Death By Supermarket (2 page)

PART ONE
How Factory Food Changed the Way We Live … and Die

FORTY YEARS AGO, ON
the TV sitcom
Green Acres
, socialite Lisa (Eva Gabor) just added boiling water to prepare Dee Dee’s “Dehydroficated” Mason Dixon Southern Fried Chicken Dinner for her husband, Oliver (Eddie Albert). This parody of the modern American diet presented back in the 1960s is a reality today. Instead of breastfeeding, we feed our newborns industrialized infant formula and wean them on toxic “kid foods” like Nabisco Teddy Grahams Clifford The Big Red Dog Cinnamon Graham Sticks, Danimals Swingin’ Strawberry-Banana Flavored Yogurt, Betty Crocker Looney Tunes/Scooby Doo Fruit Flavored Snacks, X-Treme Jell-O Pudding Sticks, and Kool-Aid.

American children go off to school on breakfasts of Hostess Ding Dongs, Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls, Cap’n Crunch, and Reese’s Puffs. They eat Fritos and McDonald’s for lunch, and snack on movie popcorn, Hot Pockets, Fat Free Pringles, Crystal Light Sugar Free Lemonade, Nickelodeon Fruit Snacks, and Coke.

Americans have evolved an “every man for himself” system for dinner, swinging through fast-food drive-throughs, 7-Elevens, and ampms, calling Domino’s, or foraging in the kitchen for Kellogg’s Eggo Buttermilk Waffles, Campbell’s soups, Chef Boyardee Ravioli, and Lean Cuisine and Hungry Man frozen dinners.

Back when our country was founded, Thomas Jefferson idealized the family farm as the backbone of American democracy. But over the past one hundred years—accelerating after World War II—to increase profits, family farms and ranches have been taken over by behemoth corporations, and the production of poultry and meat has been industrialized. Livestock were moved from their natural habitats and were incarcerated in cramped, dark factories, pens, and cages to live short, miserable lives eating species-inappropriate food, being pumped with genetically modified growth hormones, and kept alive on drugs before being slaughtered in the cheapest (which often means the cruelest) ways. Since it’s more profitable and less of a headache to ride herd on factory workers than it is manage the farms and ranches that historically fed us, the food industry developed “products” that have long shelf lives and can be easily shipped thousands of miles—unlike real, living food, which spoils and is difficult to transport.

Factory-food products are made, for the most part, from real food that is broken down in laboratories and factories, using heat and chemical solvents, into its basic components. The components are then mixed with colored dyes, preservatives, synthetic vitamins, and hundreds of other substances. Teams of chemists and “food flavorists” manipulate the chemical composition of recipes so the resulting products titillate taste buds and have appealing “bite characteristics” and “mouthfeel,” along with a maximum shelf life. Although factory foods promise good health, beauty, and satisfaction, they lack the life-sustaining nutrients necessary to maintain healthy metabolic processes and are mostly foreign and toxic to human physiology. The heartbreaking reality is that rather than feeling sated by eating these products, the resultant unnatural hunger provokes people to binge insatiably.

Industrialized animal products (meat, dairy, fish, poultry, and eggs) that are produced in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) also contribute to obesity and ugly death. In CAFOs animals are deprived of sunlight, clean water, and space to move, swim, or lie down. They’re fed species-inappropriate food (herbivores are fed soybeans and chicken poop,
for example) and are injected with hormones, and because of the depraved conditions in CAFOs, they must be given antibiotics and hundreds of drugs to keep them alive long enough to fatten for slaughter. They’re lonely, frightened, and crazed from birth to death. Since the way animals are treated and their nutrition determine the nutritional value of their meat, milk, and eggs, CAFO foods contain fewer of the life-sustaining nutrients necessary to maintain healthy metabolic processes. Because of the poisons in animal feed and the drugs animals are given, CAFO products contain toxins that can harm human beings.

