The Cost of Our Food Should be Measured in the Total food, Health Care, Energy, and Environmental Costs of What We Choose to Eat. Looked at this way, it is insane how much we are paying and future generations will be paying for our unhealthy diet pleasures. Meanwhile, half the world is starving and the other half remain overfed.
It is remarkable that the American public, as tight as money is, is so fearful about some unexpected health crisis popping up, that we are willing to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars per family each month for health insurance, which may get cancelled at the last moment anyway. This is a perfect example of how we have been conditioned to fear things we don't understand.
Rather than taking the time to educate ourselves on how to eat to stay both thin and well, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by our fear of some nameless health catastrophe. And then, overcharged for high-tech solutions that treat only our symptoms. (To be fair to doctors, they can't control what we eat.)
And yet, for all the "protection money" we spend, we are unwilling in most cases to do the things we are told by public health agencies that will prevent many of the most feared diseases. We pay exorbitant charges for health care insurance rather than correct our personal risk factors.
This being January, the month when most Americans decide to get serious about dieting for a week or two, it may be appropriate to look at how insane our dietary habits are.
The diseases that trouble us the most are caused by the junk we eat. Most of them can be prevented by correcting our diet--once and for all--and learning to ignore temptation. We should recognize slick advertisers of unhealthy foods as the Devil's own representatives--and avoid their recommendations like the plague.
What we do instead, with the encouragement of our medical providers, is spend $70-100+ per month for a statin drug to allow us to go on eating bacon and eggs, meats, and ice cream, without worrying about our cholesterol levels. Would it not be simpler and healthier--and cheaper!--to stop eating extra cholesterol? But no, life in modern America wouldn't be worth living without being free to graze on all the delectable goodies that food chemists concoct for us each day--or so we appear to think.
So, because 68% of Americans are overweight, which should be an easy problem to remedy with a little self-discipline, we are prone to become diabetic, suffer from cardiovascular disease, and several cancers. This we know. What are we going to do about it this year? Another bout with the Atkins diet? Or will it be some new diet that is guaranteed to be a marketing success and a weight loss failure?
Weight loss is generally viewed as a simple math problem. Usually, we're given the old choice: We've either got to exercise a lot more or eat a lot less, but most dieters want to do neither one.
There is, however another option that most of us ignore with a passion. And that is changing WHAT we eat rather than limiting how much we eat. Specifically, we're talking about cutting out meats, eggs, and milk products.
That is the key that few of us want to use to unlock the weight loss riddle. More than being a problem of eating too much, weight gain is caused by eating the wrong kind of foods. Anthropologists point out that our digestive systems are not set up to be carnivorous. But since McDonald's and Pizza Huts even provide the food service in many public schools now--and have for some time--most of us find it hard to imagine life worth living without fast foods, fried foods, and junk snack foods.
We have been trained to eat the wrong foods and to expect someone else to solve the medical problems this creates. (And now, it looks like we will all be forced to buy health care insurance, whether we want it or not.)
Health care, as we currently see it practiced, is not the answer, though.
Until we are each able to see the part we play in allowing ourselves to be manipulated by advertisers to eat unnatural, unhealthy foods, we will not be ready to take the first step to permanent weight loss. Short term changes in what we eat, diet pills, and all the new crop of diet books will not produce the desired results until we learn to see how we have been duped by food processors and our government-subsidized industrial system of farming.
We need real food, grown in healthy soils, not colorful boxes of factory-farmed "foods" with minimal nutrients and maximal flavor additives. And, we need to stop eating animals and their by-products. The alternative is to continue to pay outrageous prices for continuing to eat as we do.
One option to the unrealistic expectation of converting the nation to organic farming methods overnight is to encourage everyone to supplement their diet with high-quality vitamin and mineral supplements. It makes sense that much of our overeating is an unconscious urge to get the vital nutrients that should be in our food but aren't, due to depleted soils.
If it seems extreme to suggest we stop eating meat, other animal products(milk, etc.), and processed foods, don't you think open-heart surgery, knee and hip replacements, kidney dialysis on a regular basis, chemotherapy, and Alzheimer's Disease are extreme, too? Countries where the populations live on simple, naturally grown foods, with little meat in their diets rarely get the diseases we do. We should learn from them.
If, as 45-year cancer researcher T. Colin Campbell tells us, our diet is responsible for 97% of the diseases we get, then it is up to us to stop offering ourselves up as prey for the health care industry. Change your diet and you can change your medical fate.
The irony of this whole milieu of sickness, obesity, and high health care costs is that we are doing it to ourselves by what we choose to eat. As soon as we realize that fact, we can start doing something to reduce our weight and our health care expenses.
As a happy side-effect, changing our unhealthy diet will take a huge burden off our environment and be a good example for the rest of the world.
Paul H. Kemp is an entrepreneur, writer, and amateur athlete.
For more information on how to reduce your personal health care expenses, while improving your health, visit his Web site: http://www.HealthyPlanetDiet.com
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