Three-fourths of Americans obese or overweight by 2020, says alarming report

Sunday, October 10, 2010 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: obese, Americans, health news

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(NaturalNews) America is already on the verge of drowning in sick-care bankruptcy, but the situation is about to get even worse. According to a new study released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, three-fourths of Americans will be obese or overweight by 2020. That puts America in first place for the world competition to see which nation can create the most obese population.

We're number one!

Seriously, according to the research, America is No. 1 on the world obesity rankings, meaning a higher percentage of the U.S. population is obese (or overweight) than in any other country in the world.

Not surprisingly, why this is happening brings up all sorts of different explanations ranging from entirely valid to completely bizarre. But the simple truth of the situation is that Americans are fat because of these three simple reasons:

Reason #1) We don't get much exercise.
Reason #2) We eat too much food.
Reason #3) The food we eat is mostly processed dead food of marginal nutritional value.

These three reasons largely explain why America has become the fattest nation in the world.

Why do we eat so much junk food?

Knowing this, the next question seems obvious: WHY do we eat so much junk food? The answer may seem complex, but it really isn't. Americans eat junk food because that's what's available and that's what they're told to eat by their television sets.

You can buy junk foods at any convenience store, gas station or vending machine in America. But getting something that's actually healthy for you is far more challenging. Most people opt for the quick, easy and cheap solution: Drive-through burgers or genetically modified tacos! Why bother with real food when factory-made imitation food is so much cheaper (and more convenient)?

Why don't we get much exercise?

The sad, simple answer is that most Americans are just flat-out sedentary. A recent study revealed that an astonishing 95% of Americans never do anything strenuous -- ever! The people you see in the gyms or jogging in public are the 5% who actually engage in some form of exercise.

The other 95% of Americans just do don't much in terms of physical activity, yet at the same time Americans tend to eat huge meal portions that would be considered obscene in many other countries. When I lived in South America, for example, I quickly learned that South American meal portions are about one-fourth the size of a typical North American meal portion (in terms of what restaurants serve you, anyway). A typical one-person meal at a family Mexican restaurant in the United States, in other words, would feed a family of four in Ecuador.

This combination of eating larger meals while avoiding most exercise is the "perfect storm" for exploding obesity. It is accelerated even more by the lack of nutritional density in the food people do choose to eat.

The nutritional depleted foods we eat

Most foods consumed by Americans are heavily processed, factory-made foods. Just check out the grocery carts of the average American shopper -- they're loaded up with the most heavily processed, chemically adulterated imitation food products you can possibly imagine. And there's a not-so-surprising correlation between the health of the person shopping and the quality of the foods in their cart. Healthy people shop primarily for fresh produce and food staples like legumes and beans.

The least healthy people are the ones purchasing canned soups, dinner "helper" products, macaroni and cheese, sweet pastries, cow's milk, processed meats and cheeses. Not surprisingly, these are the same people who end up in the drive-thru pharmacies, buying their latest round of diabetes drugs. They're also the same ones driving up your health care costs by destroying their own health and racking up billions of dollars in disease maintenance costs.

Think about it: When people buy and eat processed foods, they are not only destroying their own health; they're passing along the sick-care costs to all the other people who share the cost burden of either private health insurance, Medicaid or Medicare. When a person buys a 99 cent hamburger, they may actually be generating five dollars in future health care costs to be paid by all the rest of us.

That's one reason why obesity is bankrupting America. Many of the junk food eaters seem to think someone else is going to pay for their disease. Someone else is going to fix the broken health care system. Someone else is going to find a cure someday. So why bother changing their own dietary habits anyway?

Too many people dismiss their own role in creating the very disease and bankruptcy from which they're suffering. This is happening at both the personal level and the national level. When America as a nation has its food supply regulated by a corrupt, criminal agency called the FDA that actively censors the truth about healing foods which prevent disease -- and then the same country asks "Why are our people so diseased?" -- you gotta just shake your head in disbelief.

America is obese and diseased precisely because that's the kind of outcome you'd naturally expect when you imprison the herbalists, shut down the nutritional supplement companies and ban honest health claims about healthy food products while allowing toxic chemicals and GMOs into the food supply. The FDA sure deserves a round of applause here, eh?

And then when people actually do get sick, instead of teaching them how to be well, the government pushes an agenda of dangerous chemical medications and vaccine injections that only further compromise health (while driving up health care costs even more).

When companies can sell infant formula made with over 50% sugar (https://www.naturalnews.com/029863_Similac_in...) and state food stamp programs actually cover such products by making them free to low-income mothers, then of course you're going to end up raising a generation of obese diabetics!

This isn't rocket science, folks. If you feed a whole generation of people junk foods, liquid sugars (HFCS) and heavily processed foods while promoting chemicals and pharmaceuticals as the answer to health care, you cannot possibly get any result other than widespread obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease. It's no coincidence that's exactly what we see in America today. The answer is so simple that even a fifth grade could figure it out.

We must choose between the People or the corporations

If America really wants to get healthy, it's not a difficult thing. Just put a dozen natural health and nutrition advocates in charge of regulating food, drugs and personal care products. We would clean house and put a whole slew of junk food companies out of business, and then we would restore health freedom to natural product companies so they could communicate the truth about how their products can help people prevent disease.

Make no mistake: The American people can never be healthy if Big Pharma and the junk food companies stay in business as they operate today. You literally have to bankrupt all the toxic product industries (or force them to shift to completely different products) in order to save America from the medical bankruptcy that now seems inevitable.

But these toxic product industries are very powerful and very influential. They fund political election campaigns and hire armies of lobbyists to get things passed like the recent health care reforms that effectively lock in a Big Pharma monopoly for decades to come. Disease pays big bucks to these powerful corporations, and they're not about to see Americans get healthier if that would eat into their profits.

It would quite literally take some sort of temporary dictator in America to clean house and shut down all the consumer product companies that are right now causing widespread obesity and disease. Although I don't support dictatorships, if such a dictator did exist and he really wanted to improve the health of the American people, he would have to radically reform or force the shutting down of companies like Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Pepsico. All the top pharmaceutical companies would be next: Merck, Pfizer, GSK, Astrazeneca, etc.

If you shut down all these companies, seized their products, halted their operations and arrested and prosecuted their top executives for their various crimes against the People, then you might have a shot at improving the long-term health of the American people. Note carefully that this is almost exactly what the FTC and FDA do right now against natural product companies, so this kind of action actually takes place quite regularly (although it's directed at the wrong companies). This isn't "something that would never happening in America." It's happening right now! (https://www.naturalnews.com/019366.html)

It's all just a matter of national priorities. If America's politicians would rather protect the health of the profits of giant drug companies and food conglomerates than the health of the working people, then they should just keep doing what they're already doing... it's working beautifully! But if they actually want to help Americans get healthy and stay healthy -- while saving literally trillions of dollars in long-term health care costs -- they've got to be willing to put these toxic product companies out of business for good while promoting sensible nutrition and exercise programs through public education campaigns.

In other words, the United States government needs to be doing what NaturalNews.com is already doing: Educating people about nutrition, promoting personal health responsibility, teaching disease prevention and fitness.

Maybe one day they'll figure out that the way to have a healthy nation is to start with creating healthy people.