Are Americans, by and large, stupid? Or are they stuck in a Middle Ages time warp? How many Americans think that’s even possible? One thing for sure is that if twenty percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, then Galileo* still may not be safe. While you’re mulling this over, consider the fact that these [20%] people may be voting in the next election, and that they’re raising children, and… (forget it, this line of thinking is just too depressing to think about). Anyway, you have to ask yourself how easy it is to manipulate uneducated people into (more specific to the purpose of our Nutrition Research Center website), ignoring important issues such as genetic engineering, the consumption of natural foods, pesticide use, nuclear proliferation, the use of fossil fuels, a non-junk food diet and exercise.

The Washington Post tells us:

• What else is signaling that Americans are becoming increasingly dumbed-down as a society?

• Reading — of books, newspapers and magazines — is on the decline. A 2007 study even found that 80 percent of American families did not buy or read a book in 2006.

• Attention spans are declining; Jacoby suggests this is due to television and videos. For instance, between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to a Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

• General knowledge is eroding. This is evidenced not only by the fact that one in five U.S. adults believe the sun revolves around the Earth, but also many others.

Read the rest of this article on mercola.com

Dr. Joseph Mercola comments: “The more that you are kept in the dark, either due to your own lack of inquisitiveness or the workings of an unscrupulous industry (such as the food industry that markets junk foods and soda to children as though it is something they should be consuming), the easier you are to manipulate.”

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*In his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo supports the Copernican theory that the earth is not the center of the universe, but rather one of several planets revolving around the sun. Because of this work, he was imprisoned by the Inquisition and forced to declare publicly that the earth does not move. An apocryphal quotation is attributed to him as he was led from the trial: “And yet, it moves.”

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