We Really Are What We Eat

We know it but we pretend it is acceptable to be obese

Then we turn to drugs or an early grave

Every processed food morsel that slides between your lips makes a conglomerate richer. Your willpower to exercise erodes. You don’t care about what you eat. Your body will need prescription drugs for you to meet your grandkids.

Obesity is responsible for 4.7 million premature deaths each year ~ Obesity, Hanna Ritchie and Max Roser

Buying produce from local British farmers has never looked tastier. Future food choices could come from the American agri-food industry. Government trade deals are not in our best interest.

The United Kingdom, like the rest of the world, is under attack on at least two fronts. The invisible coronavirus and harmful processed food.

What’s the connection between processed food, Xanax, and obesity?

Women going out to work means wives and mothers are no longer preparing nutritious food at home. Nowadays, we eat a takeaway, pizza, Chinese, Indian, or Italian pasta meal on the way home. Or order home delivery. Most supermarkets offer these high-calorie meals at a fraction of the takeaway price.

As our children join us in our mission to expand, is it to our advantage to encourage yet more bad food? Mindless TV while gorging ourselves on sweets and savoury ‘treats’ is the norm. We don’t even walk to the shop to buy more snacks. Instead, we justify your actions with I worked all day this is my relaxation time.

As the months and years roll by, the rolls of excess skin and fat increase. You find yourself waddling to the car and flopping onto the seat. Puffing your way from the car park into the building where you work. You sit at your desk all day, except for the odd floor-shaking trundle across the office to see a colleague. Then drive home again to your TV and comfort meals.

There’s no time in your schedule for exercise, is there? It would be too much effort, though, wouldn’t it? Far nicer to lounge and wait for your joints to wear out and put excessive strain on all your vital organs.

More than one-in-three (36%) of adults in the United States were obese in 2016.

You develop high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, and various cancers. You’ll start your rest-of-life prescriptions for ACE inhibitors and insulin. You’ll get used to not having muscles and thus no strength to heave yourself out of the bath. Add smoking, drinking, and enjoying recreational drugs, you are on the fast track, baby.

We are what we eat and don’t burn off. The evidence is clear. Watch the Super Size Me Movie by Morgan Spurlock. During a few weeks of eating junk food, his fit and healthy body experienced harmful changes.

The Standard American Diet (SAD) brings depressing news for Americans. According to Taking Charge of Your Health and Wellbeing:

The United States ranks ninth in life expectancy among nations in the developed world.

We have a workforce plagued with absenteeism and reduced productivity because of chronic health problems, including depression.

78 percent of healthcare expenditures are for the treatment of chronic disease.

A high intake of carbohydrates, trans and saturated fats, and sugar will lead to ill-health. People who don’t, won’t or can’t buy, prepare, and eat fresh local produce themselves will suffer as they age.

Xanax

It is one of the most widely prescribed medicines in the U.S., and like other benzos, Xanax works by binding to specific GABA receptors. It has effects including sedation, and also muscle relaxant and antidepressant properties. ~The Recovery Village®

Americans fuel themselves with corn syrup, processed meat, and pasta. Driving everywhere has made the US an obese and morbidly obese country.

Our food is killing us

The UK is already heading that way. Poor people are not to blame for buying processed food. People don’t want to cook from scratch after working a crappy minimum wage job for forty plus hours per week? They want to flop down on the sofa and watch their favourite soap or the fifth rerun of whatever film is on hand.

We sit for long periods every day. We have a very high chance of inactivity causing all sorts of maladies to our bodies. It’s the new smoking, didn’t you know?

Designed for movement, our bodies must bend and sway, stride and hike. We must build strength in our muscles to take the strain off our joints, to enable us to enjoy sex and dancing. And to get out of the bath when we’re older.

Yet we continue to consume. Incredible amounts of calorific energy and we do very little to convert it or burn it. Thus the obesity epidemic continues to grow. Children included. While the world pretends processed food is the salvation for busy workers.

Who reaps the benefits of our ill-health?

Agri-food, pharma and medical insurance look on and cash in. Processed foods and lack of exercise cause ailments from diabetes to depression. Pharmaceutical companies develop cures for the ailments.

Private medical insurance companies reap the benefits of the poor saps. Their only hope? A job with health insurance to pay for all the drugs and operations they will need to keep them alive.

For the moment, but for not much longer, the UK has the National Health Service. But it’s a drain on governmental funds. The solution? Sell the NHS off to America and welcome in private health insurers.

Isn’t it about time we stopped playing with our food?

What happens when we eat fresh healthy food and build strength in our bodies? We are more able. Able to move, lose weight, go for long walks instead of sitting at home on the sofa. Reduce or not need the drugs that big pharma wants us to buy.

Shall we stop playing into the hands of the 1% elite? All the companies that encourage us to consume everything that we desire to eat? Eating the conglomerates’ processed meals cause us to disregard our health. We make ourselves weak, our bodies and minds compromised. Then we demand the drugs they manufacture to keep us alive.

It’s a cycle made in heaven for the six richest companies in the world and we fall for it every day. America isn’t satisfied with the conquests it has made in its own territory, it now wants to make a move into the UK. It’s already started. By the time the American dream foods are lining the supermarket shelves, it will be too damn late.

Connections

There is a connection between diet and health. The University of Minnesota and its Taking Charge website promotes vital information. Discover how to use food as nature intended it to. Reverse the damage done by poor nutrition and processed meals.

We are all lapping up the agri-food products companies sell us. We then compound the problem. Bad food + no exercise = drugs or death.

It is not acceptable to be obese. To pretend this is okay is the same as the junkie dying for one more snort of the heroin that’ll kill them. The junkie gets the job done much quicker than obesity.

An excessive Body Mass Index (>30) will kill you today, next month or in twenty years. There will be no heroin high. But if you must get orgasmic over that twice a week 18" New York pizza all alone on the sofa, go ahead. Know the consequences. Make an informed choice.

Eat with your health in mind and exercise. Don’t pay for the big pharma drugs. Big pharma created their drugs to solve the problems the agri-food industry caused. Playing with our food is what got us into this situation in the first place.

Let’s not pretend obesity is okay when it is not.

Let’s stop making the rich richer, and live active lives and meet the grandkids.

Let’s dance and snack on fruit and vegetables.