development revealed that while producing chemical immune crops, chemically immune weeds had also been produced over time, over 20 different species. Now Monsanto is spending millions of dollars trying to fix the problem that came from them trying to fix the problem that nature solved on its own. It seems counter intuitive that by trying to kill weeds with chemicals, Monsanto built stronger super weeds.