I love the intelligence of researchers who make such obvious statements as, 'Americans are getting older.' Of course Americans are getting older. Are there people from any other countries who are getting younger? Of course, what the researchers are really talking about is the age wave in America. They're saying that the demographic curve (the baby boomers "hump") is shifting towards old age, so there's a greater percentage of the population older today than 10 years ago.
But that doesn't account for high blood pressure. There's nothing pre-programmed in the human genome that says as people get old they automatically get fat and have high blood pressure. To say that Americans are being diagnosed with high blood pressure simply because they are chronologically aging is truly junk science. They're getting high blood pressure because their diets are getting worse and they're avoiding physical exercise. It's happening because people are eating more processed foods and they're being dosed up with more prescription drugs that actually cause destructive side effects in their bodies.
Of course, it is true that Americans are getting fatter, and it's no secret why. The average American purchases apparent weight loss products like SlimFast, which has more sugar in it than the circulating blood of a 14-year-old ADHD child. When people go out and buy so-called diet products that have table sugar as their primary ingredient, and when these products somehow manage to achieve priority placement on the shelves of grocery stores and retailers like Walgreen's, it's downright amazing that the whole country isn't overweight. We're not far from it, actually: 66% of the adult population has already reached that status.
But finally, we get some sanity on this from Dr. Daniel Jones, Dean of the School of Medicine for the University of Mississippi Medical Center who says, "The big message to the American public is that we need to pay attention to our lifestyle, and those that are overweight need to get slimmer." He may have borrowed that quote, by the way, from the football coach at the University of Mississippi who once said, "We need to move the ball down the field..." -- obviously highly complex football strategy.
Well of course we all need to get slimmer. But the real issue is that we all need to stop talking in circular logic here. We need people in the medical community to start addressing the real cause of chronic disease, which almost always comes down to diet and physical exercise. It's basically just food, exercise and whether or not you can manage to avoid environmental toxins. But yet, in the medical community, you almost never hear diseases described in such terms. Rather, they're busy announcing the latest finding of what gene has a 1% influence on the risks for heart disease or obesity or diabetes.
And besides, did it really take a government-funded research project to realize that the people in our nation are getting fatter and have higher blood pressure? I figured this out one day just by walking through the Denver Airport. All you have to do is basically look at the people walking around and you can reach the same conclusion the government did without spending $5 million on federally funded research.
So now that 1 in 3 American adults have blood pressure, what are the other two doing? One of those two is busy filling out paperwork for the Medicare drug discount card which reportedly requires 500 pages, and the other person is working sixteen-hour days to generate enough tax revenues to pay for the overpriced healthcare of the first person.
This, friends, is called, "The best health care in the world!" Only by naive Americans, of course. Everybody else knows the U.S. health care system is the laughing stock of the international community.