INTRODUCTION
In the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” after most of Los Angeles
is destroyed by aberrant tornados, a climatologist warns the President of
the United States that he must immediately enforce mass evacuations to save millions of Americans from an impending storm brought about by global warming. The president dismisses the urgency and refuses to take action. True to the climatologist’s predictions, a devastating storm and accompanying ice age obliterate the Northern Hemisphere.The epidemic of obesity in the U.S. is as ominous as tornados ripping across Los Angeles. Americans are the fattest people walking the earth today. Out of a population of 300 million, up to 68 percent of our citizens are overweight. Some are so large they can’t fly on airplanes, go to a movie theater, or otherwise function in society. New industries have sprung up to accommodate “people of size” by manufacturing larger
seats for restaurants, wheelchairs and toilets, mega hospital beds and XL coffins. It’s gotten so surreal, we hardly blink an eye at people being hoisted
around with cranes.
I believe that the American diet of processed, convenience, junk, fast and otherwise industrialized “factory” food is the major contributing factor in our
obesity epidemic. And this diet is also responsible for our skyrocketing rates of degenerative disease and ugly death. Yet because our medical community and government are not protecting us the epidemic escalates, with millions of people on a trajectory that is certain to culminate in apocalyptic human tragedy.
The message we should be hearing is that if Americans stopped eating all factory food and ate only real food we would calm the irrational craving that
compels us to eat these injurious substances. (Real food is organically produced meat, fish, poultry, dairy, vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, seeds and nuts that could (in theory) be picked, gathered, milked, hunted or fished.) By giving our bodies and brains the necessary nutritional building blocks in real food, Americans would be a healthy, fit, sexy population with each individual fully realizing his or her unique physical and mental gifts and
propensities—we’d be as intelligent, tall and physically and emotionally gifted as our genetics predispose us to be. This would dramatically reduce the number of patients flocking to obesity clinics, E.R.s and shrinks’ offices. As it stands, though Americans worship youth and beauty, we are aging more rapidly than we have to due to the combined effects of (what I call) “hysterical hunger,” depression, obesity and ill health.
I initially held my beliefs about real food because of the influence of my grandmother, Stella, who taught me about nutrition. In the last ten years I have coauthored books on weight loss, adrenal burnout and Chinese medicine. The common thread was that the first step in resolving weight and health problems was to stop eating factory food and to eat real food. I also believe that our health and weight problems are
not just because of factory food.
Before WWII much of our population suffered from malnutrition due to lack of food, which manifested in emaciation, depression, lowered I.Q., disease and ugly death. Since WWII our food chain has become permeated with factory foods, diets and drugs we are now suffering from a new type of malnutrition that manifests in obesity, depression, lowered I.Q., disease and ugly death. An unhealthy symbiotic relationship was (perhaps unintentionally but ultimately serendipitously) choreographed between our medical establishment, government, the food, diet, pharmaceutical corporations and us—American consumers. The food industry addicts us to their products, fattens us up, makes us depressed and sick, and then, backed by our medical community and government, the diet and drug industries profit by selling us diet products that perpetuate malnutrition and drugs that exacerbate our health problems.
The agencies that should be protecting us are complying with the moneymakers. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the government agency that’s (supposed to be) responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the safety and efficacy of the substances we ingest, the fact is that Americans are killing themselves and murdering their loved ones by supermarket—with FDA approval. In addition, our medical community has evolved a health care system that acquiesces to government policies (that in turn support the food industry) and has summarily rejected nutrition as “standard of care” (accepted modes of medical practice). This health care system actually encourages people to eat products that have contributed to the epidemic of disease.
All of this may seem very hard to believe as Americans have been subjected to intense conditioning from infancy through adulthood and like other types of abusive relationships, the food, diet, drug industries, as well as the medical community and our government use wooing, denial, ridicule and threats to keep us from breaking away. As so we remain addicted to factory food, desperately dieting and taking drugs to try to fix the health problems caused by factory food.
Do Americans even care? Reportedly, the factory foods that have the worst nutritional value sell the most briskly in the U.S. When it comes to suggesting health changes, health educators continue to set the bar lower and lower, ostensibly because Americans are too lazy to make any substantive changes. And it’s true that we’ve sleepwalked into inertia. After two years of research, I’m convinced that our fat and disease epidemic is no more our fault then it would be if we were caged lab rats being subjected to mind control, force feeding and Frankensteinish experiments. That said, we have given in to the industries that have made us fat and sick, basically without much of a fight. As a path of least resistance, we attempt to make ourselves feel better about our fatness, our dumb-and-dumberness, our unhealthiness and addiction to factory food by adopting an ominously jovial “we are all in this together” mentality about our diet. We laugh to cope, but unfortunately this cavalier attitude perpetuates our role as victims.
(Before we go any further I want to make it perfectly clear that this book is not a condemnation for being fat, sick, or weak-willed, nor is it intended to make you squeamish about any medications you must take. The purpose of this book is to educate you about nutrition and the influences of the food, diet and drug industries so that you can make the healthiest choices.)
Change is imminent as people are starting to wake up from the corporate hypnotic trance and are making efforts to eat real food, stop dieting and reduce their drug intake. I hope that this book will help still others to understand why making these deatthree changes is crucial for their health and the health of their children. What’s about to happen in America is analogous to an apocalyptic movie. Picture a few survivors blinking at the devastation they have escaped and brimming with hope for a future utopia. You and your family could be numbered among the survivors.
All it takes is turning the page.
Buy Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America
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This book will change how you shop your supermarket aisles
Reviewer: The Three Tomatoes
Listen in to our interview with Nancy Deville
Listen to internet radio with Tomatoes in Trenches on Blog Talk Radio
Butter is good, soy is not.
These were just two of the “wow” moments on our radio show yesterday with our guest Nancy Deville, author of “Death By Supermarket – the fattening, dumbing down, and poisoning of America”. In her highly researched book, she makes a powerful case for eating real food vs. factory food and the positive impact that would have on eliminating obesity and many health related issues that age us, and often lead to premature death. If you missed the show yesterday, listen in at your leisure. Read an excerpt below from the book.
Win the Book. Go to our Tomatoes in the Trenches Facebook Fan and write on our wall "Death by Supermarket". We'll randomly pick 3 winners. Contest ends Tuesday 8/3 at noon ET.
