Cartoon characters such as Ronald McDonald, Grimace and Hamburglar have been inviting our toddlers for decades to play and eat with them on social media. “Magically delicious” cereals that bring out the tiger in you are promoted by cartoon characters who bounce around telling children that they will feel “G-G-GREAT” when they eat these cereals for breakfast, the breakfast of champions! Start your morning off right with Pop Tarts!

Our children are being bombarded with hours and hours of commercials every day. Our teens and children live on social media for most of their waking hours. Artificial intelligence is today creating a new version of reality that has little truth behind it. The most famous processed-food slogans are targeted to influence toddlers and young children who then pester their parents until they buy the product. American children learn to be brand loyal from the very beginning of life – choosing to buy specific brands of soda, cereals, frozen dinners, and to visit certain fast-food enterprises. These fast-food restaurants teach children that they are “coming home” to eat! Body building has become a major influence on male and female teens and young adults over the past few decades, enculturating them into a culture of processed protein foods and energizing additives that they are told will make them stronger and healthier with greater energy and enhanced muscle power. The meat and dairy industries in the United States have been major sources of economic power throughout the twentieth century. Americans are taught from a very young age to eat lots of animal protein, especially grassfed red meats and milk. These are carefully orchestrated lies that have created a world suffering with chronic diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, autoimmunity and cancer.

As all human societies do, we never question our lifestyle choices. Every person on earth believes that how they do everything is the best and most natural way to do everything. How we educate our children, how we build our houses, how we fertilize our gardens, how we dress, how we bathe, what we eat and drink, everything we do is the very best way!

Americans have learned to place their complete trust in what we see on television, what we read on the computer, and what is on our smart phones and I-pads. We believe that what we see is the TRUTH – we rarely question the source of the information. Most of us don’t have the time to research what we read or hear. Many times, we learn later that these internet publications were hoaxes, misinformation, or misleading slants on accurate information.

Much of this “information” comes from scientists and medical professionals whose research is funded by food manufacturing conglomerates and who claim to have the answers to excellent health! Unfortunately, most of these “experts” do not have the nutritional knowledge to know what many food additives are doing to our bodies, misleading the public into following dangerous eating plans. Medical doctors are not required to take even one course in nutrition throughout their medical education.

The truth is that many of these scientists and medical physicians are often selling a brand name or a food supplement or a product for massive profits rather than providing accurate information. We have grown up in a society that promotes profit over individual freedom. This means that many times our choices may not be the most beneficial for our health and longevity and often will lead to chronic and/or irreversible disease.

The industrial and cyber revolutions have now permanently convinced

all of us in the industrial world that technology is the answer to all our problems. When we deliver our babies in a hospital setting, we then carry our newborn babies home with a renewed and solid faith in technology. After all, technology “gave me a healthy baby and continues to keep my child alive.” We even have this faith incorporated into our daily conversations – “Who delivered your baby? Dr. Smith at Wilson General Hospital.” When the truth is that the mother delivered her baby!

Despite the power of scientific research, and the numerous remarkable discoveries and inventions that benefit our lives in the industrial world, we have been socialized to believe the answers to ALL our problems are found in medically prescribed pills, protein-based smoothies, and laboratory-created synthetic products. We have lost all faith in the creative power of nature. Our lives have become so complicated and technologically advanced that we no longer place any credence in the simple lifestyles practiced by our great grandparents and all traditional peoples.

Professionals now teach us everything – how to raise and discipline our children, how to earn the most money, what school systems are the best for our children, what foods to eat and how to exercise our bodies – rather than taking responsibility for our own health and well-being.

We usually choose artificially-processed fast foods such as cold cereals, granola, hamburgers and French fries, pizza, turkey or ham sandwiches or cream cheese and a bagel with a diet coke rather than eating a salad of organic mixed greens, fresh golden heirloom organic tomatoes, baby lacinato organic kale, red onion and raw organic sunflower seeds with homemade dressings and organic homemade Einkorn flatbread (all known as SUPER FOODS for their antioxidant activity).

Very few children today grow up in families that know how to grow their own food. Most of us no longer know how to work for our food – growing, harvesting, preparing and/or eating whole foods to obtain our health and longevity from Mother Earth as traditional human populations have done for centuries of time. We used to ask, “What’s for dinner?” but now we ask, “Where are we going to eat for dinner?”

Most think that they no longer have the space or the time to produce organic healthy food. Square foot gardening (even in apartments or condos) is an easy and fun way to produce fresh whole organic food with minimal effort, especially when the entire family works together. Composting and organic gardening can easily be incorporated into your family’s daily life.

