Why are Americans so unhealthy today? Are we feeding ourselves to death?
Obesity is on the Rise, So is Cancer, Diabetes, and Heart Disease. We are a nation that is dying younger than our parents and the statistics are not getting any better. We are waging a hundred billion dollar war on disease but more people died of Cancer this year than 30 years ago.
From 1976 to 2006, 62 million people died from medication errors, according to a June 2010 report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The cost of adverse drug reactions are more than $136 billion annually, this is more than cardiovascular and diabetic care combined. One in five hospital patients become injured or die from adverse drug reactions. Yet our medical industries motto is “First Do No Harm.”
Learn more: Check out this article from the National Institute of Health.
Why are Americans so unhealthy?
Over the last several generations, and most drastically over the last 50-75 years we have radically shifted our diets from farm grown, organic produce, fresh organic eggs and farm fresh, pasture raised meats, to chemically produced fruits and vegetables, heavily processed foods and antibiotic ridden meats that are raised on nutrient poor grains instead of their natural diet of organic grasses.
Why are Americans so unhealthy? – Our food is less nutrient dense.
The quality of our food supply has changed drastically. Experts agree that your average vegetable contains up to 40% less nutrition than just a few decades ago. Add to that, the fact that we eat far fewer fruits and vegetables than we did just one and two generations earlier and that 40% less nutrition really adds up (or should I say subtracts?).
Read more about soil depletion and our loss of nutrients here: Scientific America, New York Times, Time Magazine.
Natural and Organic Soil contains 50 or more known nutrients, as well as millions of bugs and bacteria that work together to create, store and process all the nutrients in the soil. After the second World War, the government had surpluses of chemicals from weapons production. These chemicals were passed off to farmers as fertilizer and make up the N-P-K that we know today.
N-P-K stands for Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and Potassium (K) which are three elements found in soil which help plants to grow. The problem is, these are only three of fifty or more known nutrients that should be in healthy soil. So year after year, our farmers put down their N-P-K neglecting all of the other Nutrients found in healthy soil.
This depletes the soil as all the other minerals are slowly used up. Now our plants growing in this N-P-K heavy and everything else poor soil have no place to draw up all the other essential minerals. The beneficial insects and microbes can’t survive in this poisoned soil and slowly die off. So we are left with a dead soil which leads to unhealthy, malnourished plants and consequently unhealthy, malnourished humans.
These unhealthy plants then require more and more chemicals to help them survive; pesticides, herbicides and more – a chemical soup.
Why are Americans so unhealthy? – Our food is old.
Before the World Wars, if you wanted fresh vegetables you went to your backyard or to the farmer down the road. Your food was picked fresh that same day. Eggs were laid by the hens that morning and the meat was slaughtered just hours before, maybe even right in front of you. People brought seeds from the old country and passed them down through the generations. The variety of vegetables was plentiful. Wild greens grew readily all around your home, fresh for the picking.
Today, most of your food has been shipped 2000 miles or more. It comes from Australia and China, on giant container ships, it comes on trucks from all around the country and from Mexico. It may take a week or more from the time it was picked until the time it was delivered to your grocery store. Then it sits in your refrigerator for another week or more. All of this time the nutrients are slowly breaking down, so by the time this food gets in your mouth, there is barely any nutrition left to feed your body.
Why Are Americans So Unhealthy? – Our Food is Poisoned.
Most of the produce you buy at your local market has been sprayed with all types of chemicals, pesticides, herbicides and chemical “nutrients”. We are told this is all safe, but all of these chemicals have giant poison warnings on them. If it is not safe to eat out of the sprayer (or even be nearby when it is being sprayed), why would it suddenly be safe once it is sprayed onto the food? Many of these chemicals have been shown to cause cancer on their own, but most of our foods are sprayed with a whole cocktail of chemicals, not just one.
The chemical companies say, just wash it off, you’ll be safe. Sure, that’s why Round-Up is being found in Breast Milk and our babies are being born with high levels of DDT and Round-Up and many other chemicals before they even take a bite of food.
Or they say, peel the vegetables, the chemicals are only on the outside. Seriously? Vegetables absorb what is sprayed on them, just like a sponge. They suck it up through their root systems, they absorb it through their leaves. Peel away the outside, the poisons are still there.
So now, our food is lacking in the nutrients that help us heal and coated in poisons which our Liver now needs to clean out of our body, along with all the pollution in the air and water it’s already trying to handle.
