Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (6 page)

“The drug works best,” Nobel Prize-winning Dr. Michael S. Brown said, “when taken in conjunction with a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet.”

Nothing is ever perfect—that's the trouble with all these new discoveries.

The scientific and medical communities are going to have to step up the speed of their inventions, preventions and discoveries if they hope to have all the illnesses known to the human mind and body either cured or preventable before one of them catches up with us. Some of us don't have all the time in the world left.

What I want, if any of you medical scientists are reading this, is a small pill that can be taken once a day before dinner, with a martini, that will cure anything I already have and prevent anything I might catch in the future. In addition to inhibiting cancer, heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver, kidney failure and shingles, I'd expect this little pill to keep me from getting Alzheimer's and palsy and at the same time restore any names to my memory that I can't think of. Neither do I want to read a lot of warnings on the label telling me that if I take too much of the stuff it could produce bad side effects. This all-purpose, live-forever pill should be 100 percent side-effects-less.

I know you medical scientists can do it if you put your minds to it. If some of you were a little older, you might have more incentive to work harder on the problem.

Lovastatin will be sold by the Merck drug company by prescription under the name Mevacor. Don't ask me how they arrived at these names or why they're changing it from “lovastatin” to “Mevacor” when they sell it.

You can't knock the drug companies that are developing all these miracle medicines, though. It's capitalism at its best. The drug companies want to get rich and they spend a lot of money developing new medicine to that end. That's the way capitalism is supposed to work. Merck and Company developed lovastatin and it deserves to make a lot of money.

Just as soon as science has licked old age and all the diseases we humans die of, we're going to have to face the problem of where all of us are going to live. If no one ever dies, there's going to be a honey of a housing shortage. Between our new liberal attitude toward promiscuous sex, the outlawing of abortion and the elimination of death, this is going to be one crowded planet in another hundred years.

I just wanted to make sure you heard the good news about this new drug. Lovastatin will sell for about $1.25 a dose and doctors estimate a person with a high cholesterol level will need four doses a day, so it isn't going to be cheap.

I figure that if lovastatin costs $5 a day for the next hundred years, that'll run me $182,500. Listen, the way I enjoy life, it'll be worth it, even if I have to borrow.

It's always surprising, considering how slowly things seem to progress from day to day, how quickly great changes take place in the world.

Remember the Egypt of your history books? Remember what happened to Rome and Greece? In recent times Great Britain has gone from one of the dominant world powers to a quaint country with waning influence in world affairs. Japan has developed from an inconsequential maker of cheap trinkets for our five-and-ten-cent stores to the biggest producer of quality goods in the world.

Is it possible some major and terrible change is taking place in our great country? Are we seeing it happen without knowing it's that big?

We can console ourselves with the thought that there was probably never a time in the two hundred years since the Constitution was
written when it didn't seem as though things were getting worse. If that's true, these must be typical times because things sure seem to be getting worse.

What do I mean? I mean American industry isn't making most things very well. I mean our scientific work is being done more and more by foreign visitors and less and less by native Americans. The brightest kids in many of our schools weren't born here. Our money isn't worth much in foreign countries. Our manufactured goods don't sell well abroad.

A typically discouraging “these days” story appeared in the paper the other day. General Electric and General Motors are fighting a battle with the government, trying to get permission to use Soviet rockets for lifting their communication satellites into space. They want to use the Russian rockets because our space program doesn't have any.

Can you believe it? GE and GM going to the Russians for help? Here are two of the biggest corporations in the United States admitting that if they want to put their satellites in space, they have to use Russian rockets because the Russians are making them better than we are. Here are two companies that ought to be spending more time making their products, like rockets maybe, and less time making money, pleading to their government to let them use Soviet products. It's a sad day. First thing you know, the Russians will be selling us light bulbs, toaster ovens and tanks, which George Bush says they make so well.

In spite of its rockets, the Soviet Union doesn't yet seem about to bury the United States economically, but then who would have thought the Japanese would be doing it twenty-five years ago? I recall we used to laugh at the large parties of visiting Japanese engineers who always were being shown through the technical areas at CBS. There are no longer any Japanese visitors. Obviously, they got what they wanted and now they're selling CBS much of the equipment it uses in those technical areas. I'm waiting for the Japanese to take over Dan Rather and the evening news.

In a typical month recently the United States paid Japan $4 billion more for goods than Japan paid us. Our biggest export to Japan in terms of cash is food. That's cold comfort because the biggest reason we have more food than we can eat and Japan doesn't is that the United States is twenty-five times as big as Japan and has the land to grow it on. Japan isn't even as big as our state of Montana and has half the population of the United States.

What should we do? How do we get back to where we were when
we were making so many things better than anyone else in the world?

Columbia University in New York has hired a Wall Street wheeler-dealer to teach a course in corporate takeovers. It's called “Corporate Raiding: The Art of War.” Bright young Americans are being taught not how to make something but how to make money by taking over established companies built on hard work.

Did you ever have one of those days when nothing seems funny?

For many years, before people had clothes dryers in their basements, every young boy's knowledge of what women wore under their dresses was formed by what he saw hanging from clotheslines in backyards.

It was a more realistic picture of the truth than what a young boy sees today. When underwear was hung out to dry, Sears, Roebuck was advertising women's underwear in its catalog to show how warm and practical underwear was. The women modeling the undergarments were not all built like Marilyn Monroe, and there was nothing about the ads that would cause readers to linger over them if they weren't in the market for the product.

