How Media And The Food Industry Affect Your Health, By Actress And Radio Host Rhio

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Raw Summit which can be found at http://rawsummitarchives.com . In this excerpt, Rhio educates us regarding mainstream media, the food industry and how it affects your health.

Raw Summit Excerpt with Rhio, author of Hooked on Raw, speaker, radio host, actress, singer raw chef and eco-farmer.

Kevin: You’re in the media which is very cool because I’d like to get your opinion on this next question from a media perspective. What is the media looking for when they are looking for health information? Are they just looking to repeat the same old news? I would think that theywould want to bring up new points.

Rhio: I had a little 90-second spot that was being syndicated, called “The Fruit and Veggie Lady.” I did a spot once on dairy and the station called my partner up and said that the dairy industry had called him because the station was funded by ads from dairy. They objected to what I was saying about dairy. In media, it depends, like I wouldn’t say I’m not a part of the mainstream media because I’m more a part of the underground media.

My partner and I own our own internet radio station. We’re trying to get this information out in an alternative way because it’s so few and far between the opportunities that we can get the information out. One time I was invited to go on a show a called “American Journal” and they had asked me to get people that had healed themselves of serious disease with the raw food diet, so I got them someone who had healed himself of bone cancer, 4th stage.

Kevin: Wow!

Rhio: They did a wonderful interview with him. He told his whole entire story. When it aired, the bone cancer part was left completely out!

Kevin: Are you serious?

Rhio: It was not even in there. What they did is...he had lost his bone cancer by fasting and also by going on a raw food diet. It took him about a year to be clear of the cancer. He told the whole story, but in the process of losing the cancer, he had lost over 100 pounds. Guess what they concentrated on?

Kevin: The weight loss.

Rhio: Right. The more serious, the life threatening issue was left completely out of the piece. Well, this is what mainstream media does to information.

Kevin: Who do you think has control over this medical information that most people would like to know about?

Rhio: Well, you see the way the media works today it depends on advertising. Who are the advertisers? If you look on TV and radio, who are one of the main advertisers, drug companies.

If we get the information out that people have it within their hands, within their ability to create health in their body, and they don't have to rely on any kind of external medicine for that, if that becomes engrained in people, who's going to lose? What business is going to go out?

Kevin: Yes, it’s obviously a matter of capitalism, right?

Rhio: It's a matter of dollars unfortunately. I think the main thing should be people's health, but that's not the way it is. A lot of these drugs that get out on the market and they’re recalled later, after us human, not me, but human guinea pigs used them for couple of years, and all of a sudden they're recalled.

Kevin: Yes. The food industry is doing a lot of things that some people would say are questionable and putting things out either hoping or suspecting that they will work. One of myths is irradiation of foods. What foods are being irradiated? Because I don't even know if I know for sure. What is it doing?

Rhio: Well, the government has approved the irradiation for basically all foods. Now whether the foods are being irradiated or not, it's hard to say. It supposed to carry a label on it. It’s supposed to clearly say that the food is irradiated and they have a little symbol which is --actually the symbol it’s very appealing and looks like a little flower, so it's non-threatening.

Kevin: It’s not a nuclear reactor?

Rhio: No, you would think it was something good, if you looked at it. But the industry is moving to remove that symbol and they want to not let the public know. Food is being irradiated through radioactive gamma sources like Cobalt-60 and Cesium-137. What happens when the food goes through these sources? It creates radiolytic products. Radiolytic products are like formaldehyde and benzene. Benzene is a known carcinogen. Then there's formic acid and quinone. All of these things are not desirable to be eating. Then by going through irradiation, there's unique radiolytic products created. Now these haven’t even been named or studied. In other words, the process itself creates certain chemicals that are unknown.

Kevin: Wow!

Rhio: Also irradiation destroys vitamins and minerals. Between 20% and 80% of the vitamin and minerals are destroyed. The things that I know for sure that are being irradiated are spices and papayas from Hawaii. I just buy Mexican papayas at this point.

Kevin: Are they irradiating organic foods as well?

Rhio: No. If the food is organic, it cannot be irradiated.

Kevin: Good.

Rhio: It should not be also genetically engineered which is another problem that we have with the food, which is very, very serious, because they’re taking foods and genetically engineering them to contain bacteria and viruses and genetic material which is not of the product itself. For example, they are putting fish genes, let's say, in tomatoes. That's one of the things they did. This is something that nature would never do. Yet, they're just doing this indiscriminately. Every genetically engineered food that's out there contains cauliflower mosaic virus, it contains promoters and all kinds of substances that are not in regular foods, ungenetically engineered foods. But yet, the industry and our government itself say that those foods are substantially equivalent to regular foods. But all the private research that has been done shows that that is not the case.

Kevin: Yes, it's pretty scary. Do we even know what some of the health affects in both of these actually are or are we unsure?

Rhio: Well, the health effects of irradiation are it destroys vitamins and minerals. Then you're not getting the complete nutrition from the food. There's been studies done where it shows that it creates pre- cancerous conditions in children. All of the studies that have been done have been suppressed. But yet, other countries are not irradiating food and they don’t want that food.