These poisons not only build up in our bodies, but they build up in the bodies of the livestock we eat. Farm Animals are also fed these heavily sprayed foods, along with a huge cocktail of antibiotics and other questionable “supplements”. And since these pesticides are eaten daily by the animals, when you eat that piece of chicken or that steak, you are now getting all the poisons that animal ate through its lifetime as well. So animal products drastically increase your exposure to these cancer-causing toxins.
And Then We Cook the Heck Out of It.
So, if you only walk around the perimeter of the grocery store and you buy fresh produce, eggs, milk and meat, what do you do with it? We cook it! We know that cooking damages the nutrients, scientist have been telling us this for decades. But new studies now prove that cooking changes the molecular form of foods creating additional toxins. Cooking food actually makes many foods carcinogenic (cancer causing), especially high heat cooking, blackening, and grilling. Cooking food creates the carcinogenic chemical Acrylamide, the higher the temperature, or the darker the color(think burnt toast), the more Acrylamide is produced. (Learn more about Acrylamide from the National Cancer institute here.)
So if you regularly cook at home, from fresh simple, unprocessed ingredients, then your food is 40% less nutritious, chemically coated and cooked to death. But how many of us don’t even cook from “scratch”. That is where the middle aisles of the grocery store come in. And if you have been to the grocery store lately, you may have noticed, the middle is the largest part.
So the largest part of the store sells the stuff in the boxes and the cans, and this is where the majority of Americans spend their money. Or perhaps, like 1 in 4 Americans, you are also getting your food from a Fast Food Restaurant every day…
Why are Americans so unhealthy? – Our food is heavily processed.
So now we have food that has less nutrition in it and has been sprayed with a toxic soup and now we process that food. Cook it, strip it down, add some more chemicals to it for seasoning and a few more to preserve it and throw it in a box or a can or a bottle. Then we ship it off to a warehouse to sit for a few months or a few years before we ship it to a store to sit on the shelves. Then we bring it home and let it sit in our pantry a little more.
So now this food is old, old, old, and guess what? It’s dead. There is no life in it, there is no vibrancy, the nutrients are gone, the energy is gone. So we fuel our bodies with the calorie dense, nutrient poor sludge and then we feel tired, depressed, sluggish and slow. Why? because our food is dead, it can’t give us life.
We think we know what to eat, but we are way off the mark.
So now we know that the majority of our food is cooked to death, starved of nutrients and loaded with Toxins, but at least we know the right things to eat right? Wrong.
Our perception of what our plates should be has been skewed far from a natural human diet. Our government has presented us with the “Food Pyramid,” where we are told to stuff ourselves with heavily processed starches: 6-11 servings of Bread, Cereal, Rice, and Pasta. Consuming all of these wheat and starch based products sends our blood sugar on a wild ride with wide-ranging negative effects on your health from Diabetes to Heart Disease.
Now add to that 2 to 3 servings of meat and 2 to 3 servings of dairy. Eat only 2 to 4 servings of Fruit per day, which most people don’t even meet on an average day. Eat 3 to 5 servings of vegetables, but no mention of leafy greens. And of course don’t forget your added sugars and fats, used sparingly of course. So if we were to follow this guideline strictly and eat the maximum servings, that is 26 servings, only 7 servings are coming from foods that contain vital nutrients: fruits and vegetables. That leaves 19 servings of useless filler: fats, sugars and mostly indigestible animal proteins.
So we are stuffing ourselves to the brim with “foods” that keep our body constantly starved for nutrients. Sounds crazy right? So lets put a stop to this madness. Let’s start preventing disease by eating food, not science projects.
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Dairy is a huge contributor to disease in our country. We have been taught since childhood to drink a big glass of Milk every day for strong bones. But did you know that there is not a single study, that was not paid for by the Dairy Council, that shows that milk builds strong bones?
Let’s look a little deeper at Milk. If we look to the animal kingdom, there is no other species around the world which consumes the milk of another species, this should be our first clue. Also looking at the animal kingdom, there is not another species on our entire planet which drinks milk from its mother once it has been weaned. You don’t find a juvenile or adult animal anywhere in nature who consumes milk.
Modern Dairy cows, through extensive genetic manipulation, have been bred to significantly increase the amount of milk they produce, up to 12 times what they would in nature. Then by artificially inseminating cows (on what the dairy industry so appropriately calls a “rape rack”) and then taking away their calf, the dairy “farmer” is able to take the milk meant to raise the calf.