1980s NEWS
INTERVIEW INSERT:
Robert Lipsyte:
Greg, welcome. Congress is looking now into the whole diet industry, the idea that people lose the weight and gain right back. But what I've never understood is with all the hungry people in this country in this world, why are you concerned with fatties?
Dick Gregory - Civil Rights Activist Comedian:
Because I think they eat too much broccoli for one thing.
and and the President said he don't like broccoli, that's probably because his mother probably cooked it in olive oil. But if his wife would cook it in pork rind, it would probably. Let me tell you how it works. I started off concerned about hungry people. And could I create a cheap nutrition for the world's starving people. In the process of doing that, I found out that if you don't understand the politics of hunger, then you'll never feed hungry people. For instance, right now we get an alert that some corner of the world people are starving. And we will buy $2 billion worth of food. And the companies get their money when it leaves the warehouse. And it goes and sits on docks because they don't have the roads or the scientific know how, or the ingenuity to distribute it. But remember, the people that sold the food, they don't get paid when hungry people eat, they get paid when it leaves the warehouse. And so looking at all of that, I also found out something else. And when you look at a hungry, malnourished, starving child or human in Bangladesh or Ethiopia, they got a couple of things in common, a bald head and a bloated belly. And then I realized one day that when you go to any major airport in America, and see ball heads and bloated bellies, you're also looking at malnutrition. And what I was able to do was take the same product that I use in Ethiopia, they use in the hospitals, we don't use it in the field, and convert that to a weight loss when it's really nutrition, but nutrition don't sell. People won't buy that says "nutrition" they say weight loss and so we will able to put a package together. Congress is investigating. And they issue it. I mean, there's certain myths out here, L-Tryptophan. I'm not about to believe that that's killing folks, cigarettes is killing folks. So I live in a country that's going to take a vitamin off the market, but they're not gonna take cigarettes off the market, then again, that's big business. And then if the same people that own the cigarette industry bought out L-Tryptophan, then it would be back on the market. And so when you sit and you look, my whole thing is nutrition. I feel ashamed 20 years ago, buying bottled water for my family. When poor folks had to drink what was coming up tap and I knew it was killing them. And so I went out of my way to talk about chlorine and fluorine is no good for you, and try to raise the level to the issue that we'll all eat clean food. I look around today at people talk about teenage pregnancy. And I'm 57 years old. And I'll be honest, I don't know what my youth teenage pregnancy would have been had we had 5,800 chemicals and additives in the food. And so until we sit down and get serious about this whole thing called nutrition, how do it fit in? Well, last year,
when you count all the deaths in this country, from everywhere, you can die, homicide, suicide, accidental OD, we had 2.1 million deaths in America. And of those 2.1 million 1.5 million was diet related. Now, anytime you live in a country, that 80% of your deaths is related to what you eat, and then maybe the CIA is watching the wrong thing. Maybe it's not communism, gonna be our downfall. But what we eat is going to be the downfall.
Robert Lipsyte:
When you say diet related, you're talking about the cancers that are caused by fat.
Dick Gregory:
High blood pressure, sugar, diabetes, cerebral hemorrhages, and in the sugar, the salts, the water, the whole bit. And until we can change that, and I would just hope that I could use my voice. I remember. See, I was outraged over one day, I looked back and realized why I start drinking and why I started smoking. My heroes was drinking and smoking. I mean, Alan Ladd man, I mean, Clark Gable never said nothing cool without a cigarette. And I love Clark Gable. I wanted to be like Clark Gable, and I looked at one scene with Clark Gable was talking to this white lady. And that curly lock fell down in his hand. Everybody in the black movie said Oh, my man's in trouble. And Clark kind of switched his head around and flip that curly lock back. About three weeks later, I was with my lady man trying to flip a net back and damnit broke my neck. And so that's the effect they had on it.
So I looked around one day, and I found out that I'm saying to young folks that drugs and alcohol is bad, but come on in a nightclub and catch my act. And so in 1973, I had my wife Lillian, call the office here in New York and say, Look, after I get past my last contract, don't book me no more nightclubs. And they didn't understand it at first, but it was my country. Alan Ladd, took a cigarette. Humphrey Bogart smoke whiskey. Now I'm 57 years old, and I noticed that my non-heroes didn't drink. Wolf Man, he never snorted no Coke, you know, Dracula never drank no light beer, and Frankenstein ain't never had a cigarette. And so I just didn't want, and I really believe that the salvation to this whole nation in the planet is not food it's nutrition. And I think the number one battle out here, I think sexism, racism, I think until we really get down to talking about our bodies and talking about, for instance, we live in a racist, sexist society and why we tolerate because we all high. It's not normal for a predominantly Christian society to have to drink as much whiskey as we drink. They have to stay as much high as we say, and we don't understand the whole drug thing. You know, I'm a fantastic income. So I leave my wife and she get upset, right? Whatever you do, please don't call the ghetto welfare system because they'll say kill me, you know, because poor folk don't have no recourse. So it's instant gratification. Throw some hot water on them do some whatever, you know, it's a call somebody in your income bracket. See? Dick's acting funny. I think he got another woman. Well, Mister Dude, come on by the house. Let's talk about this. You take my wife to see her psychologist. And it's like that guy's write up some prescription called drugs. Ghetto sisters, oh man, leave her got the same vibration. She got on call and buy her some crack. Two Americans did not deal with a problem from an ethical standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint, from a godly standpoint. They drove them out, they doped him out. And that's what we into, a drugged out doped up society. And when you do that, you will tolerate racism when you do that. And alcohol is the number one problem. Hitler neo nazis wasn't snorting coke and decided to do some Jews in. They was drinking the same whiskey the Klu Klux Klan was drinking to proclaim, get drunk on the weekends and let's go get some niggas. They weren't snorting no coke or mainline. And the number one problem confronting this country today is whiskey, but we tolerate it. Here's a dude down in Lexington, Kentucky last year, got drunk, come off the expressway the wrong way, hit a school bus and killed 27 folks, children. Got eight years in jail. You know, had they found some marijuana in his pocket, or some cocaine, he'd be on the electric chair now. And so I would say that health and nutrition and as far as the you know, Congress, investigating health and nutrition, they should broaden it. They should look in to we had 4,675 Americans last year OD from hard drugs, and 51% of those was prescription drugs. And 52% of those folks was over 60. And the over 60 population in America is less than 17%.