WHAT’S WRONG WITH OUR FOOD?
America is facing a nutritional epidemic. We have for so long taken for granted that the foods we buy at our local grocery stores will supply us and our families with all the nutrients we’ll need to live long and healthy lives. However, the alarming truth is, our foods of today may lack the sufficient nutritional content required to keep us healthy.

Today’s farming methods includes the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that have stripped our fruits and vegetables of their original nutritional value. On his best selling CD “America’s Unbalanced Diet”, Dr. David Friedman compares the nutritional value of one apple in 1914 to that of 26 of today’s apples. And after gathering data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), a researcher at the University of Texas concluded that there was a significant drop in the nutritional content of vegetables from the early 1950’s when compared to ones from the late 1990’s. It was also in the 1950’s when farmers and ranchers began injecting growth hormones into cattle and poultry so that they would be ready for market sooner than ever before.

Time magazine’s recent article by Bryan Walsh titled “The real cost of cheap food” reveals that according to the USDA, less than 1% of American cropland is farmed organically. “The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us”, says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The article goes further to say that “worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous”.

This means that you would have to eat up to perhaps 10 times more fruits and vegetables in order to get the necessary vitamins and minerals our bodies require. It also means that the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and growth hormones that is in the foods we eat ends up in our bodies.

AMERICA, AN UNHEALTHY NATION
This has made America a sick nation. We spend 2.5 trillion dollars a year on health care, far more than any other country in the world. America’s cancer rate has skyrocketed along with heart disease and diabetes. Americans have more cases of colon cancer than any other developed country and studies now indicate that our diet and the chemicals they contain is one of the main contributing factors to America’s high cancer rate and declining health. According to the American Cancer Society 559,312 people in the U.S. died of cancer in 2005. This was 5,424 more people than in 2004. In his book “SuperHealth”, Dr. Steven Pratt states that “it is estimated that up to 80 percent of colon, breast, and prostate cancer cases and one third of all cancer cases may be influenced by diet…”.

In an analysis published in the Journal of Oncology Practice, based on data from the National Cancer Institute, researchers concluded that “the number of Americans who are diagnosed with cancer, both in treatment and those who have finished therapy, will grow to 18.2 million, up from 11.7 million in 2005. Today, about one in 26 Americans have had cancer. By 2020, roughly one in 19 will have been diagnosed with the disease,” says Edward Salsberg, an author of the study from the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Center for Workplace Studies.

And how do we compare to 100 years ago. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), cancer and heart disease accounted for only 13 percent of all deaths in and around 1900. Since then the cancer rate has tripled and the rate for heart disease has nearly doubled. In the early 1900’s, foods did not contain the chemicals or growth hormones that are in our processed foods of today and had all of their intended nutritional value.

AN AMERICAN’S LIFE EXPECTANCY
Our bodies simply cannot tolerate years of eating foods containing nitrogen based fertilizers and the chemicals contained in herbicides and pesticides used by today’s food producers. Compared to other countries, the United States has been slipping in the international rankings of life expectancy for many years now. Forty one countries, including Japan and most of Europe, have higher life expectancies than Americans. According to international figures provided by the Census Bureau and domestic figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, the United States ranks 42nd in life expectancy, down from 11th just two decades ago. Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan, and most of Europe have lower infant mortality rates. In 2004 the U.S. infant mortality rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births and it was 13.7 for Black Americans. “Somethings wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. John Clymer, president of Partnership for Prevention, goes further by saying “We must look at each other, but also to these other countries as examples to aid us in our efforts to improve health.”

Related Articles:
Genetically Modified Foods on Our Dinner Table
Genetically Modified Foods: Are They Safe?
Our Current State of Health: Why?

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Tagged as: Chronic Disease and Prevention