Healthy foods are actually cheaper than popular manufactured foods

Wednesday, July 06, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: health foods, nutrition, manufactured foods

After sharing health information with people, I'll hear some of them say things like "Okay, I get it, but it's too expensive!" They're meanwhile sipping a Starbuck's coffee and driving a brand new car, and telling me that it's too expensive to buy a $29 bottle of vitamins, or superfood supplements, or something else that would do them a world of good.

It makes you wonder, where are people's priorities today? People are reluctant to invest money in their own health, and I find that absolutely astounding. Many of these very same people are buying $300,000 homes, and spending several thousand dollars per month on house payments. Perhaps it's just $500 to $1000 per month for apartment payments, but that's still a big chunk of cash.

Then of course, they have their car payment on top of that, adding another two to four hundred dollars per month easily. They've also got their insurance payment, their monthly restaurant bill, and clothing bills. All the entertainment -- albums, concerts, movies, and Starbuck's coffee. They still say, "But I can't afford to be healthy. Mike, you're talking about all these things, but I can't buy any of it! I'm living in poverty. I don't have an extra dollar." I tell them, "You've got enough food to feed yourself pretty well. You’ve got enough money to buy all that food - you can afford good nutrition."

Good nutrition is less expensive than junk nutrition

Like most people, you're probably spending money right now on bad nutrition. I can show people how to spend less money on groceries that are better for them than the highly processed, high-markup brand name foods they're spending a fortune on (and that are giving them chronic disease and obesity). I can show people how to actually save money. With the money saved, they can buy high-density superfood supplements, whole food concentrates, high end herbs and vitamins, or other nutritional supplements. Spending the same money that you're spending today, I can show you how to be a heck of a lot healthier.

Brand-name rip-off foods

The processed foods, the popular brand name foods, are the most expensive of all. These deliver the least nutrition for your dollar. If you buy anything in a pretty box, anything that's been processed, anything that's been advertised on television or something that comes with a coupon, you have been conned. You are getting ripped off. Most foods that have coupons are so overpriced to begin with that the food manufacturer is still making money even after you redeem the coupon. If you really want poor nutrition and want to waste a lot of money on foods that aren't doing anything for you health-wise, then buy all the groceries that are advertised. Buy all the stuff that other Americans and people around the world who don't know anything about health tend to buy.

Observe people and learn

When you go into a grocery store, observe people: watch who buys what, how healthy or diseased they look and what economic status you think they have. You will begin to notice some interesting patterns.

One is that those who seem to be having the most financial trouble are buying the foods with the highest markup. They are unable to make good decisions about what foods offer nutritional value. They buy things like instant macaroni and cheese, dinner mixes, potato chips, and carbonated soft drink beverages. They buy foods that are nutritionally worthless, but cost a lot of money. You can go to any grocery store and observe this yourself.

At the same time, you'll notice that people who tend to be healthy, who seem to be aware of what's going on around them, who look intelligent, whose eyes light up, who have some energy evident in the way they hold their bodies and in the way they interact with others around them -- these people are intelligent shoppers. In their carts, you'll notice they have lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of raw food ingredients, and you'll see that they tend to buy things in bulk. They'll buy bulk ingredients like brown rice, beans, or legumes. They actually pay attention to what they're buying by reading the ingredients labels, for example.

Contrast this to the everyday grocery shoppers: these are the everyday people who don’t really pay attention to nutrition. They don't make good choices. They basically pull things off the shelves that they've seen on television. They choose foods based on what they've been told to buy through promotional advertisements, public relations, and other efforts, including food lobbying.

Lobbying is how the USDA came up with the new "Food Guide Pyramid," by the way. It's pretty much the "Drink More Milk" pyramid. It was heavily influenced by the dairy industry. Look at how much milk it says we should drink now. Apparently, all humans are supposed to eat from cows utters, which is rather interesting, given that there is no nutritional requirement for any human being to eat from any cow.

The everyday shoppers who buy all of this garbage that's been advertised are chronically diseased. You can see it at a remarkably young age. Even when they're teenagers, you can see the disease starting to progress. If these people happen to be in their 30s, 40s, or even their 50s and beyond, you can see the progression of this disease.

