America’s Death Valley……

Madison Avenue’s advertising geniuses are adept at promoting foods that are attractive to the eye, and laden with sugar, the stuff that inhabits the inner aisles of our grocery stores and the outer aisles of our vast C-Store empires. In a conversation recently, Sharon and I talked about the mistakes we have made in nutrition and our late entry into the world of food that our parents and grandparents accepted as a way of life. The deadliest place in America is not the streets of Chicago or New York, rather it is the inner aisles of your local grocery, America’s real Death Valley, where sugar and processed foods reign supreme.

We spend billions searching for the magic bullet to cure or block cancer and metabolic disease, and billions promoting the sugary garbage found in Death Valley where we cruise through pushing huge carts to haul our assortment of glittery packaged foods that give rise to the research into curing our disease processes rather than preventing them. You don’t need advanced degrees to understand what folks with these degrees are talking about when they warn us to clean up our dietary habits. I just read an article in The Epoch Times, perhaps the cleanest source of factual information currently available to us, about the latest discoveries by cancer researchers that have finally uncovered the mechanism that definitively links cancer to our diet. All the science you need is found in these words, “MGO, a glucose metabolite, can temporarily destroy the BRCA2 protein, reducing its levels in cells and inhibiting its tumor-preventing ability”. Let me help you with this thought, sugar kills you in more ways than you can count.

I was privileged to reside in Okinawa for three years. Okinawans seem to live forever. Indeed it is a blue zone, where folks routinely live to see 100 years. Their diet sees little sugar, in spite of America’s western influences promoting the garbage we refer to as food. They eat vegetables and seafood, mostly, with a little meat thrown in once in a while. The renowned Mediterranean diet is not Little Debbie cakes and Fruity Pebbles.

Remember your grandmother’s table? The garden, either direct to the table, or out of a Mason jar, was ever present. She would not have fed Ramen Noodles or Coca Puffs to the chickens out back. Cancer was less prevalent in those days, mostly enabled by genetic predisposition or the chemicals we bathed in enhancing agricultural production, not so much sugar.

Sharon and I have cleaned up our food choices in the past decade or two, but honestly, it is like showing up at a house fire with a fire extinguisher. The damage is done. Talk to your children and grandchildren. If it is wrapped or boxed and the ingredient list is more than 3 items long, help them to understand the danger. Teach them to stay out of Death Valley. Metabolic disease and cancer is, as they say, a hell of a price to pay for surrendering to Madison Avenue and a food industry intent on killing us in the name of profit.

Have a great week!

SR