They drink a lot of cow's milk, which actually has poor nutrition for human beings given that it is designed for baby cows, not baby humans. They eat a lot of red meat, which contains heart-damaging saturated animal fats and lacks fiber. They take cheap vitamins that offer synthetic forms of vitamins and minerals rather than natural, organic forms. People also engage in lifestyle habits that deplete the vitamins and minerals they've managed to absorb from their foods. These habits include the consumption of caffeine, soft drinks, tobacco, white flour, added sugars, and other ingredients that actually strip nutrients away from your body.
To top it off, they're subjected to chronic stress conditions like work stress, environmental stress (breathing polluted air, drinking polluted water), relationship stress, lack of sleep, lack of sunlight, and so on. This chronic stress actually accelerates the depletion of nutrients in the body, leaving people in a deeper state of nutritional deficiency.
So by the time you're done with all of that, the average American has only a fraction of the nutrition they actually need for optimum health. And that means they are operating at far less than the health potential their body was designed for. If they were able to get better nutrition and avoid the nutrient depleting substances in their foods, imagine what state of health they could achieve. Imagine how good their blood chemistry would be, the level of energy they would have on a daily basis, how healthy they would be and how long a life they would live free of chronic pain and free of chronic disease. This is the kind of life that you can achieve with nutrition. And it is exactly the life that I'm leading right now through a proven strategy of nutrition and physical exercise.
So if you put all this together, you realize that the standard American diet is a diet of chronic disease and death. The diet that most people are following today in modern societies is a diet that will kill them much sooner with far higher health care costs and with far lower quality of life than if they were able to eat simpler foods -- unprocessed, non-manufactured, and unrefined. Our diet is the number one cause of disease in this country. The American food supply is what's killing us, not our genes or bad luck (as many doctors would have you mistakenly believe).
As a side note to all of this, it's interesting to look at the companies that produce white flour and how they ship that white flour to cereal companies, bread companies and other commercial users of the product. You may know that if you're in the food business, it's difficult to ship food without having it infested by various pests. There are mice, rats and insects that want to eat your food as it is being transported.
But when companies ship refined white flour in large 50 lb. bags, they don't have to use any insecticide whatsoever. That's because if an insect gets into the bag of white flour and starts eating it, that insect will die from consuming it. White flour is a natural insecticide because it kills any insect that attempts to live off of it.
So by the time the truck arrives at its destination, which might be a cereal company, a bread company or some kind of food producer, if there were ants or crickets or other insects that got into the truck when it left the factory, all those insects will be dead by the time it arrives. Why did they die? They were eating the white flour.
You can try this experiment yourself by buying some white flour, putting it in a bowl and throwing some ants and crickets in with it. Give them a little bit of water, just so they don't die from dehydration, and then find out how long they live. You'll find they won't live very long at all.
And yet, many Americans are attempting to live off white flour because they consume it at every single meal in alarming quantities. Then they wonder why they suffer from chronic disease. The fact is that white flour will (slowly) kill you. It will cause nutritional deficiencies and it will ultimately put you in a state of chronic disease that could easily be avoided by consuming whole grain flour and getting outstanding nutrition rather than consuming processed grains.
So don't make the mistake of thinking that nutrition simply means calories. Often, around the world, when you hear the term 'malnutrition', you're shown images of thin, bony children who haven't had anything to eat. But in fact, Americans look just like that underneath all the fat. They are malnourished, they are diseased and they continue to suffer from malnutrition caused by the consumption of nutritionally depleted foods such as pancakes, white bread, candy bars, soft drinks, breakfast cereals, pastries, processed foods, junk foods, snack foods, and many other items.
This article is an excerpt from the book, The 7 Laws of Nutrition by Mike Adams.