WE are the most common cause of poor health

It never ceases to amaze or confound me how much we as human beings, seem to be unable to assume responsibility for our own health. Heart disease, cancer, infection are in a very large part controlled by how we treat our bodies.
We all gripe and complain about the high cost of medical care, medicines, hospital stays take swipes at the very quality of medical care in the United States, but I maintain that a large part of the poor quality of medical care in the United States in the highly processed, fat laden, carb laden culture that we all participate in here in our country.
We all hear about obesity, cholesterol, blood pressure, lack of exercise, and nutrition but we (and that includes me too) don't do enough to take control of our personal health. A large proportion of the patients that I talk with have no clue how to eat well. And I understand because as a single parent I often struggle to put together meals that have some form of nutrition.
I tell people, especially diabetics, that you cannot eat fast food at all. You cannot eat processed foods at all. White bread, white pasta, soda, TV dinners , microwave foods and yes even the very beef that we all love so much. Even small changes like whole grain breads and pastas makes a difference.
The less processed the better it will be for you. So get used to serving whole grain bread products and eating bread in moderation. Use whole wheat pastas. Change how you think about food. My daughter and I had turkey tacos last night.
Do away with soda as a drink in your home. It has no purpose in the human diet, Milk, real juices (in moderation) or water. Sports drinks are a myth propagated by the cola companies that have no purpose except in elite athletes in certain situations.
And then there is beef. Americans have been sold a huge line of crap when it comes to beef.
Interestingly enough beef didn't used to be all that bad for us. Then around 50 years ago the beef industry started feeding cattle corn.
Cattle are not meant to be fed corn, they are meant to eat grass. When you feed cattle corn you set off a series of actions that destroy the nutritional value of beef and destroy the environment.
First the nutritional aspect, and this is a very important point. When you feed cattle corn you change the natural omega 3 to omega 6 ratio in the beef from 20-1 to pretty much 1 to one. What does that mean? You make the meat that was full of good fats that the body needs and can't live without (omega -3 fatty acids) and tip it over to the bad fats that clog arteries, and set up a pro inflammatory environment in the body that promotes hardening of the arteries, cancer, diabetes and in general shortens the lifespan of humans.
If you haven't heard about omega 3 fatty acids you will. I could write a book on how they are good for you but suffice it to say here and now we need to increase the foods in our diets that have high omega 3 fatty acid ratios like our grandparents down on the farm. They are the good fats and are plentiful in fish and grass fed animals. That is why fish oil is proven to be so damn good for us.
Of course we used to get plenty of it in our diets. but not since corn became king.
You now see labels on food that address how much omega 3 fats are in the product, its becoming the "new cholesterol".
My patients tell me all the time that their grandparents ate beef, bacon and other red meats. OF COURSE THEY DID BUT THEY WERE FED GRASS NOT CORN!! Grass fed beef is probably better for you than corn fed chicken!
We grow more corn in the US than any country in the world. Corn is KING. Its cheap as heck to grow because farmers have switched huge tracts of land to corn and dump fertilizers on it and then get a subsidy to grow it from the US government. Technology has driven the ability to produce corn so efficiently that the price has fallen because of all the corn on the market. We then prop up the price of this corn with those government subsidies making farmers reliant on the government for survival.
We then stuff it down our cows, chickens and pigs throats, fattening them up quickly and lowering the price of production of all food, but with the long term price of destroying the health in the of all those that eat it. It's so cheap now we put it in our bread, in our juice drinks, in our sodas as High Fructose Corn Syrup.
It makes the cows so sick that we have to pump them full of antibiotics and hormones just so they will live long enough to make it to the slaughter house. Corn fed beef is a carrier of the deadly E. coli bacterium whereas grass fed beef rarely carries the deadly bacteria because they are so much healthier.
And if you think about what the growing of corn has done the the environment, we basically have taken the feeding of the cows natural food, grass, which takes sunlight and converts it to protein by nourishing a cow, and replaced that with cows fed by corn grown with petroleum based fertilizers. So instead feeding our cows sunlight we essentially now feed our cows petroleum!
Grass fed beef is more expensive, but we can pay now or we can pay it in our food budget or we can pay it in our health insurance premiums like we do now. And if the demand goes up the price will eventually come down. The same goes for corn fed chickens and the eggs they lay and all other livestock.
An excellent and very well balanced explanation of what cheap corn has done to human nutrition is well researched and documented in an unbiased way in a book called THE Omnivore's DILEMMA by Micheal Pollan. Its not an anti-meat, left wing environment tree hugging book as some might say. It's truly a fair and balanced look at how we produce food in the US and why its so damn unhealthy. It also takes a fair and balanced look at how we produce beef and other livestock in the US. But this look is all wrapped up in the fair question of "What should we eat?"
I suggest anyone who has any interest in what they put in their bodies read this book. You can get it at your local library. Here is a description of this fascinating book http://www.michaelpollan.com/omnivore.php.
I obviously cant cover this topic all right here, but i can get people thinking about eating better, and eating grass fed instead of corn fed livestock. Educate yourself on what it means.