I don't want to be judgmental in saying it, but it is sometimes painful to look at these people. Sometimes I just feel so much compassion for them, I want to help them. But in many ways, most of them aren't ready to be helped. It's also a bit frightening, if you think about what's going on in their bodies. All of this degeneration, this lack of flow, and stagnation that's happening in their bodies... the stress on the organs: the pancreas, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys, the heart. You look in their shopping cart and think, "Oh my God! How can these people buy this stuff?"

Your health reflects your grocery cart

A person's external health is a perfect reflection of what their body is experiencing. It's the same vibration, the same energy, coming from their face, their eyes, their skin, their posture. It’s all reflected right there in that grocery cart, with the foods and beverages they've chosen. Of course, it's all brand-name stuff, lots of processed meat, and frozen pizzas. Carbonated soft drink beverages are almost always in the cart. Usually, there's some form of ice cream, cookies, or crackers with hydrogenated oils. There's typically lots of cheese, and there's always a gallon of milk in there, it seems.

Sometimes there's some fruit punch, or some of those other garbage fruit drinks. There's always lots of sugar, white flour, and instant foods like macaroni and cheese and the microwaveable TV dinners. There are usually lots of fried foods as well.

I look at this and find it quite disturbing. Sometimes I try to shop off-hours, so I don't see what other people are buying. I just want to ask these people, "Do you know what you're doing here?" Sometimes when they're with children, then I go a little bit crazy, just in my own head. I think, "These poor kids." I bet they've been diagnosed with ADHD and the kid's suffering from obesity here. Sometimes it’s just a 7 or 8-year-old girl who’s overweight. The kids are climbing all over the parents, and you can tell they've got behavioral challenges. You look in their carts, and sure enough, all the foods have MSG and artificial food coloring. All of these chemical additives are in these foods.

Sometimes, I look in people's carts and I can't find one thing in there that's natural. There's not one thing in there that's from nature, nothing that's healthy. There’s not even a bottle of water in there. There’s not one fruit, vegetable, nut or seed.

Your grocery receipt tells your health future

I wish I had some way to show these people a flashcard and they would instantly just get it. They would get the idea that all of that disease they're experiencing is directly a result of these foods in their grocery cart. It is cause and effect. "A" causes "B." If you buy and eat those groceries, you're going to have these diseases. I'm talking about all the big ones: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, depression, bowel disorders, and Alzheimer's disease. All the common diseases begin with the foods, right there in the shopping cart.

However, if you take a family like this and sit down to have a conversation with them, talking to them about the importance of nutritional supplements to get high-density nutrition, they will tell you, "We can't afford it." What do you mean you can't afford it? You just spent $150 on garbage food! You can't afford to feed your kids decent nutrition, and give them one multivitamin a day, one healthy oil capsule a day? They'll say "Nope, can't afford it. We just spent all our money on groceries."

You can't even GIVE them good nutrition

You know what's even crazier? If you were to actually give that family the nutritional supplements they need, just flat out give it to them, they wouldn't even take them. Why? Most likely because it doesn't taste like a cookie. It's not part of their pattern. The only way to get a family like that to actually eat something that's nutritious is to force it into the foods that they're buying anyway.

You'd have to sell macaroni and cheese with spirulina powder. Of course, then it would be green and they wouldn't want that. You'd have to have margarine with cod liver oil. Then again, it would be expensive. They wouldn't buy that; they would buy the cheaper margarine, the one that's more heavily advertised, because it's cheaper to manufacture and cheaper for the consumer. That's what they're going to buy.

It really becomes difficult to try to get good nutrition into the bodies of people who refuse to understand what nutrition can do for them. They refuse to accept information even from those who are trying to help them. They refuse to make any changes in their life whatsoever that require effort, that require breaking their existing pattern of disease, malnutrition, and mass consumption of sugary foods, pizzas, processed meats, and other similar disease-promoting items.

Teach the nation about nutrition

Here's the big challenge in this country and around the world in all industrialized nations. The big challenge is: How do you teach a population to make healthy food choices? How do you really accomplish that?

