How Our Modern Diet Is Failing
For a nation that spends more on health care than any other country, the United
States certainly isn’t very healthy. Did you know we are the sickest nation on the
planet? As of this writing, 97 million Americans are overweight. Despite the
huge success of many diet books, soaring sales of diet pills, and increased gym
memberships, more Americans are overweight today than at any other time in
history.
At present, nearly 62 million Americans suffer from cardiovascular disease,
and many of them are permanently disabled. Heart disease is the number one
cause of mortality for Americans, and cancer is second— despite tremendous
medical advances in treating both diseases over the last several decades. Sixty
million Americans are on the verge of becoming diabetic, and more than 25
million are already there. About 72 million people aged 20 years and older have
high blood pressure. Osteoporosis is rampant. Arthritis, depression, and
infertility are also on the rise. It’s far from a perfect picture.
Today’s generation is plagued by diseases. Never in history has there been
such a surge in the number of people with so many serious illnesses. Why is
such a developed nation losing its health despite tremendous medical advances?
Conventional medicine can offer little help to reverse the onset of these diseases
when our diet is contributing to it. The statistics are similar in many Western
societies.
You’ve no doubt heard about the grandmother who ate three eggs a day,
cooked only in butter or lard, drank whole milk daily, and lived a healthy life
until she was 97 years old. Gee, you may be asking yourself, how could this be
possible if she followed a diet that’s a perfect recipe for a heart attack or a
stroke? Was she simply lucky, or was she blessed with extraordinarily good
genes? She did not take cholesterol or blood pressure drugs; she had not had
bypass surgery. It is even more incomprehensible to hear that she never saw a
doctor except when giving birth.
You might be tempted to ascribe her longevity to luck because most people
who lived in her time died at a much younger age. But life expectancy was
shorter then because there were no cures for infectious diseases like tuberculosis
and pneumonia. Longevity, or the lack thereof, had much less to do with heart