Posts Tagged With: diet

You may have heard how Americans are unhealthier than ever, in spite of billions spent on healthcare. Not surprising since healthcare tries to fix the problems after the fact, instead of addressing root causes. How did health begin to spiral out of control? One major reason began, not surprisingly, with government meddling.

The government’s devaluation of the dollar in 1971, allowing Congress to spend endlessly and thus devaluing the dollar even further, effectively destroyed vibrant, healthy, American agriculture. Saifedean Ammous details the history in The Fiat Standard, and here are some highlights:

Government policies begun in the 1970s “killed small-scale agriculture and forced small farmers to sell their plots to large corporations, consolidating the growth of industrial food production, which would in due time destroy America’s soil and its people’s health…” This brought down the prices of industrialized foods, but “the quality of food was degraded…[and] as prices of highly nutritious foods rise, people are inevitably forced to replace them with cheaper alternatives.”

Instead of issuing dietary guidelines based on science, they are often designed “to promote cheap industrial food substitutes” and are “shaped by an increasingly powerful agricultural industrial complex…The food pyramid is a recipe for metabolic disease, obesity, diabetes, and a plethora of health problems that have been increasingly common…” Industrial foods are often full of “toxic, heavily processed industrial chemicals misleadingly referred to as ‘vegetable oils’…as well as the abomination that is margarine.”

“Refined sugar and flour can be better understood as drugs…[the process] is similar to the refining process that has made cocaine and heroin such highly addictive substances…Government subsidies for the production of unhealthy foods-and government scientists recommending and requiring we eat them…[has resulted in a] dietary transition on Americans’ health [that] has been calamitous…their mental and physical health are deteriorating…increasing obesity is not a sign of affluence but a symptom of deprivation…The ever-increasing cost of medication and healthcare cannot be understood without reference to the destruction of health, diet, and soil, and the economic and nutritional system that promoted this calamity.”

Healthy cultures “relied heavily on animal products…junk food cravings are also a result of deep malnutrition caused by not eating enough meat.”

“Americans are not fat because of prosperity and abundance; Americans are fat because they are malnourished and nutritionally impoverished.”