Imagine an America in which you had to go to a specialty store to get any clothes size with an X in it. Imagine an America in which you know almost no one taking prescription medicine. Imagine an America in which only 1 in 2,000 children are diagnosed with autism (as in the 1960s and 1970s) as opposed to the 1 in 31 diagnosed today.
In order to understand where we are today, living in a high income country that ranks in the top 10 of the unhealthiest populations in the world, we need to bone up on a little history.
First is how the medical industry has evolved in the last 120 years or so. This article has a great summary of how we got to the place where the article says it’s a felony to treat cancer with anything other than chemotherapy, surgery or radiation. I can’t confirm that treating cancer with only those three modalities is illegal, although there was a National Cancer Act signed by Richard Nixon back in 1971 where that may have been the case. It’s been amended several times, and I know that doctors are using other treatments so take that part of the article with a grain of salt. The history is accurate.
That history explains how the medical profession evolved in the early 20th century to focus primarily on methods of treatment that relied more heavily on allopathic (using drugs, radiation or surgery to treat disease) treatments. This evolution to allopathic (as opposed to homeopathic) medicine taught in medical schools coincided (imagine that) with the medical schools being underwritten by rich Americans with financial interests and investments in the burgeoning fledgling pharmaceutical industries.
Follow the money. Medicine embraced pharmaceuticals. Now, standards in America for blood pressure and cholesterol are lower than elsewhere in the western world. That’s incredibly convenient that there’s a drug for those things. The United States is one of the only countries that allows advertising on television for prescription drugs. We are guided by “programming” to ask our doctors for quick fixes that, if you do the research, only treat symptoms and have no intention of curing anything.
Here’s a glaring truth doctors no longer tell you, and that we, as a culture looking for that quick fix, don’t want to face. Food is medicine.
I asked my doctor several months ago why she didn’t recommend that I lose weight, get more exercise and change the way I eat. Instead, she wanted to put me on yet another blood pressure pill to treat my sky-high blood pressure. She flat out said that wouldn’t work. I refused the medication because of a serious side effect I didn’t want more than I didn’t want high blood pressure. I told her I was going to stop taking the 1 additional medication (I was already on 2 others). She told me I was setting myself up for a stroke or heart attack. I made a few changes and guess what? My blood pressure is finally under control for the first time in years.
This medical and pharmaceutical issue really gets my dander up.
And then there’s how the food industry has changed over relatively the same period of time. Food has shifted from primarily fresh, locally sourced food to highly processed, technologically enhanced stuff that claims to be food. What we’re primarily eating now, pushed by thousands of commercials in media, is chemicals and synthetic flavors that has a shelf life designed to last through natural and man-made disasters we couldn’t even imagine 100 years ago. To use food as medicine and improve your own health you have to take charge and work at it.
The Food Pyramid Guide made its first appearance in the 1970s and the US Department of Agriculture published its version in 1992. The Food Pyramid, too, has a sketchy history that you can read in this article. Since then, what the government and medical profession has told us is good for us have tripled obesity rates. And we now know that the heart healthy, low fat diets recommended in the early 1990s were just plain wrong. Researchers of a 2020 study from the Perelman School of Medicine and published in Science concluded, according to Zoltan Arany, a co-author of the study and a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, that our human heart typically heavily rely on fats for its fuel. “It’ll use every fat that it can use,” he said. “That’s really its main source of energy.”
No wonder heart disease has also skyrocketed in the last 30 years. Yet, even as the disease skyrocketed, treatments and medications have significantly increased life expectancy for heart related health issues. How convenient. Lots more patients with lots more health problems living lots longer equates to a hell of a lot of additional health care spending injected into the economy.
I read somewhere recently that the biggest industry in Florida is health care. I couldn’t confirm that through any of my research, but it did put it in the top 3 behind real estate and tourism. Do you know that the medical industry in America is worth $4.9 trillion a year (roughly $14,570 per person in 2023), the food industry in America $1.537 trillion in 2023 and the pharmaceutical industry in America – $602 billion in 2023. It’s staggering.
Those 3 industries together account for about 25% of our annual $30 trillion GDP in America. However, think about how upside down this next statistic is. America accounts for 30-40% of the global pharmaceutical market but only has 4.2% of the world’s population. That seems almost criminal to me.
In case you can’t conceive of the enormity of a trillion dollars (let alone 7 trillion dollars a year), let me provide a bit of perspective. If you earned $1 per SECOND (that’s $60 per minute or $3,600 per hour) it would take you 31,000 years (that 31 THOUSAND YEARS) to earn a trillion dollars.
Do you think a healthy population is a sustainable business model? Goldman Sachs asked that very question in a 2018 biotech research report. To my little human pea brain, it sure as hell isn’t.
Again, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m not trying to get you to see things from my perspective. But I think it does everyone a lot of good to ask the what if questions. That arms you with information so you can make decisions for your own good. The truth is that if you believe everything they tell you and want you to believe, you need to also know that their interests are going to trump your interests every single time.
I apologize if this post seems like it’s all over the board and leaves you with more questions than answers. Those truthful answers about what’s really good for your health aren’t going to come from simple Google searches. You have to dig deeper for yourself, making sure to ask the right questions that can’t be twisted, answered with half truths, or outright ignored and misdirected. And you can only do that if you think long and hard about what are the right questions to ask.
Let’s talk about this! Together we can seek the truth and the right answers for our individual situations. Listen to and consider what Robert F Kennedy is saying in his role as Health and Human Services Secretary. I believe he’s, finally, a government official speaking truth. And thank God for him.
P.S. I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Modern medicine is great at fixing a lot of stuff that involves blood and bones. I’m grateful for that expertise and the doctors committed to making people whole again.
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