There is no secret that food can either be our safest and greatest form of medicine or the slowest form of poison. Unhealthy foods and poor diets are killing us like never before. Talk to most people and they agree they need to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, and less processed food. However, we continue to eat garbage. Some of the things we are sold as food are really just food-like. Many ingredients in fast food, processed food, your favorite restaurant food and the food that manufacturers tell you are healthy do nothing but damage to the human body.

Nutrition is stripped from food for a very good reason; it makes food last longer. Preservatives, chemicals, man-made ingredients, artificial flavors, toxins, high levels of salt and sugar, harmful preservatives and other things that were never intended to enter the human body take the place of the nutrients and minerals which are stripped from food.

This is done because it makes food manufacturing cheaper. Food lasts longer on the shelf so there is less of a chance of it going bad before you buy it. The addictive and toxic chemicals intentionally placed in those foods guarantee you to keep coming back for more of the stuff that is killing you. In spite of this, most people like to think we are advanced. They point to the fact that we are the ruling animals on our planet.

If that is the case, it is more than just a little embarrassing that the average person today eats what is probably the most destructive and unhealthy diet of any in human history.

A Poor Diet Filled with Bad Food Kills More People Than Type II Diabetes, Heart Disease and Cancer

That is the finding of research published in the April 2019 journal The Lancet. What’s more, it doesn’t matter how much money you make, where you live, how strong your metabolism is, what race or culture you belong to, how old you are or whether you are a man or a woman. If you eat certain things and avoid eating healthy things, your risks of dying young greatly increase.

The problem is worldwide, not just in the United States, the United Kingdom and other modern societies. Dr. Ashkan Afshin worked on the nutrition study reported by The Lancet. He says, “While the magnitude of the problem varies, people in all countries are affected.” This is because many countries have adopted modern food growing, harvesting and manufacturing processes that strip a lot of the food you eat of most of its nutrition.

A Poor Diet Kills More People Than Smoking and High Blood Pressure

Smoking is definitely a lifestyle choice that kills people. There is no upside to smoking. You get a high from it, but it does not produce any advantage physically or mentally. It makes your teeth yellow, causes cancer and heart disease, makes your breath smell bad along with everything in your home, and it can be expensive.

In other words, there is no reason to do it. Even smokers will not argue with the fact that smoking tobacco has killed billions of humans. It kills millions every year, it is incredibly addictive and cigarettes are readily available, so a lot of people smoke.

As bad as smoking is, the research provided by more than 130 scientist from 40 countries reported in The Lancet shows that a poor diet is even worse.

Do you know how many people die from high blood pressure each year? Consider this.

• Roughly 1,100 people die because of high blood pressure each day in just the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
• The American Heart Association tells us that more than 100 million Americans currently have heart disease.
• The Cable News Network (CNN) reported in November 2016 that more than 1.1 billion people were living with high blood pressure
• The World Health Organization believes that as many as 7.5 million deaths are caused by high blood pressure each year. There are several health organizations that believe this number is much higher.

The sobering data from The Lancet study says that if you continue to eat a poor diet that is predominantly processed food, with lots of refined table salt and not enough fruits and whole grains, you are courting a killer that is more effective at ending human life than high blood pressure.

What You Are Not Eating Is As Important for Your Health As What You Are Eating

Most diets and weight loss programs tell you what not to eat. They beat you up about the poor food choices you’re making. They give you all the scary figures we just mentioned to try and get you to stop eating certain foods. What often results is that there is not enough time spent on telling you what you should be eating. Don’t worry! I have some solutions for you below so keep on reading…

There is also another problem. People turn to their government for nutrition advice. Unfortunately, the multibillion-dollar food manufacturing industries pay many governments to tell you to eat their foods.

This is unfortunately the truth.

Big Sugar did this in the 1960s and ’70s, making fat a health villain. We know now that sugar is one of the major causes of the heart disease, obesity, diabetes and cancers that are present around the world. We are just waking up to the fact that eating certain fats is good for you, and that sugar should pretty much be avoided at all costs.

The dairy industry has done this and continues to do so.

Humans are one of the only animals that feed the breast milk of another animal to its children. We are even more rare as one of a small handful of animals that consumes breast milk from another animal as adults! Unfortunately, the dairy industry has lots of money. They pay for studies that tell us we need to be doing this, drinking lots of cow’s milk.

What they don’t tell you is that 2 out of every 3 people don’t process the lactose in dairy products properly. This leads to minor and major health problems, and not too many benefits. The dairy industry also doesn’t tell you that humans can only absorb about 30% of the calcium that is in the dairy milk they drink.

Don’t let your government tell you what to eat and what not to eat. Do your own research and you find that a plant-based diet with little processed foods is the key to avoiding chronic disease and to living a healthy, long life.

Most of the Food at Your Grocery Store Is Highly Processed and Has Little Nutrition

Just about all the food your grocer sells is processed. Any time you eat food that is not in its natural state, it has been processed in some way. If you pull an apple from a tree, wipe it off on your shirtsleeve and then cut it into four pieces, you have technically “processed” that apple.

This is not the type of processing which is dangerous.

It is when that apple has been raised with harmful fertilizer and pesticides that problems develop. If genetically modified ingredients make up what the apple tree is given so that it can grow quickly, more processing occurs. Spray the exterior of an apple with a chemical coating that makes it look shiny and preserves it for more than a natural length of time.

Then throw it in a crate and load it on the back of a truck. Let that truck drive hundreds or thousands of miles through smog, the exhaust from vehicles and other air pollution. That is in many cases what you are looking at when you see a scrumptious-looking apple at your grocery store.

That is a highly processed piece of food, but it is nowhere close to the amount of processing that nearly 2/3 of most grocery store foods undergo, according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. When you buy food that is packaged in a sealed bag, can or box and has a long list of indecipherable ingredients, you have your hands on highly processed food.

What Is the Answer?

The scary data mentioned in The Lancet study is only one example of countless research which links a poor diet to chronic disease and death. If human beings began today to eat more healthy sprouted whole grains, clean, fresh organic fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, wild-caught fish, 100 % grass-fed beef and dairy milk alternatives, the food industry would take notice.

The problem is we continue to eat processed food.

We justify that trip through the fast food drive-through because we are in a hurry and that’s what our kids are screaming for. We tell ourselves, “I have been eating so good for so long, I deserve a reward meal.” Then we go out and consume 1,500 to 2,000 calories during a single meal and virtually none of it is nutrition; and most of it is toxic and poisonous.

The answer to maximum health and well-being has never been a mystery. Eat your food as close to its natural state as possible.

This doesn’t mean you should go out and take a bite out of a cow if you are hungry for some healthy meat. It means choosing grass-fed beef instead of the highly processed beef your grocer offers. It means eating fish that have been caught out in the wild. If you eat poultry, make sure it has not been fed genetically modified feed, and that it has been pasture-raised.

Eat fruits and vegetables raw when it makes sense and organic whenever you can. Drink lots of water throughout the day and avoid added salt and sugar, two of the biggest culprits causing a lot of health problems these days.

You have to eat; you have no choice in the matter. You must eat to survive. What you eat is up to you.

You can enjoy the best mental, physical and emotional health of your life by eating the healthy foods we just mentioned. You can alternately decide to embrace disease and illness, courting the obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and early death that junk food, fast food and processed food have been proven to deliver. It’s your choice … what are you going to do?

If you know it is time to make some changes for you and your family’s health and want support transitioning from the Standard American Diet (SAD diet) to a Clean Eating Lifestyle then click HERE to get my 12 Steps: To Bio-Hacking Your Health.

Wishing you well,

Dr. Jessica