Americans are spending 48 percent of their food dollars eating out. Our food 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 results: 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.
Dietary Changes
Before 1900, the North American diet consisted mostly of foods grown in local gardens and nearby farms supplemented with a few staples from the General Store. The meat then came from barnyard animals and range-fed cattle. People didn't have thousands of beautifully packaged and highly promoted food products waiting at the super market. And fast-food restaurants didn't beckon from nearly every street corner.
The backbone of their diet was kernels–kernels of wheat and other grains growing in reassuring profusion. Families ate freshly cooked food and thick slices of home-baked bread around their tables. They enjoyed hot cereals, cornbread and biscuits. They ate rice, pasta, and corn along with beans, potatoes, vegetables and fruit. These nutritious high fiber foods then made up 53 percent of their daily calorie intake. (see graph)
From foods to industrialized products
Last year, Americans grew over 10 billion bushels of corn–but less than one percent of this crop was sweet corn, the kind we eat. The rest nowadays is used for animal feed, soft drinks (high fructose corn syrup), corn chips, gasoline additives and paper. It is obvious: tastes have changed dramatically. For breakfast--hot cereals like oatmeal have been replaced by cold, pre-sweetened flakes. Lunch typically consists of a small salad soaked in oily dressings, a hamburger, potato chips and a Coke. And dinner often comes frozen in a cardboard box from the "Colonel.” Between meals there are sodas, chips, Ding Dongs and doughnuts. Nutritious, unrefined high fiber foods, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes (beans and lentils), now only represent seven percent of our daily calories. The clear majority of calories today comes from refined, processed foods (51%) and dairy and animal foods (42%).