In a recent blog I complained about the sorry state of food. An announcement this week may be the last straw for me. Every few days, doctors and others researchers come up with another cause for cancer. This week they are blaming soft drinks with sugar as a cause for pancreatic cancer. This means that my beloved Dr. Pepper is going to kill me.

When I was a kid, even before starting to school, I developed pneumonia. This was in the days before penicillin and other antibiotics. Sulfa drug was the only antimicrobial available. I was hospitalized and given IV fluids and sulfa drugs. I wouldn’t eat or drink anything. My brother, who worked at a drug store at the time, brought me some ice cream. I still remember that ice cream as one of the few things I would eat. The thing that really saved me was Dr. Pepper. I loved that soft drink and it was the only fluid I would take. It actually helped save my life. I have been a loyal fan of Dr. Pepper ever since and have ingested barrels of the stuff during my life. Now I find that it is going to kill me. That news is more than a body can stand. The TV even had an interview by a doctor I know who said the stuff was a killer. He talked like he was an authority on the lethal nature of soft drinks. He said that sugary soft drink make the pancreas work overtime to produce insulin and predispose it to getting cancer. A few years ago they were saying that coffee was a cause of pancreatic cancer and I stopped this for a couple of days. Now they have implicated my precious life saving Dr. Pepper and it is an insult. I have been on the planet for three quarters of a century and am too addicted to give up my beloved drink this late in life. I plan to have a Dr. Pepper logo stamped on my tombstone.

There is nothing safe anymore. We get a warning almost daily about something else that is out there to kill us. China is trying to poison us, Japan is making our cars to run away when we push the accelerator, our vegetables are laced with lethal E Coli, meat contains deadly cholesterol, fish is tainted with carcinogens and mercury, and all fast foods make you drop dead on the spot. There is nothing left. I’m building a bubble on the porch to protect me from the Swine flu and other pathogens. Inside the bubble I plan to restrict my diet to yogurt, a multigrain bread and sterile water. For the rest of the world, I would recommend selling your Dr. Pepper and other soft drink stock because my going on the wagon will cause these stock values to plummet.