I thumb through my weekly sales flyers that are delivered to my yard without fail, I often laugh at the ironic twist that many of the local drug stores offer sales on sugar riddled drinks, chips and cakes. Both front and back pages are entirely covered, top to bottom with incredible deals on food laced with chemicals. The irony to all of this is that these “foods” drum up business for these drug stores as many of us are addicted to the sweet and salty deals that they offer to get us into their stores. My suspicions are confirmed when I turn the page and see that anti-acids and digestion aids are on sale too!
In 2016, obesity-related illnesses killed 300,000 Americans. In the ten years between 2006 and 2016, around 215,000 deaths worldwide were caused by acts of terrorism. We are waging war on terrorists, spending trillions of dollars in fear of being the next one to die in a terror-related act, yet we cram our faces with processed chemical food at alarming rates. To me, Coca-Cola is worse than ISIS.
Food companies are feeding us a toxic soup of chemicals, and all we do is eat it up. Our minds are controlled by the massive amounts of sugar and fat that we cram into our mouths that we are too hopped up on a food high to read what it is that we are even eating. Sadly, most people do not care, you probably don’t care. We are led to believe that quality food, the kind of food that rots after a few days, is more expensive than the chemical concoctions that we purchase in a can. We are shown pictures of ISIS training grounds, heads hanging from trees and ammunition piles but we are never shown how high-fructose corn syrup is made or images of clogged arteries and fatty livers caused by years of consuming partially hydrogenated oil.
I don’t have to tell you that obesity is on the rise. We see it everywhere as most of us are living with or around obesity. Obesity rates in the world have tripled since 1975 and in 2016. The World Health Organization says that 650 million people were considered obese, that is about 8.5% of the world’s population that is obese, not overweight, obese. More people die from overeating than they do from starvation, think about that for a minute.
We are dying because of the diets that we keep, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We get angry at our politicians for not providing enough healthcare dollars to keep us alive. We get mad at cancer for taking our loved ones far too soon. We get angry at drug companies for charging insanely high prices for prescription drugs. We get mad at our schools for not teaching our children to eat better.
We get angry at ISIS for killing innocent lives.
Nobody ever gets angry at Coca-Cola.
Some reference material:
Worldwide deaths by terrorism 2007-2016
WHO | Obesity and overweight fact sheet
Obesity: Facts, Figures, Guidelines
Oh so true.