Americans are obsessed with saving time, an impossible endeavor! Cheap, convenient food that seems to save time is not only attractive but is often a perceived necessity when the average American works longer hours for less income with no relief in sight.

Drive-through eating is now an American way of life! The fast-food industry has spent trillions of advertising dollars to gain our loyalty and trust. This industry has become a revolutionary force in America and the world, changing our diet as well as our landscape, our economy, and our culture. There is now a fast-food restaurant on every corner, inside most major shopping outlets, in our airports, and in our shopping malls. According to Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation and Chew on This), Americans spent about $6 billion on fast foods in 1970. By 2023, we spent more than $349 billion dollars, equivalent to $148 per person per month and nearly $1800 per person per year!

At first, the fast-food industries built their restaurants across the street from high schools, but now they have invaded our elementary and middle schools, placing ads on the sides of school buses and inside classrooms,

placing vending machines inside the halls, and negotiating to replace school lunches with their fast, processed packaged foods many times each week to reach more of our children.

Fast foods are cheap, convenient and are designed to taste good with harmful flavor enhancers. This industry is responsible for vast numbers of people suffering from chronic disease, autoimmunity and obesity. One in three adult Americans are now obese. Nearly half of us are overweight. Seventeen percent or almost one in five of our children and teenagers are obese, a number that has tripled in the last decade. Today, according to the CDC, 129 million or sixty percent of all Americans suffer with at least one chronic disease. Today, medical doctors are prescribing weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy to children as young as 3 years old because of the prevalence of childhood obesity. These medications have known dangerous side effects including gallbladder and kidney disorders and thyroid cancers.

Today, 80% of Americans survive on just 7% of our nation’s resources! The upper middle class, the middle class, as well as the poor have less income than their parents did, lowering their ability to buy healthy food. (source: Michael I. Norton, Harvard professor of business and Dan Ariely, Duke professor of behavioral economics). When you don’t have much money, buying a bag of French fries to fill your child’s stomach seems to be a better choice than buying organic black kale or an organic apple.

Organic whole food meals are often too expensive for the average family budget. Whole fresh organic vegetables and fruits are much more expensive than the canned versions that contain BPA (bisphenol-A or synthetic estrogens) and high-quality organic poultry is completely out of reach for the average family. So, the poor families continue to suffer without enough money to buy the food they need to get healthy. It is a wellknown fact that poverty kills. Wealth inequality means health inequality!

Americans have less income than 40 years ago because our standard of living has increased while the buying power of our wages have stayed the same. The average American worker must work more than a month to obtain the same amount of income that a CEO makes in just one hour. Most Americans cannot afford to buy and eat healthy foods! In recent years, following the coronavirus pandemic, inflation has exploded the cost of living, including the grocery store foods, to the level of total unaffordability for most middle-class families, let alone the poor.

Americans spend less and less time with their families in educational activities including cooking and eating meals together and teaching our children to obtain their whole food from the earth. Many live in isolated apartments many miles away from their parents or other relatives, struggling to survive without social support. It has been shown through scientific research that people who have social networks and close family groups are healthier and live better-quality lives. Loneliness has now become a known precursor to many mental health disorders and chronic diseases.

Our family structure has rapidly changed over the past decades. Today, many households have only one parent. Single mothers are so stressed by the struggle to earn enough money to feed their children, often working two or three jobs just to survive, that they have no quality time with their children. Many seek help for their total exhaustion in their family doctor’s office, resorting to using medications to cope with the overwhelming hopelessness of their situation!

This country was established by people who fled tyranny to be able to raise their families in freedom, living off the land and using their creativity, their newly earned personal freedoms and hard work to build legacies for their children. We must return to our roots!

Most Americans do not know how to prepare whole grain dishes, or even where to buy most whole grains. The current generation of people have grown up in homes where there was relatively little cooking done, mostly eating frozen dinners or conveniently packaged frozen meals, rather than learning the basics of preparing whole food, freshly harvested from home gardens.

Whole grains, essential for a healthy balanced diet, (barley has been eaten by ancient hominids for more than 10,000 years and Einkorn or farro piccolo wheat has been consumed since 6,000 BC) are relatively inexpensive to eat and very easy to prepare. For more than six decades, Americans have eaten processed, refined grains in breads, baked goods, pizza, rolls, crackers and pastas that have altered our taste buds and physically changed our ability to digest whole grains. Genetic engineering of whole wheat and other grains in addition to glyphosate pesticide use has changed the nutritional content and increased the gluten content of our whole grains. Glyphosate is the number one toxin negatively impacting the health of every human being on the earth today. As a result of these changes in eating behaviors, Americans are now dealing with epidemic levels of gut disorders including gluten-intolerance, SIBO, inflammatory bowel disease and celiac disease!