Americans Overfed, Undernourished
March 2, 2010
People who eat nothing but processed foods for a few days in a row often notice that despite ingesting lots of sugar, processed grains and hydrogenated fats, they are consuming few nutrients. And so they remain hungry. The paradox of malnourished obesity even affects hospital economics, for although gastric bypass surgery is replacing heart surgery as the most lucrative source of revenue for hospitals, more than one gastric bypass surgery has had to be delayed while the patient’s evident malnourishment was addressed.
A review of data gleaned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Exam Surveys reveals how widespread poor nutrition is among Americans, from vitamin B12 deficiency among seniors to vitamin D deficiency in all age groups.
Several researchers have stressed the connection between poor nutrition and poor health: for example, Bruce Ames, Ph.D., of the University of California, Berkeley, with his “triage theory”. In 2006 professor Ames published “Low micronutrient intake may accelerate the degenerative 
diseases of aging through the allocation of scarce micronutrients by triage” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, arguing that congenital conditions can be addressed by giving high-dose nutrition to bypass the co-factors, enzymes and nutrients influenced by the affected genes. According to Ames, “Many micronutrient (i.e., vitamin and mineral) deficiencies are associated with chromosome breaks and cancer in humans, such deficiencies having caused DNA damage in rodents or human cells in culture. It had also been established that chromosomal breaks cause early aging.” Dr. Ames’ work has profound consequences for industrialized countries whose populations eat a great deal of processed foods.
It is interesting to note that great minds such as Dr. Ames, the late Dr. Abram Hoffer, the late Dr. Linus Pauling, Dr. Jeffrey Blumberg and Dr. Lester Packer take or took their vitamins each and every day. But as Ames says: “A new idea is always hard to get through.”
btw- it is hard to buy all organic, i must go to farmers markets, health food stores and small farmers co-ops to find non toxic fresh produce, i moved to an area because it had abundance of organic markets, the rich people gobble up organic food, the poor have almost no way to get organics, it is all about food, all wars are about food, all biz is about food, everyone wants the good quality food and the bad food goes to poison and kill the poor, disadvantaged, the elderly the young, the unaware or unfortunate.
men used to protien starve women to enslave them. kings used to starve serfs to control them.
it, the worlds wars,and biz have always been about stealing the good food. the devils want all the good food to themselves. and the devils give pharmie pills and poison chalk to the weak poor or marginalized humans, children and the elderly or infirmed are starved by the greedy people all the time.
what about hypothyroidism? chronic fatigue the same thing?
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The whole process from eating lousy disease causing food to most peoples final death in a hospital seems to me to be an almost scripted dance by the corporate elite (food companies, big pharma, health insurance companies and hospitals) based on maximizing profit. Many of the food, pharmaceutical and medical companies have interlocking boards of directors in each others companies so the incentive is definitely there to do things which get people ill and moved into the medical system.. The scripted dance starts when the majority of the food buying public (who are too either poor, lazy or uneducated) selects cheap processed junk, or fast foods, and sodas which have are addicting, cause obesity and little or no nutritional value. This Poor diet, combined with a sedentary lifestyle and environmental pollutants leads to various diseases and often leads people to seek medical attention provided they can afford it. Once there people are moved through the pharma-medical industrial complex starting with the prescribing of drugs by physicians. Some doctors are definitely incentivized by “big pharma” to prescribe drugs vs changing diet and a sedentary lifestyle; when you combine this with trying to squeeze as many appointments as possible into a day this is definitely not a patient-centered approach. Once pharmaceuticals are involved, the drugs which treat but rarely cure anything, cause numerous side effects, leading to more drugs being prescribed to counter the side effects of the original drugs and so on. Ultimately, because our bodies without proper cleansing will become so toxic or immune system compromised due to the drugs, environmental factors, dietary choices,and lack of exercise,most people will die from strokes, heart attacks, complications from diabetes, or die painful deaths due to cancer.