On the other hand, real food (including humanely raised animal products) contains life-sustaining nutrients necessary to maintain healthy metabolic processes. Real food is recognized and utilized by human physiology. As I said in the Introduction, I learned this initially from my grandmother. Stella was a dark-haired beauty, a Polish immigrant who came through Ellis Island in 1911 and suffered her fair share of health problems as a result of inadequate early nutrition. In 1942, at age thirty-nine, Stella happened upon a “health” lecture, became a health-food devotee, and was henceforth labeled the family kook. When I was a child, I often found her in the basement, lying in the pitch black on her “slant board,” blood rushing to her head as she meditated. She was notorious for her delicious cooking, juicing and canning homegrown vegetables, dispensing vitamin C capsules, and dog-earing pages in nutritional pioneer Adelle Davis’s books for us to read.

Stella was an example of someone who started out with inadequate nutrition because her family was poor but regrouped later in life by providing her body and brain with the necessary building blocks of real, living food. By doing so, she was able to take advantage of her genetic gifts, such as was possible later in life. Among Stella’s unique gifts were her physical beauty, strength, energy, and—her most remarkable quality—a positive attitude about life, despite hardship and tragedy. By giving our bodies and brains the necessary building blocks of nutrition, we could also take advantage of our genetic gifts, to the extent that is possible later in life. Future
generations would benefit to a much greater extent in that adequate nutrition from conception on would allow them to fully realize their genetic gifts.

Our nation has a well-established superiority complex in which we see ourselves as the richest, most macho, most technologically advanced nation in the world. The truth is that we’re number one in the world in obesity
¹
and that we’re falling way behind in world health. We’re ranked fiftieth in life expectancy. In a 2009 World Health Organization (WHO) comparison, the United States ranked twenty-ninth in the world in infant mortality and 68 percent of adults were overweight or obese.
²
(WHO is a United Nations agency dedicated to global health.)

In addition, although studies have demonstrated that tall people enjoy a positive bias in society, get promoted faster in their careers, earn more money, and are better than short people in relationships and politics, American men are not growing taller as are other men around the world. American women are actually shrinking. According to John Komlos, Ph.D., the leading expert in the field of anthropometric history, which tracks how populations around the world have changed in stature, the average adult height attained by a population is a historical record of the overall nutrition of that population. Dr. Komlos’s twenty years of research has documented the height of almost a quarter of a million people from the 1700s to the present.

“Americans were the tallest people in the world until right after World War II, which was a reflection our healthy eating habits,” Dr. Komlos told me. “Because of our poor diet, Americans have gone from being tallest in the world—one to three inches taller than Western and Northern Europeans—to being towered over by the Dutch, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, British, and Germans by one to three inches. Today, Americans are, on average, the same height of the men and women of the Czech Republic.”
³
In other words, Americans are now the same height as the citizens of an Eastern European country that has been economically repressed and nutritionally deprived for hundreds of years. (The average American man is five-foot-nine, and the average woman five-foot-four.)

In addition to reversing our growth spurt, our industrialized diet has resulted in more American kids being at higher risk for a host of health problems, including precocious puberty and neurological disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and attention deficit disorder (ADD)—diseases characterized by inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity; and autism, a disorder of mental introversion, aloneness, inability to relate, repetitive play, and rage reactions. Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder of absolute insulin deficiency, is on the rise in children.
⁴
Also occurring more frequently in children are the degenerative diseases formerly associated with aging: cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes, a chronic disorder of carbohydrate metabolism formerly known as “adult onset” diabetes.

