Americans are spending 48 percent of their food dollars eating out. Our food today is processed, refined, concentrated, sugared, salted and chemically engineered to produce taste sensations high in calories and low in nutrients. Our cattle are fattened in feedlots without exercise and with antibiotics and growth enhancers. The result: bigger cattle producing juicier steaks containing nearly twice the fat as range-fed cattle. And we are paying dearly for these advancements. While we eat to live, what we eat is killing us.
Diet and Disease
The statistics are pretty convincing. In 1900, fewer than 10 percent of deaths in the United States were attributed to artery disease. Today it is closer to 30 percent. Back then, less than six percent died of cancer while today the figure is exceeding 25 percent. Back then few people died of diabetes and its complication. That number has dramatically increased, especially in the last 40 years debunking the idea that diabetes (type 2) is a largely genetically driven disease. After all, we now understand that it takes some 300 years to alter the genetics of a nation to produce a change in a given disease. Look at obesity -- adult rates have gone from 5 percent in 1985 to more than 35 percent today.
This isn’t nature’s way. We were not meant to die in such numbers from heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and from cancer of the lungs, breast, prostate and colon. Significant death rates from cardiovascular disease (heart disease and strokes) began to emerge after World War I. It became rampant only after World War II when people could afford diets rich in animal products and when the food industry began producing highly processed foods crammed with calories and emptied of nutrition.
Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) and cancer [as a percentage of all causes of death] has increased over the years. While around 1900 deaths from CVD were very low accounting for less than 10 percent of all deaths, they now account for about 30 percent. Similarly increases are shown for cancer, which is continuing to rise despite heroic after-the-fact medical interventions now accounting for 26 percent of all deaths.
Coincidental?
Hardly. This problem was unique to Westernized people, where we called these chronic diseases “Western Diseases.” In those days, rural populations in China and Southeast Asia with little access to rich foods experienced few heart attacks. Similarly, most people in rural Africa and South and Central America had little fear of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In Japan, after World War II, the Medical School of the University of Tokyo had to import coronary artery specimens from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to be able to show Japanese medical students what killed every second American since the disease was difficult to find in Japan. But all of this has been changing. In North America, Australia and New Zealand, and in the increasingly affluent countries in Europe and Asia, and among the affluent in Africa, where diets are rich in fat, animal protein and cholesterol, heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes are now epidemic. Once known as “Western Diseases,” these diseases—spread through the globalization of the western diet and lifestyle—have now become “global diseases.”
The Villains
Low fiber, high fat and animal protein together with the cholesterol have emerged as the villains. They take their toll by damaging the body’s vital oxygen-carrying arteries and by upsetting important metabolic functions. Because of thickened and narrowed arteries 3,000 Americans have heart attacks every day and every third adult has high blood pressure and thousands are crippled from strokes. Because of disordered metabolisms from unbalanced lifestyles, obesity is epidemic and three out of 10 babies born today will develop diabetes in their lifetime.
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