The U.S. is a nation of disease treatment, not prevention

Monday, November 03, 2003 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: processed foods, disease prevention, refined white flour

There's not much money in preventing disease, but there's a fortune to be made in treating it. Birth defects like these neural tube defects cost just pennies to prevent (folic acid is dirt cheap), but babies that are born with defects create hundred of thousands of dollars in revenues for hospitals, surgeons and pharmaceutical companies. It sounds brash, perhaps, but it's economic reality.

That may be one reason why so little has been done in the United States to try to prevent disease. Virtually every modern disease now threatening our population -- cancer, diabetes, heart disease, depression and more -- has a nutritional basis... meaning that each is preventable through dietary changes alone.

In reality, the problem isn't that we haven't been putting folic acid into flour, the problem is that we're stripping out all the folic acid in the first place. In the United States, people love to buy and eat foods that have been stripped of the majority of their natural nutrition. The milling process removes virtually everything that's good for you, leaving only empty calories. White flour, sugar, corn syrup... it's all the same disease-promoting stuff after it leaves the mill.

Only whole grains are healthy grains. Whole grains contain the bran, the fiber, the oils, the vitamins and the minerals that promote human health. Instead of debating over what isolated nutrients we should put back into the foods sold at grocery stores why don't we stop stripping them out in the first place?

You already know the answer, of course: because healthy food has limited shelf life. And that makes it expensive for consumers and unprofitable for food producers. Most people won't buy food that's good for them for the simple reason that it costs more than healthy food.

So they'll save fifty cents right now by buying the cheap, processed food, and they'll spend a hundred thousand dollars on hospital bills ten years later as a result. Of course, few people connect the two events. Most people are short-term thinkers.

In addition, as I'm sure you'll agree, many people just don't know any better. That's why Internet education efforts are so critical to helping people get healthy. Keep reading, keep learning. And spread the word to help others.