America is like a chronic disease factory producing diseases of affluence. We over eat and under exercise. Our diets contain overly processed foods with chemicals added along with more fat than 30 years ago. The diseases of affluence or over consumption include cancer, coronary heart disease and diabetes. Every 24 hours, 3,000 Americans experience a heart attack. Forty percent of us will die from heart problems. Cardiologists Robert Elliot, M.D., describes our current situation as:
A medical system waiting at the bottom of a cliff for people to fall off. When we suggest building a fence at the top of the cliff to prevent people from falling, the answer from the bottom is, ‘We can’t afford it. We’re spending all our money down here.
In his book Affluenza, DeGraaf declares America to be a “pathogenic society”. Many institutions undermine health by marketing quick-fix solutions and over consumption. The symptoms of this “cultural disease” include stress, anxiety, and waste. We make ourselves sick with over work and credit card debt in our compulsive drive for more.
We take an increasing number of drugs to alleviate stress, depression and high blood pressure claims Peter Whybrow, MD, in his book American Mania. Affluence undermines our physical, mental and social health as suggested in this Figure.
"We sleep less, work longer and spend less time with our families in the manic rush to earn more money to buy more goods."
The same tools and technologies that enabled America to achieve affluence are also eroding the social fabric. Social relationships are being fractured by our pursuit of self-interest as we pollute our bodies, our minds and our environment. The external environment mirrors the internal ecology of our bodies. Dis-ease abounds!
To adequately understand how Americans became so fat, so stressed and so dependent on prescription drugs, I cast a wide net to catch all the culprits. Americans must not only change their lifestyle choices, but also some institutional practices, if we are to reverse the spreading epidemic of chronic disease.
Numerous institutional factors undermine well-being and constrain healthy lifestyle choices. Too many Americans believe the marketing ploys that tell us happiness lies outside us in the form of a commodity and sold in a package. These beliefs and practices create a pathogenic lifestyle that leads to dissease and a lower quality of life.
Health and well-being depend upon nutrition. Food affects mood, level of energy, and future prospects of health and disease-resistance. Over two-thirds of all deaths are caused by diet/activity-related diseases. The diet/activity nexus is summarized with a simple equation: caloric input should match caloric expenditure via exercise. Exercise brings many benefits including helping circulate fluids through the lymph system to avoid toxic buildup into a cellular cesspool that produces illness.
Given our exercise levels, we consume far too many calories. We eat the wrong foods, which leave us vulnerable to chronic illnesses. The primary culprit is the American food industry?especially fast foods?that promotes the consumption of high-calorie, high-fat convenience foods that are highly processed. Highly processed foods along with smoking contributes to heart disease, diabetes and a long list of other chronic diseases.
The appeal of fast food is its ease and speed of preparation and its chemically engineered taste, smell and color to seduce our senses. Fast food restaurants moved into cities and neighborhoods across the US, targeting lower socio-economic areas two and one half times more often than the highest socio-economic neighborhoods.
The American fast food industry brought four changes
With the advent of fast food, what we eat and where we eat has undergone four major changes. We consume more meals outside the home; we eat more processed foods; we consume more calories per day, and more chemicals are put into our foods for color, taste and shelf-life. This transformation in diet is as deleterious as it is dramatic. Where once many were malnourished, today over 60 percent are overweight and eat unhealthy foods.
If “you are what you eat,” those who rely on fast food become “fast and easy”—fast to undermine health and easy prey to acute and chronic disease.
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