THE U.S. IS A NATION OF DISEASE TREATMENT, NOT PREVENTION

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NewsTarget.com printable article

Monday, August 22, 2005

The U.S. is a nation of disease treatment, not prevention

There's not much money in preventing disease, but there's a fortune

to be made in treating it. Birth defects like these neural tube

defects cost just pennies to prevent (folic acid is dirt cheap), but

babies that are born with defects create hundred of thousands of

dollars in revenues for hospitals, surgeons and pharmaceutical

companies. It sounds brash, perhaps, but it's economic reality. That

may be one reason why so little has been done in the United States to

try to prevent disease. Virtually every modern disease now

threatening our population -- cancer, diabetes, heart disease,

depression and more -- has a nutritional basis... meaning that each

is preventable through dietary changes alone. In reality, the problem

isn't that we haven't been putting folic acid into flour, the problem

is that we're stripping out all the folic acid in the first place. In

the United States, people love to buy and eat foods that have been

stripped of the majority of their natural nutrition (see related

ebook on nutrition). The milling process removes virtually everything

that's good for you, leaving only empty calories. White flour, sugar,

corn syrup... it's all the same disease-promoting stuff after it

leaves the mill. Only whole grains are healthy grains. Whole grains

contain the bran, the fiber, the oils, the vitamins and the minerals

that promote human health. Instead of debating over what isolated

nutrients we should put back into the foods sold at grocery stores

why don't we stop stripping them out in the first place? You already

know the answer, of course: because healthy food has limited shelf

life. And that makes it expensive for consumers and unprofitable for

food producers. Most people won't buy food that's good for them for

the simple reason that it costs more than healthy food. So they'll

save fifty cents right now by buying the cheap, processed food, and

they'll spend a hundred thousand dollars on hospital bills ten years

later as a result. Of course, few people connect the two events. Most

people are short-term thinkers. In addition, as I'm sure you'll

agree, many people just don't know any better. That's why Internet

education efforts are so critical to helping people get healthy. Keep

reading, keep learning. And spread the word to help others.