The American Diet...A Recipe for Profit, Convenience, and Disaster

 

The American diet is abundant in processed, bleached, preserved and nutrient depleted foods. Foods “promoted” for consumption are not chosen because of their ability to maintain health and prevent disease.

It is all about cost and profit margin, not health.

Food production in a capitalist society is a business, and businesses are about money, not your health.

We have become complacent after so many years, and have allowed the slow, steady and now almost complete takeover of our food markets by the 'food business'. We have allowed the scourge of processed foods to become the norm...so that now even intelligent people (although their brains are likely dulled by their own addiction and overingestion of processed carbs😉) have forgotten that yes...at one time way back...that humans actually ingested unprocessed, natural foods....foods that evolution and thousands of years of genetic fine tuning allowed the human body to be reliant on and to thrive on.

 

While aging and disease are inevitable, what we do every day to maintain this incredible but very mortal machine is essential in preventing illness and ensuring optimal health and function as we age. The foods that we consume daily remain the best source and represent the most natural form of the vital nutrients that the body depends upon to function. In addition to the necessary proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories provided for cellular energy/function, these nutrients include vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and thousands of newly discovered and incompletely understood phytochemicals (many of which

[I believe] will ultimately be determined to have been essential) involved in thousands of chemical reactions throughout the body. We are only beginning to understand the nature of most of these reactions, and how they relate to our health and disease. There is one thing I can say with certainty....as we get a more complete understanding of the nutrient needs of the human body, we will not ultimately conclude that the diseased body is lacking in white bread, a nitrite-preserved piece of meat, or an expensive pharmaceutical agent....we will find that in some (many?) disease states which we currently have a limited understanding of, that there were as of yet unidentified nutrient deficiencies and imbalances that allowed the disease state to exist and/or advance. We are currently aware of only a relatively short list of nutrients that have been determined to be essential for the function of the human body....but there are UNDOUBTEDLY many more nutrients contained within our natural whole foods that are essential to the human body (this is the only logical conclusion after thousands of years of natural food dependency and human evolution), but at this point in medical science we remain unaware of their importance and the disease states resulting from a deficiency or imbalance of those nutrients. So it is certainly likely that some of the chronic disease burden that we continue to see is the result of nutrient deficiencies that are as yet not understood and unexplored.

 

The reliance on a diet based primarily on processed foods is inadequate for maintaining a healthy human physiologic state.

Unless you are ingesting vegetables and fruits daily....You are Nutrient Deficient regardless of the supplements you take in an attempt to compensate for your deficient diet.

 

The ingestion of a diet primarily reliant on processed foods, especially when not balanced with the ingestion of whole, plant based foods....should have its own medical diagnosis code which declares it a pre-disease state.