Somewhere along the line, something went wrong. If the ads carried in the slick women's magazines today were printed in
Playboy
, someone would be trying to ban them from the newsstands. Perfectly respectable people who wouldn't dream of having pictures of mostly naked women around the house have these magazines right on the living-room coffee table where everyone can see them.

I'm not complaining, mind you, just commenting. The underwear ads are sexier and more provocative because the women in the ads look like intelligent, likable women. They don't look like the tough, been-around broads who appear naked for
Penthouse
. Even though the women in the underwear ads look prim and proper, it is apparently difficult to get nice women to do this kind of posing. As an inducement to get them to do it, the ones who stand there having their pictures taken in underwear are paid more than the ones who are pictured fully clothed.

My question is this, though: Does the average woman really imagine that she'll look like the women in the ads if she buys the underwear
they're selling? Under the underwear, the women in the ads have one-in-a-million, near-perfect bodies. I should think the average woman would feel terrible every time she looked at an underwear ad. How is she ever going to live up to that image? You could say the average man might feel the same inadequacy when he looks at the unnaturally handsome dog in the shirt ad but at least the man in the shirt ad has his clothes on.

It's hard to believe many women are fooled into buying the underwear being advertised because they think they'd look like the women in the ads if they wear it. I even find the ads make a strange assumption. They seem to assume that a lot of people are going to see women in their underwear.

There are lots of fur-coat ads in the magazines and, looking at the underwear ads, you realize why it is women need fur coats.

To do some research, I went to the library to leaf through the magazines that carry ads for women's underwear. A trendy magazine called
Working Woman
has pictures of young women so scantily dressed you'd think NOW, the National Organization for Women, would object to the models being associated with working women. You wonder what their work is. I couldn't help noting, too, that the less women's underwear covers, the more it costs.

Magazines like
Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle
and
Vogue
have underwear and outerwear ads on adjacent pages, and I notice a new phenomenon here. While the women in the underwear ads are wearing elaborate and lacy undergarments that obviously cost a lot of money, the women in the pictures who are considered to be fully dressed seem to be wearing little or no underwear at all. If the women wearing dresses had on the undergarments pictured in the ads, the underwear would be showing, and it isn't.

Of course, some of the underwear is so elaborate and some of the outerwear so skimpy that it's hard for a man looking at these pictures to know which is which. What often appears to be a nightgown turns out to be an evening dress.

Many of you will probably be getting thinner pretty soon now because several companies have announced that they've made a new
low-calorie, cholesterol-free substitute for fat that they'll have in food in the grocery stores next year.

I'm sorry I won't be joining you in losing weight by eating this stuff. If I lose any weight, it's going to be by cutting down on food, not by eating imitation fat. I have never tasted any imitation food that was close to the real thing. When the label says “with a real buttery flavor,” it means there's no butter in it, and if it tastes like butter to you simply because they call it “buttery,” you're a poor judge of both butter and good food.

The NutraSweet Company, part of Monsanto, one of the country's largest makers of chemical products, announced something called Simplesse. The company says Simplesse has been made to taste, feel and look like fat but will have 80 percent fewer calories. It would be used in things like ice cream, mayonnaise, yogurt, salad dressing and cheese spreads. One of the shortcomings this new product has as a substitute for butter or shortening of any kind is that you can't cook with it. You can't heat it.

I have some observations about all this:

—The ingredients in commercial cheese spreads are already as suspect as the ingredients in a cheap hot dog. If I want a cheese spread, I buy good cheese and spread it.

—If we're going to have salad, I make a salad dressing. I don't understand anyone who buys bottled salad dressing that's half as good and costs four times as much.

—I like yogurt but most commercial yogurt is so chemically concocted anyway that if they want to play around with a food, yogurt would be a good one for them to concentrate on.

—NutraSweet already makes the artificial sweetener aspartame. I have no objection to aspartame and occasionally buy a Diet Coke that's made with it. Just don't try to tell me it tastes like sugar.

I don't care what they put in cheese spreads or salad dressings or soft drinks but I object to anyone tampering with ice cream. Laws governing the ingredients in ice cream have been effective and have kept the quality of commercial ice creams at a high level compared to many products. It would be a shame if they started fooling around with ice cream by making it with fake anything. If you don't want the calories in ice cream, don't eat ice cream.

I'd prefer that Monsanto left our ice cream alone and stuck to the things that made the company big in the first place … things like fertilizers and herbicides.

Just as I hate to see dog food in the same aisle with the cans of tuna fish in the supermarket, I don't like a fertilizer company making food.
Anyway, we already have enough companies trying to improve their profits by trading on the great American dream of looking beautiful by dieting.

Procter & Gamble, the soap company, has a new product too. It is called Olestra. I don't know where it got the name. Maybe it was the name of the original Mr. Procter's wife.

Olestra is different from Simplesse. Olestra is purely synthetic and goes right through your body without changing itself or your body. Simplesse, on the other hand, is a protein that your digestive system has to work on.

Monsanto's NutraSweet Company takes protein particles from egg whites and milk, grinds them up and heats them and makes them into the same shape as fat particles. I don't know how they do that.

“This creates the smoothness and richness our tongue knows as fat,” says Robert Shapiro, head of NutraSweet. “It's really an illusion of the taste buds.”

Maybe, Mr. Shapiro, but my taste buds are very experienced and hard to kid. I don't want any of your fake food. I don't want to be fooled. If I'm going to overeat, I want the real thing.