Bad Food + Bad Habits = Bad Health. Any Questions?

A recent report from an American Stroke Association conference tells us that strokes are rising dramatically among young and middle-aged Americans while dropping in older people, a sign that the obesity epidemic may be starting to shift the age burden of the disease.

The numbers improved for people over 65. Strokes dropped 25 percent, but still represent the highest numbers at 300 per 10,000 hospitalizations. For males 15 to 34, there were about 15 stroke cases per 10,000, and for girls and women in that age group there were about 4 per 10,000.

I hesitate to present these numbers here because admittedly they look pretty small. And if people look at the numbers as small it is doubtful they will see any urgency in changing their habits.

Health professionals have been pointing out the causes of stroke for years as bad food and lack of exercise. In the past we have accepted the higher chance of stroke as a part of the aging process, brought on by years of high calorie and high cholesterol intake coupled with an increasing lack of exercise. Then we are forced to rely on medical science to correct our abuse.

Now, we discover we are falling victim to these bad habits at a much younger age. What has changed? Fifty years ago our youth ate better quality food and got more exercise. Today’s youth eat more processed foods and are less physically challenged.

How can we be aware of the causes of stroke and yet do nothing to prevent it? Certainly, the family dynamic has changed over the past fifty years. We are seeing an increase in the number of single-parent homes which results in a decline in home cooked meals and thus convenience foods are on the increase and our schools no longer push physical activity as part of their regular curriculum.

Convenience food is not inherently dangerous to our health. It’s the manner in which it is processed. A large portion of processed food comes from fast food restaurants who, despite their claims of making a healthier product, continue to serve us meat that has been so fully injected with antibiotics and growth hormones that there is no way these chemicals are not finding their way into our bodies. Vegetables found in grocery stores, if we eat them, are genetically modified to make them bigger and more resistant to the heavy use of pesticides. Then they are injected or sprayed with stabilizers to give them a longer shelf life and picked before their time to ‘ripen’ on the long trip to the grocery store. All of these factors lessen their natural ability to develop the nutrients we think we are getting.

Is the use of all of these chemicals and processes connected to our increasing waistlines and poor health? No one seems to be able to conclusively connect those dots and corporate agriculture is certainly not going out of their way to find out. It would cut into their profits.

Additional Side Effects

1 - Health costs continue to rise for everyone because not enough people are keeping themselves healthy.

2 - CAFO’s – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations – increasing in size and number because people eat meat,

• pollute adjacent streams due to the large amount of concentrated effluent,
• inject large amounts of antibiotics and pesticides into our food supply due to overcrowding at these facilities,
• support environmental degradation through growing feed which uses intensive methods which uses excessive fertilizer and pesticides.

3 - Processed food adds about three-fourths of the salt we eat, especially tomato sauce, soups, condiments and canned foods.

The bottom line is that corporate profits continue to increase, our waistlines continue to increase, environmental pollution continues to increase, our health decreases, our life-expectancy decreases.

In my opinion, this formula is a very poor substitute for quality of life. Is convenience really a good reason for this to continue?

If we expect to reverse the spread of stroke we need to grow more of our own food, eat less meat and more vegetables, and exercise more. All of this is within our power and everyone will benefit from it.