Our society is paying an enormous price, probably in the tens of billions of dollars each year, just from the fact that people aren't healthy. Actually, it's got to be over $100 billion by the time you add up the loss of life, the medical costs, the loss of quality of life (not just the longevity but quality of life), the loss of work productivity, the loss of good minds -- because nervous systems degenerate when people start consuming these foods. So even though you may have someone who lives to be 65, they might live the last 30 years of their life in a state of perpetual confusion because they've been consuming all of these foods that deplete the nutrients that protect the nervous system. The cost is tremendous. It's probably the biggest cost facing society right now. It far exceeds the cost of energy in our society. It adds up to more than what we spend on oil.

Government bureaucrats teach nothing

So how do you teach this population how to make healthy food choices? This is what the USDA has been pretending to do for many decades. They first pretended to do that with the old version of the "Food Guide Pyramid," which was basically an advertisement for the grain industry. It said, "Everybody eat more grains!" And people did, and now we're all diseased.

So they came up with a new one in the Spring of 2005, and the new one is basically the "Milk Pyramid." It's the "Milk and Meat Pyramid." There are still quite a lot of grains thrown in there too. Of course, this remains useless to people. It's less useful than the old one, because they took out all the pictures of food for some reason. Now it's just this giant rainbow with a person running up the stairs on one side.

A rainbow? What does this mean for people? Apparently you have to actually log onto a website to get your food pyramid, because there are 12 different food pyramids now. Do you think all these families that claim to have no money, that are living in poverty, are going to log on? You think they've got a couple of PCs sitting around the house, or a Mac? Are they just going to log on and print this out on their color laser printer? Is that what the USDA thinks they're going to do?

Let's suppose they somehow manage to do that. Well, what advice do they actually get? They’re told, "Drink more milk! Eat more meat!" In fact, the whole new Food Guide Pyramid can basically be summed up in four words: Eat more of everything. That is the USDA's message. That's right, we as Americans are basically supposed to eat more meat, drink more milk, eat more grains. Then somewhere in the fine print, it says, "Know your limits." Oh, like Americans know their limits. If we knew our limits, we wouldn't be diseased right now. We wouldn't be obese, and two-thirds of the population wouldn’t be overweight.

End the food politics corruption

Let's talk about what limits there should be. I say there should be limits on how much influence the food industry has over this pyramid, because it has the fingerprints of big food corporations all over it. That's why the message is "Eat more of everything". The USDA does not have the courage to say "eat less" of anything. They won't even tell you, "Eat less sugar." Can you believe that?

What kind of food guide pyramid is that? It's the kind of pyramid that you get when there's a lot of payola going on, when there's a lot of under-the-table money being handed out. When there's a lot of corruption, you get a food guide pyramid like we have today. It's basically saying, "Eat more of everything, eat less of nothing."

Given that we're already overweight and obese, and given that our population already cannot make good decisions about how to buy nutritious foods, how is that message supposed to improve things? "Eat more of everything, eat less of nothing, drink more milk, and eat more meat." How is this supposed to make people healthier?

I'm going to make a wild prediction here. Five years down the road, as this silly pyramid continues to be propagated around the country and taught to schoolchildren, people are going to get even more diseased. How's that for a prediction? Sad but true. This is not going to solve the nutrition problem in this country. You'll also notice that the Food Guide Pyramid doesn't really tell people to consume healthy nuts, healthy oils, and fish oils. It mentions it in the fine print somewhere, but it's not a prominent part of the message, although it should be. The main message is all about milk.

What we need: an Honest Food Guide

What we really need to do is get all the big food company people, all the USDA corruption people, and all the consumers who really don't want to make good decisions about food, and we should let them have their own little country. They can go off and do whatever they want. In the meantime, here in the US, or in any industrialized nation, we should have an honest food guide, don't you think? An honest food guide.

In fact, I've come up with one called, "The Honest Food Guide", found on HonestFoodGuide.org. We should have our own system, where we actually teach people how to be healthy. Then we should have our own society, where our children aren't labeled ADHD, where they don't get doped up on heavy narcotics just to attend school, where people live long lives and don't have huge medical bills, and where we don't have corruption and collusion between the USDA and the food companies that just want to sell overpriced, low nutritional density foods to a population in order to make money.

