This Blog Post Has No Anti-Aging Properties Whatsoever

Cigarettes—once thought to make one look “cool”—now must be packaged with not one, but four varieties of warning labels:

• SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.
• SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.
• SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking By Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight.
• SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.

The implication is that if you go ahead and smoke anyway you basically don’t care about your health, the health of your unborn children, or the fact that you’re essentially committing suicide by the equivalent of sucking on a smoking automobile tailpipe. And don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Maybe cigarette companies will continue to rack up profits, but their customers must now claim a higher degree of willful ignorance than ever before.

Speaking of warning labels, it’s always annoyed me how herb and vitamin companies must put similar boilerplate on their products—many of which have genuinely beneficial properties and have been in use by health practitioners since before recorded history:

“These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

What I’ve often wondered—considering the ubiquity of this statement on health food shelves everywhere—is what is the FDA doing with their time? Why isn’t someone there evaluating some of these herbs and vitamins, instead of endlessly printing up helpful labels for things like bottled water, helpfully informing us that water has essentially zero nutritional value (forget about the fact that you’ll die if you don’t drink it) but that Wacky Fruit Friends snacks has twenty percent of the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance of Vitamin C, which is full of antioxidants?

What really bugs me now, though, is this: why is it that herbs that have been in use for thousands of years—and are known all over the world for their specific therapeutic usefulness to the human body—must by law be labeled in the above manner, but any yahoo can now boldly label their products “Anti-Aging”—in large print, without any FDA caveat—even though everyone knows that you can’t stop time, and that aging and death are therefore 100% inevitable?

I strongly suggest that all companies who wish to boldly declare that their skin creams and such have “Anti-Aging” properties must similarly inform their prospective customers about the outrageously misleading nature of their “Anti-Aging” claims. Something along the lines of:

“This product has not yet been shown to have any significant or insignificant effect on slowing, stopping, or otherwise affecting the passage of time in any way, shape, or form. No laboratory testing has ever demonstrated that the human body’s inevitable natural aging process can be counteracted even slightly by the application of any manner of chemical compound found in any commercially or privately available skin care product. The purchaser fully assumes all responsibility for being labeled a fool, booby, sap, imbecile, cretin, dullard, simpleton, moron, clod, nitwit, halfwit, dope, ninny, nincompoop, chump, dimwit, dingbat, dipstick, goober, coot, goon, dumbo, dummy, ditz, dumdum, fathead, numbskull, numbnuts, dunderhead, thickhead, airhead, flake, lamebrain, zombie, nerd, peabrain, birdbrain, jughead, jerk, donkey, twit, goat, dork, twerp, schmuck, bozo, boob, turkey, schlep, chowderhead, dumbhead, goofball, goof, goofus, doofus, galoot, lummox, klutz, putz, schlemiel, meatball, dumb cluck, and dumbass by the rest of thinking society.”

Better to chant Hare Krishna mantra.