American food manufacturers are as opportunistic as any other large business entity when it comes to profits. How do you get the most profit for the least amount of expense? Try using extremely cheap and synthetic raw materials, then crank up the price until the consumer simply refuses to pay. Obviously, the difference between "expenses" and the price consumers are willing to pay is what is known as profit. Considering what is in the U.S. Standard American Diet (SAD), they learned their lessons well in Business school.

Most foods on American grocery shelves are highly processed, highly refined, heavily fortified with chemicals and preservatives, loaded with sugars of several kinds, and packaged brightly and cleverly. They are, most of all, convenient. Americans love convenience, and I swear; Americans will eat anything if it is convenient and comes in a cute package. (Let's not go there, ok?) Nutrition--REAL nutrition--is the farthest thing from their minds. The package will proclaim, "FAT FREE! VITAMIN FORTIFIED! NO COOKING NECESSARY!" and the consumer thinks, "This is what I need: a nutritious meal that I don't have to spend a lot of time preparing."

What these consumers don't see is the deliberate planning behind that convenient little package of fat-free, vitamin-fortified food that has deliberately targeted people who will think these exact words whenever they enter a grocery store. They don't see the deliberate use of packaging as a lure. They don't see the willful adulteration of food with chemicals and sugars. They don't see the sneaky marketing-polls and the computerized tracking of spending habits. They don't see the obscene profits these companies make on foods that don't even provide a nutritious diet to laboratory animals.

They don't see the actual processing of the food, in which it is often denatured to the molecular level into a base product that is unrecognizable as food, then colored, flavored, shaped, and fortified to make it resemble the original food. Not only does this process make the raw material go much farther (very cost effective), but it also extends the shelf-life of the food and allows the grocers to buy large quantities before the "sell-by" date is reached. They don't see the chemicals and additives, colorings, preservatives, and flavor enhancers that are proven carcinogens, that frequently go into the making of a processed food on the grocery shelf.

And they don't see that the refining, processing, and production of these ersatz foods render the foods so anti-nutritional that vitamin supplements are one of the biggest-selling items in the country. If the SAD was such a nutritious and healthful diet, why do so many people have deficiency diseases? Why are so many people obese? What has caused the 40-year upswing in type II diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression that exactly corresponds to the addition of these artificial foods to the diet and the displacement of natural foods?

Why do people eat these things when every grocery store not only carries real meat, poultry, and fish, and raw vegetables and fruits? In a word: Convenience. Americans have been taught by the food industry that "convenience" equals "nutritious," and American consumers have no reason not to believe these claims because the manufacturers go to great lengths to protect their reputations as reliable and trustworthy purveyors of good nutrition.

But, as in all things pertaining to food, the bottom line is still the bottom line. People must eat. It's like breathing--you can't not. So, you are a captive consumer. And, because you are their captive, they can do anything to you, and you will have to take it. With a few small exceptions, they have the only game in town. You either buy their products, or you go hungry. You want convenience, they give it to you, wrapped around a nutritional time bomb that is set to go off by the time you reach age 60. Every one of the diseases mentioned above is diet-induced, regardless of what your doctor tells you. Every one of them can be reversed by adjusting the diet to remove as many of these fake foods as possible and to replace them with more natural foods, such as meat with its attached fat, free-range chicken and eggs, home-grown vegetables, and raw whole milk, cream, and butter from grass-fed herds.

If you eat a continual diet of high-carbohydrate (commercial foods are loaded with sugars and starches of all kinds), nutritionally barren food (most fortifying vitamins and minerals used in commercial foods are chemical and/or synthetic imitations), wrapped in those pretty, clever, and appealing wrappers, I can virtually guarantee you that by age 60, you will have at least one of the above mentioned chronic diseases, if not all of them, and then some. And when this happens, you will become the property of the medical industry and the pharma-giants until you die, especially if you continue to eat the convenient foods in the cute wrappers.

When our grandparents were growing up, they ate raw, natural diets. Heart disease was virtually unknown. The only people who had pinched faces and crooked teeth were the ones who ate a highly-refined, carbohydrate-heavy diet. 

And the healthy ones were fertile. Today's young people are virtually infertile, and they think it is by choice, but thanks to today's poor diet, even if they do happen to conceive, the chances are very good that they will either abort spontaneously or have pregnancy and delivery complications requiring surgery or intervention of some kind.  These conditions were virtually unheard of fifty years ago.  The most natural state for a young woman's body is pregnancy, and she is built to obtain, protect and keep a pregnancy to a natural gestational age of 280 days, then deliver naturally within a short period of time, to heal quickly and be back on her feet within 36 hours.  But nowadays, fertility clinics are doing a land-office business because young women simply cannot obtain and keep a pregnancy without intervention. The increase in the number and frequency of Caesarian-section births is astronomical. Premature births occur at earlier and earlier gestational ages. 

Think this isn't related? Inspect nutritional backgrounds on infertile people. Check the facts.  As the "X-Files" motto says, "The truth is out there." Go find it.

Look to the past. Regain the present. Nourish the future.