I have often said in my Community Ed classes that you should make your calories count, not count calories. If your body needs a nutrient, your brain thinks a food rich in that nutrient looks good. You crave it. But if your palette of food choices is so restricted by habit you just keep feeding your body the same junk, you still need that nutrient and you are still “hungry”. So you eat more. And more.
Our processed diet makes this worse. Salt is a flavor associated with many trace minerals in nature, so we crave salty foods, but processed salt has none of the trace nutrients. Sweet is the flavor of ripe fruit, rich in phytochemicals and vitamins, but sugar is nothing but calories, and is used to whet our appetites for more of the same. We used to get fat from meats and nuts and seeds, all rich nutrient sources, and fat tastes really good to us. Now we eat partially hydrogenated vegetable oil stripped of all its micronutrients. No wonder we’re sick!
Not so much ‘overfed’ but fed a steady diet of GMO’s will make anyone fat, along with all the preservatives in the foods, which are deadly. It’s very distressing that in today’s world Monsanto trash they call food, even exists. It needs to go, along with High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup solids, Soybean Oil (yuckkk!, won’t use it) MSG and all the other garbage foods that are created in the labs. How they can even all it food and get away with it is beyond comprehension.
Type II diabetes is on the rise and it’s primarily caused by dead fast-foods! Canned, packaged, boxed on the grocers shelves has HFCS, dyes, sodium and many other chemicals that should not be consumed! Weight gain leading up to obesity is seen all over the country. We need to keep trying to educate the masses of ignorant self-destructing people. Rein in the FDA, policy makers marketing and advertising corporations. Not much we can do about stock holders!
I can emphatically state that what this article says is completely true. I became severely ill and started with alternative medicine in Aug 2008. I wish it had been a lot sooner. But, well, like everyone else, the medical and pharmaceutical conglomeration does a wonderful job of making sure alternative medicine sounds like such a “disease” that it’s a very big leap of faith to break out of the safety zone and over to the wonderful world of alternative medicine.
I first started to doctor with an Integration Doctor. She tested me and discovered I had severe heavy metal toxicity, severe casein (cow milk) allergy, severe soy intolerance, severe gliadin/gluten intolerance, some other food intolerances, some severe vitamin/mineral deficiencies, and severe malabsorption. The dairy/soy/gluten problems, which I have probably had since baby on, had severely compromised my gut, giving me leaky gut syndrome. We did test for Celiac; tests say no, but lab tests are borderline.
Because of my severe heavy metal toxicity, I also had my daughter tested; she was even more toxic than me in some of them. That led me to searching for answers, which led me to discover the CYP 2C9 gene on the P450 cytochrome, which, if you have mutations, your body isn’t able to detox or metabolize correctly. We both tested for the same three mutations (by extension, my husband has the same mutations), and we have NO active alleles, which means our bodies cannot detox or metabolize correctly without help (whole organic foods, supplements, herbals, nutriceuticals). That also means NO PHARMACEUTICAL DRUGS, as our bodies are unable to break down and get rid of any portion of them.
But Integration Doctors can only go so far in what they can do–after all, they are Medical Doctors who don’t want to loose their medical licenses and the MD behind their names. I was still sick, still tremendously fatigued. When I say my GYN for my yearly in Oct 2009, I complained of my overwhelming fatigue. She sent me to a Naturopathic Doctor. Yes, there are some doctors who are okay with the alternative medicine field. My doctors belong to a private practice, which might be the difference. My GYN is also an owner of the practice.
Anway, after more testing, this time at the cellular level, we discovered I had adrenal fatigue, was deficient in key antioxidant nutrients; was deficient in key immune nutrients; was deficient in key detoxification nutrients; and overall, was just in really bad shape. We are currently working on strengthening my immune and detoxification systems and getting rid of the adrenal fatigue, which is very, very real.
