Unfortunately, the food environment today is like the tobacco environment of the 1960s. The tobacco companies didn’t make cigarettes to kill people.
They wanted to make something that was addictive and highly profitable. It was just an unfortunate consequence that it also happened to kill consumers! The food environment is the same,
Similarly, the Standard American Diet wasn’t created to kill you but is an unfortunate consequence. The food has to taste good, and it has to be economical for the manufacturer and the consumer so it was made cheap and at an affordable price. You kind of know it when you see it. Walk into any fast food restaurant, grocery store, or any 7-Eleven, if it comes in a package it’s high in refined sugar and junky processed carbohydrates! If it’s high in polyunsaturated fats and hydrogenated vegetable oils, it’s probably the Standard American Diet.
So make the decision of what you bring to your house, one of the first things I did when I decided to clean up my life with respect to eating was to clean up the pantry.
Nutrition is at a place today, where smoking was when tobacco was killing people. And today, there is a relatively mainstream consensus that the American diet is killing people!
The Surgeon General reports scientific evidence that links diet to chronic disease. In addition, GMOs are present in 75-80% of our processed foods in the US, such as Soy, Rice, and Canola Oils. I recently went to Switzerland, and GMOs have been banned since 2005 overall, so finding healthy foods does not take effort.
That’s the challenge of what we’re asking you to do today. You’re fully bought into the fact that the Standard American Diet is harmful and you will have a hard time achieving your goals. But unlike in the 1960s, today, we have tools that we can bring to you that can allow you to create your own microenvironment. That’s going to be a new Default Food Environment!
