Is Our Food Killing Us? (Updated)
Frozen foods became a thing during WW2, when Birdseye used its flash-freezing technology to create frozen pre-packaged dinners for military and civilian air carriers. Called Strato-Plates or SkyPlates, they consisted of a partitioned tray offering separate servings of meat, a vegetable and a potato. After the war came the TV Dinner, which included a dessert. Ever since, the American food industry has put sugar and sweeteners — glucose, dextrose, fructose, sucrose, corn syrup — into every processed food it makes. The result, says Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is that 42% of children and 50% of adults are diabetic because of this “mass poisoning of our nation.”
The head of the Children’s Health Defense and an independent candidate for president, RFK Jr. says our health is being undermined by food industry products that have caused 175 new chronic health conditions — Crohn’s disease, lupus, gluten-intolerance, ADHD. Meanwhile the NIH and Big Pharma fund mutually beneficial new drugs for all the resulting sicknesses. So, a one-two punch of food products stuffed with sugar, additives and toxins that compromise our health, and drugs offered to address all the diseases that follow. A win-win for industry. A loss for our health.
“We’re being mass poisoned by a food industry that is highly subsidized and that owns Congress,” he said in a recent interview. “We’re the only country in the world that allows public funding for food to go to soft drinks. So, it’s 10% of food stamps are going to sugar water that is designed to make you diabetic.” Furthermore, he said, over 90% of Medicare bills are going towards treating chronic disease, a health epidemic that Kennedy described as “gravy trains for pharma.”
Not only is the government a co-conspirator in this corrupt scheme, but on Superbowl Sunday, President Biden took to twitter to rail about “shrinkflation,” his excuse for why most of us can’t afford what we used to be able to, when actually it’s a rational business decision to address rising costs. Anyway, after declining to do an interview at Superbowl half-time — see his disastrous presser after being accused of being an addled old man with a faulty memory — he appeared folksy and healthy even to tell us that we need to eat more, not less, Oreos, Doritas, and his favorite, ice cream.
“Give me a break,” Biden concluded. “It’s a rip off. The American people are tired of being played for suckers. I’m calling on companies to put a stop to this.”
How much better it would have been if the president had called on American “food” companies to stop making snacks that are killing us and start offering fresh food — veggies, fruits, beans, rice, lean meats — or even healthier snacks that can save us.
We have known since 1931, when German biochemist Otto Warburg won a Nobel Prize, that cancer feeds on sugar. Dr. Patrick Quillin, once Director of Nutrition for Cancer Treatment Centers of America, said cancerous tumors absorb glucose at 10-12 times the rate of normal healthy cells. “Trying to beat cancer while eating a diet that constantly raises blood glucose is like trying to put out a forest fire while somebody’s throwing gasoline on the trees,” he added. And yet the “food industry” seems determined, as RFK Jr said, to make us diabetic by putting sweeteners — corn syrup, fructose, dextrose, agave — in every processed food they manufacture — from salad dressing to canned soups, compromising your gut health or even your hormones.
Consider:
Recent studies found that most of the honey found in American grocery stories is actually laced with high fructose corn syrup. A study conducted by Brazilian scientists found that excessive amounts of fructose develop disturbances in the autonomic nervous, cardiovascular, and metabolic systems at an early age, increasing the risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity in adulthood.
Instead of addressing the unhealthy nature of its popular Oreos cookies, the parent company, Mondelez International, is now partnering with PFLAG, formerly the national Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays network. To make rainbow cookies more appealing to drag queens? Woke over health.
Athletes are promoting many unhealthy food options to their fans. Why star athletes need more money is a mystery to me. A decade ago, a study published in the journal Pediatrics by researchers at Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Duke found 79% of food products endorsed by star athletes were unhealthy. All the calories from more than 90% of advertised beverages came from added sugar. Then, the leaders for helping the food industry push its unhealthy burgers, pizza, soda, and cookies on sports fans were football’s Peyton Manning, basketball’s LeBron James and tennis champion Serena Williams. There was a brief outcry — some wondered if they were targeting black audiences — and then, nothing changed.
Just when you thought it hopeless to try to change food industry offerings, Hollywood’s celebrities are coming to the rescue. Turns out that Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs so popular with the glitterati are driving consumers away from high-caloric sugary foods. A recent study from Morgan Stanley projects that over the next 10 years, 7% of the US population — 24 million people — could be taking these drugs, consuming 20% fewer calories and driving consumption of soda, baked goods and salty snacks down by 3%. Walmart’s US-based CEO John Furner said it’s still early days for Ozempic, but “we definitely do see a slight change compared to the total population, we do see a slight pullback — less units, slightly less calories.”
Biden may be clueless but the food industry is alert to the trend. And so are those who argue, like Blake Livingood, that wellness is better for us than meds, or junk foods.
Here’s to those healthy alternatives. Bon Appetit.
Update: A new study has found that four out of five Americans are being exposed to a pesticide in their Cheerios and Quaker Oats. The study —published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology — examined urine samples between 2017 and 2023, and found that concentrations of chlormequat in patients’ urine increased by more than 20% during that time, from 69% in 2017 to 90% in 2023, suggesting consumer exposure is on the rise. The EPA banned this pesticide in food until 2018, and increased the amount in 2020.
Which only demonstrates that we need to take responsibility for our own food intake. Industry and government are not going to save us. Stay safe.
Insightful. Hadn’t heard the Kissinger line before — bet all those farmers protesting in Europe would agree with him. Sounds like you did a wonderful job raising your kids to be mindful of their food. I was a major sweets eater when young, a bit healthier now. Bet they’ll come around too.
This is an excellent topic! I think it was Kissinger who said "Control the food, control the people." When my two children were in their tweens, I asked them to read the labels of foods they would eat, and asked if they knew what the ingredient was, and/or if they could even pronounce it. I told them if you can't pronounce it, you probably don't know what it is, then maybe it's not the best idea to consume it. Better yet, eat something without a label, like an apple or grapes. But, an apple isn't cool like the fruit roll ups other kids had, and I hate to admit that I bought them fruit roll ups too.