In such a nation, we can actually do some of the important stuff for humanity. We can focus on reforming education, teaching our children how to be creative leaders in the world, teaching them how to be real contributors to what's important for humanity. We can help them explore the arts and philosophy, help them be healthier and more spiritual if that's a path they choose. Perhaps they can contribute to science, mathematics, or real medicine, instead of this garbage that passes today as "scientific medicine."

In such a society, we can do some amazing things. But it can only start from a foundation of outstanding nutrition. We have to have healthy nervous systems in our population if we're going to do these great things as a civilization. Today, we're not even close to that. Today, we're still poisoning our population through these dangerous foods. We’ve got these metabolic disruptors all in the food supply. I've written about this at great length in the book "Grocery Warning", which is found at www.truthpublishing.com. I've covered all of these dangerous ingredients in detail.

We've crippled our entire population

It's a shame, because as human beings we're capable of so much, yet we actually achieve so little, as a nation, and as a world. Our people don't even come close to achieving their full potential. They say we only use 10 percent of our brains. That's on a good day, you know? You get people who are buying these brand name foods, and probably 99 percent of their neurons are in stasis, because they're not really connecting any more. They're all getting diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer's. You've got kids that can't even learn. That should be the most natural thing in the world; kids should learn automatically. If they can't learn, there's something wrong with the food.

I say we teach people how to really make healthy food choices. Let's have an honest food guide that we can get into their hands, which can really show them the foods that cause disease and the foods that promote health.

Better yet, let's have this created by somebody who has no ties whatsoever to the food industry. That would be somebody like me, although it doesn't have to be me. Believe me, I don't want this to be about me. I want this to be about the nutrition. Somebody needs to do this, and I just didn't see anybody doing it.

People need to be able to make good choices. They need to actually have a list of things that they should eat less of, since the USDA doesn't have the honesty or the ethics to say, "Eat less" of anything. But I'm willing to say it:

You should consume less red meat, less milk and dairy products, less refined sugar, less refined and milled wheat, and less salt. You should eat no monosodium glutamate, no chemical taste enhancers, no excitotoxins, no artificial chemical sweeteners, no artificial colors, nothing that's been processed, refined, or packaged. You should eat nothing containing sodium nitrite, and nothing that's been smoked, such as smoked meats. You should eat nothing that's heavily advertised, or sold with seductive marketing practices, and so on. For the complete list, check out http://www.honestfoodguide.org, and see for yourself.

Eat more natural, healthy foods

Now, what should we eat more of? Well, we should eat more of the things that promote health. How's that for an incredibly unique idea?! Again, I'm not trying to take credit for this, as I'm not the first one to think of this by any means. There are many other people (on whom I've based my work) who deserve credit for this.

What should we eat more of? The things that promote health, such as raw vegetables and raw fruits. Blanched or cooked vegetables are fine too. I'm just talking about things from nature -- the root vegetables, nuts, seeds, healthy oils, sea vegetables. If you're going to eat meat, it should be organic, free range meat, and only in strictly limited quantities. Free range eggs are good. They’re much better than eggs from the standard imprisoned chickens that we get in the common grocery stores.

We should eat more blueberries and all of these incredibly potent berries. We should eat more foods of all the different colors -- purple eggplants, orange carrots, yellow onions, red tomatoes, green peppers. We should just eat the colors of the rainbow in their natural form, because these colors are potent disease-fighting phytonutrients.

We should eat sunshine, actually. We should consume it into our skin. We should consume more water. We should get more fruits. We should get avocados, high fiber products, and whole grains. These are the things we should consume if we wish to be healthy.

And to really get your nutrition and be the healthiest you can be, you should eat superfoods. High density, high nutrition supplements based on whole foods or whole food powders. These are products based on spirulina, chlorella, blueberry powder, spinach powder, or kale powder. Broccoli sprouts are fantastic, and they provide high-density nutrition. These are the kinds of things that people should consume if they wish to be healthy.

Then again a lot of people will say, "I can't afford it." Yeah, I guess not -- never mind. It is a lot cheaper just to eat all that garbage, and spend half a million dollars on medical bills in your last 14 days of life because you need heart bypass surgery, chemotherapy, some kind of organ transplant, and lots of intensive medical care before you pass away. Yeah, you're right. That's a cheaper way to do it. No need to spend an extra dollar on real food from nature instead of a discounted 2-liter bottle of soda.