We now eat gluten-free, organic food and are striving to convert our personal and household products to green/environment friendly/no chemical. It’s been a very hectic two years as I strive to educate myself on what most of the world doesn’t want me to know.
Thank you Alliance for Natural Health USA for advocating on our behalf. Now you–anyone who is reading this–need to help by contacting your representatives on any and every bill you find repressive or repulsive. If they don’t hear your voices, they will heed industry. They might anyway, but if enough of their constitutents raise a stink about something, well, they have to think about their political career and getting re-elected.
I was dying of cellular malnutrition on the sad siet, standard american diet. i had over 200 tumors on my arms and legs, benign as biopsied by pathology lab, i suffered chronic fatique, extreme weakness, anemia, my cells were dying due to toxicity over abundance of sodium and no potassium.
non nutritional mds had nothing for me except drugs, lotions and potions that did not work, i spent thousands on doctors that never touched nutrirtion aspect of nything. then i went to nutrition aware mds, the good mds told me to change my diet, i went to a molecular biologist an got on a detox diet,spent a ton on vitamins, then went to a detox herbalist, spent a ton on detox herbs, then went to a nutritional md, spent lots of time and money on diet, then went to another nutritional md, got on an organic diet, the 200 tumors went away and some energy is comming back, but i am broke, and cannot afford the 150 a week to eat all organic high quality foods.
I am still malnourished, but not dying covered with tumors anymore, i spend about 100 a week now for organics to feed me, 1 person. this is the minimum amount that will keep me alive and out of the hospital.
the world is hell, malnutrition and cellular starvation is rampant across america.
obese people are more malnourished then slender people, no nutrition gets to thier cells due to the obesity . no wondr americans are overweight and dying of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, we are all being mal nourished on a cellular level.
btw- i always see mds as patients at my alternative doctors offices, mds with cancer etc will not trust american trained pharmie mds to treat them when they get sick, they know the pharmie industry makes people sick and then kills sick people for money.
i bet the ceos of pharmie companies eat the best organics 7 days a week. i guess the devils world needs nazi pharmie ceos, and nazi hospital ceos, more hitlers to mass murder people thru chemo radiation food poisoning malnutition and starvation. when hospitals close the chalk pharmie counter and install fresh organic juice bars i will know satan is dead and back in hell and God has returned to run hospitals and medicine with organic juice bars nourishing patients daily with 100 ounces of fresh pressed organic juices.. max gerson the md who pionered freh juice theraphy to cure cancer was murdered by a rockefellor pharmie md mole md, the mole md put arsenic in gersons afternoon coffee and killed him, see charlotte gerson, daughter of max gerson md, who had to move her dads clinic to tijuana to run her fathers cancer cure clinic free from the pharmie peddling/disease profiteering nazis in usa.
When the American and perhaps all western civilized countries begin to restrict their food consumption to the outer aisles of the grocery stores where the produce, meats, dairy and hold back in buying prepackaged foods where the ingredient list is more than about four or five items and largely unpronouceable or understood, Americans and the rest of western civilized countries will begin to get back on the road to good health physically. However, I don’t see this happening anytime soon because of what I call the big 3 triangle. At the base is Big Food, with Big Pharma and Insurance on the other side. In the middle you see a big Dollar sign. Encircling all of this, of course, is government protecting these three and the big dollar sign in the middle. I think you can see that for the economy at its present inception to function it is necessary that the people buy the foods that lead them to get sick so they will need the services of Big Pharma with its sidekicks Allopathic medicine and insurance.
If you think about it, when the people wake up they won’t buy the fake food. They will stay healthier and not need so much allopathic medicine, drugs and thereby not really need that much insurance. Where will we be then? This will take some transition and time.
After surviving a near fatal heart condition I began to learn just how much conventional foods of today lack nutritional content. Today, 8 out of 10 registered dietitians recommend dietary supplements in order to get a sufficient supply of nutrients to keep us healthy.