In all age groups, there is an alarming increase in frightening, incurable autoimmune conditions—of which there are a hundred—such as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (chronic inflammation of the thyroid gland), lupus (progressive ulcerative skin disease), Crohn’s disease (chronic inflammation of the intestines), rheumatoid arthritis (chronic inflammation of the joints), Graves’ disease (overactive thyroid), myasthenia gravis (progressive muscular weakness), interstitial cystitis (chronic inflammation of the bladder), and Sjögren’s disease (in which white blood cells attack moisture-producing glands, causing numerous health problems). Autoimmune conditions occur when the immune system loses the ability to distinguish between normal healthy cells and destructive foreign invaders and attacks healthy cells. People who develop autoimmune conditions are often condemned to a lifetime of chronic pain, the despair of being characterized as hypochondriacs, and the plight of being guinea pigs at the hands of doctors who don’t know how to help them.

Millions of factory-food eating Americans today suffer from lack of what I call “happy” neurotransmitters (chemicals that carry messages between cells). Imbalances of these neurotransmitters cause the unnatural hunger that drives us to eat injurious substances. Neurotransmitter imbalances can also result in problems such as ADD, ADHD, insomnia,
exhaustion, depression, obsessive or even suicidal thoughts, panic disorders, anxiety, rage, agitation, anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and zero sex drive.

Because we’ve deteriorated to this degree, Americans are dying excruciating deaths, drugged up and tethered to monitors with beepers going off in impersonal hospital rooms where strangers walk in and out.

On her deathbed at age ninety-seven, Stella’s skin glowed and was virtually wrinkle free, and her hair was radiant. When a nurse came in to check her vitals, Stella demonstrated her famous bicycle kick exercise. The next day she died peacefully. At her eulogy, she was compared to the subject of an 1858 Oliver Wendell Holmes poem on old age called “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” about a one-horse carriage that survived one hundred years in perfect shape and then on its last day disintegrated into a heap of sawdust. Holmes writes about an ideal life of good health and peaceful death that few Americans experience today. But Stella did, largely because she ate real food.

Even though my grandma died a relatively peaceful death, she still died in a hospital. I was there for her last hours with my nephew, James. We sat on either side of her bed the entire night, talking to her, being with her, remembering things about her. It was one of the profound experiences of my life. Just as Grandma influenced me about living, she also influenced me about dying, because I was sorry that she died in a hospital. In the years since her death in 2001, I’ve thought a lot about the correlation between the effects of the big three—factory food, diets, and drugs—and the way we die. I believe that by eating real, living food, by using drugs extremely judiciously, and by not dieting, more people would be healthy enough to stay at home attending to business as usual, instead of being wheeled into “assisted living,” a euphemism for “waiting for death.” Being healthy means we could live our old age and then die of old age peacefully in a celebratory experience at home, surrounded by loved ones. That’s the way we are meant to leave this world.

This is something to think about, as death from degenerative diseases
has risen spectacularly in the last hundred years. And dying from a degenerative disease is not like the pretty, soft-focus pharmaceutical commercials you see with Grandpa fishing with his grandchildren and Mom gardening with her daughter in idyllic settings with poignant music and perfect hair and makeup. Dying of a degenerative disease is torture that ravages the family as it brings its victim down.

Historically, people didn’t suffer and die on a massive scale from degenerative diseases. Prior to the year 1900, hygiene—the basic practice of cleanliness—was an advancement yet to be “discovered.” Raw sewage ran in city streets, contaminating drinking water. Doctors with filth under their fingernails blew their noses during surgery. People and their habits were essentially dirty. Prior to the year 1900, the primary cause of death was infectious diseases.

In the late 1850s, French chemist and bacteriologist Louis Pasteur promoted the “germ theory of disease”: All infectious diseases have a causative agent, such as a bacteria, virus, fungus, or parasite. The discovery of microorganisms precipitated scientific advancements, such as the use of personal hygiene, antibiotics, sanitation, and refrigeration, which systematically eradicated many infectious-disease plagues. In addition, for the first time in the history of humankind, a population as vast as ours was gaining the capacity to produce enough life-sustaining meat, fish, poultry, dairy, vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, seeds, and nuts to feed our nation. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was poised to evolve into a utopia filled with healthy, strapping people. But this didn’t occur. Instead obesity and degenerative disease rose throughout and are now epidemic.