The answer isn't complicated: people are consuming a record volume of refined, processed foods that exhibit three critical properties:
1) They are nutritionally deplete. This is especially true of all refined grains like white flour, white rice, instant oats, and other similar items. They've all had their natural oils, fiber, vitamins and minerals stripped during the manufacturing process.
2) They are made with ingredients that cause cancer, diabetes, brain damage and other disorders. These ingredients are called metabolic disruptors. They include sodium nitrite, hydrogenated oils (found in virtually all margarine products, shortening products and baked cookies or crackers), high fructose corn syrup (found in most soft drinks), aspartame (found in most diet foods and drinks), monosodium glutamate (a proven excitotoxin), homogenized milk fats and other similar ingredients. These ingredients are used to add color or flavor to foods, yet they directly promote chronic, deadly diseases in the human body.
3) They are dead. Simply put, all processed foods have had the life cooked out of them. They barely resemble foods from nature. They've been overprocessed, overcooked, preserved with chemicals, pasteurized, homogenized, and possibly even irradiated. These are no longer the foods the human body needs, they are "products" that generate revenues for food manufacturers while adding absolutely nothing to the nutritional foundation of consumers.
The goals of Canada's Heart and Stroke Foundation closely mirror the goals of the Consumer Wellness Research Center, which fights for radical changes in food laws and FDA regulations that would protect consumers, not corporate profits. The CWRC wants to ban all hydrogenated oils, require disease warning labels on all foods made with sugar or corn syrup, ban the use of aspartame, ban the sales of junk foods in our nation's schools, and initiate other positive changes to protect the public health. These changes are strongly resisted by the FDA, USDA and food manufacturers in the United States for no other reason than they are corrupt organizations who have literally conspired to generate massive corporate profits at the expense of public health. The fact that known cancer-causing ingredients such as sodium nitrite are even allowed in our foods is proof that these agencies are not interested in protecting the public. The FDA, in particular, would much rather see the U.S. public in a state of chronic disease, since that generates enormous profits for the pharmaceutical companies the FDA strongly favors. (If people aren't sick, they don't need drugs, get it?)
Once again, thumbs up to Canada for stating the obvious: our food is making us chronically ill. As an American, I'm ashamed that my own country can't find the courage to say this. Too often, we blame Canada, and yet it's Canada that has it right. You see, only Canada can see this issue clearly, without the influence and corruption present in the United States. The U.S. is the world's largest exporter of disease and death thanks to its junk food, soft drink and sugar industries, and when you have so much money being generated by exporting disease, you're very unlikely to hear the unbiased truth locally. Our government policies are designed to protect big business (i.e. big campaign donors) and not the health of the public.
But the people are fighting back. Through organizations like the CWRC, people are raising their voices about the deadly nature of our food supply. If our groceries are killing us, maybe it's time we started questioning what's going into those foods in the first place. And the closer you look, the worse the picture gets. The last thing U.S. food companies want is for people to start asking questions about where their food comes from and what's in it. Those are precisely the questions I intend to keep asking right here.