Over the last few years, more and more attention has been brought to our American diet and the effect it has on our health. It’s no secret that America is overweight and unhealthy, with most deaths caused by gut-related diseases. Cultural diffusion has spread the idea of the fast and cheap American diet to the rest of the world, leading to a global health pandemic. Many science blogs have begun to focus on the American diet, it’s unfavorable effects, and how eating healthier can change lives.
A Washington Post blog post titled “How the American diet has failed” by Roberto A. Ferdman discusses how our fast food diet has greatly increased the amount of fats, oils, and processed grains we ingest daily. This increase in empty calories has increased the American waistline. Since these foods are cheap and fast to make, more and more of the American diet is based on these nutritionally empty calories. However, this contributes to health issues later in life and the billions of dollars spent in health care to combat it. This is why we must ask ourselves if a fast, cheap meal now is worth the hospital bills later in life.
This blog post is targeted toward the average American; it tries to raise our awareness to the dangers of our diet through graphs from the USDA. These graphs add visuals to the ideas expressed in the post, making it easy to understand. Ferdman does a great job of bringing awareness to the nutritionally deprived diet we all survive on. However, it would have helped if he had added ways to change the diet instead of only focusing on what the problem is.
In 2006, Dean Ornish gave a TED Talk titled “The killer American diet that’s sweeping the planet.” In his talk, he discusses the impact our diet has had on the rest of the world, with heart disease and obesity on the rise globally. However, changes to our diet can reduce and even reverse disease, as shown in a study of men with prostate tumors. Making healthier diet and lifestyle choices reduced the tumor growth by 70%. If preventing cancer is as easy as eating less processed foods, why isn’t everyone making an effort to improve their diet? If we made healthier diet choices, we could stop spending billions of dollars on preventable diseases and focus our resources on diseases such as AIDS and the flu.
Dean Ornish’s TED Talk is available free online on TED’s website. TED is a non-profit organization that promotes the spread of new ideas. Notable scholars in their respected fields present the short talks, and they are usually targeted toward more elite, intelligent, and ever-learning global community. Because of this, Ornish’s talk does a better job at exposing the dangers of diet to a more diverse community than the one focused on by Ferdman.
Through more research and the spread of the idea of a healthy diet, we as a country and a global community can begin to make healthy changes to our lifestyle, eventually changing the way we treat food and our bodies. The first step to preventing disease is to change the way you eat. If we all make the conscious decision to eat less processed food, we could see gut-related diseases become a thing of the past.
