A worsening epidemic spreading around the world is making its way onto your dinner table and coming straight for you. The good news is, you can protect yourself.
The epidemic is that there’s no food in our food.
The prestigious journal Lancet published a study done by the smart folks at Tufts University in Massachusetts and Cambridge in England that points out the problem with the nutritional deterioration of the global diet.
More and more, the only choices we’re offered are processed foods that make us more susceptible to obesity, cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
And it doesn’t matter where you live any longer. The global study looked at what people are eating and analyzed the trends for eating healthy and unhealthy foods from 1990 to 2010. The comparison demonstrates significant differences in various countries, but generally, increases in unhealthy food consumption is outpacing healthy dietary shifts, particularly in middle-income countries.
Researcher Dariush Mozaffarian said that, “With this analysis, we’re supplying data that support longtime speculation that, globally, our diets are getting worse. We also show that these changes in dietary patterns vary significantly by country: in some countries, lack of healthy foods is the biggest problem; in others, excess unhealthy foods; and in others, such as the United States, it’s both. This tells us there is no one-size-fits-all approach to improving global diets.”
Overall, say the researchers, older people eat a healthier diet than younger people and women eat healthier diets than men.
To protect yourself, you can do something very simple. To avoid eating as much processed food as possible, stay away from the central aisles in the grocery store. Everything that’s sealed in a box, bag or synthetic container and stored on one of those long aisles is bound to be cheap, processed and devoid of nutrition. Why do you think they have to “fortify” these foods, like cereal? Because they have no nutrients.
Stick with the outer aisles, where the fresh produce is sold. More and more, you’re not only going to find natural foods there, but organic and non genetically-modified foods as well.
