The American Diet is Not Normal: It Is Weird!

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

I have numerous patients who, when confronted with the fact that they need to make changes in the food they eat in order to recover their health, lament that they wish they could eat “normal food” like everybody else. They look forward to the day when they can once again consume limitless amounts of pizza, cheeseburgers, French fries, ice cream, bagels, donuts, and soda, and go to outdoor food festivals and gorge on cotton candy, funnel cakes, milkshakes and crepes,…… One client described a recent barbeque party she and her husband hosted: there wasn’t one vegetable dish on the menu! These people are missing the point. These kinds of food, along with the deluge of processed and chemicalized material that tries to pass for food in our mainstream supermarkets, is not “normal”, and is the reason why members of our society, and ever-increasing numbers of those in other countries around the world that have adopted our eating habits, are so sick. But, these patients say, all my friends eat that way and they are fine; why is it just me that has become ill? My answer to that is, that those people will also become ill at some point if they keep living the way that they do. Some of us are more sensitive and have weaker links in our chains of health, sometimes due to genetic factors, so we are the so-called “canaries in the coal mine”. We are the ones who are the sentinels of danger ahead. In some ways, this is a blessing, because we have symptoms at an earlier age, before too much damage is done, and we can change our ways, reverse our conditions, and end up living much healthier and fulfilling lives. Those who are insensitive to, or ignore, the warning signs and symptoms that their bodies are putting out, often “suddenly” and “out of nowhere”, contract a major life-threatening illness later.

BUT BACK TO THE TOPIC OF THE FOOD WE EAT.

There needs to be a paradigm shift in how we view the way we nourish ourselves.

The current American diet is not normal and is not natural. In medical circles, it is nicknamed the Standard American Diet, often referred to as SAD for short. And, in the words of our current president, it is “So SAD!” indeed. It bears no resemblance to what we evolved on or what nature intended for us to eat. Most of its components are synthetic or so highly processed and transformed that they are not found in nature. In addition, these ‘foods’ are infused with toxic pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, additives, heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants and genetically modified organisms, to name a few. When ingested, our bodies do not know how to process these molecules or they interfere with normal physiological processes, and then create havoc. If the ingredients are present in the natural world, they are used in such enormous amounts or concentrations that they create wild imbalances inside of us. I was recently in a large supermarket in a rural area of the country, and the shelf-space dedicated to soda and chips greatly outnumbered that devoted to vegetables and fruit. The SAD diet is polluted and unsustainable for our bodies, let alone the environment. It is truly bizarre. What are we doing to ourselves?

Junk food aisle in mainstream supermarket I recently visited.

I do wish to point out that it is not all our fault. We have been duped, exploited and have had our biological mechanisms overridden and tricked by the food industry . To understand how we got to this point, we need to know a little about the history of food production in this country. Coming in a future blog: A Brief History Of Food Production.