You don't realize how dire the condition is our children's health and chronic disease in general. This is an issue that affects all of us far more directly and urgently than any culture war issue and all the other issues that we obsess on and that are tearing apart our country, this is the most important issue, therefore it has the potential to bring us together.
So let me share a little bit about why I believe it's so urgent today, we spend more on health care than any country on Earth, twice what they pay in Europe, and yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation the world.
We're about 79th and health outcomes behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Mongolia and other countries. Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have. And during a covid epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world. We had 16% of the covid deaths, and we only have 4.2% of the world's population. And CDC says that's because we are the sickest people on Earth.
We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth, and the average American who died or covid had 3.8 other chronic diseases. So these were people who had immune system collapse, who had mitochondrial dysfunction, and no other country has anything like this. Two thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues today (66%), 50 years ago that number was less than 1%.
We've gone from 1% to 66% in America in 50 years. 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, and 50% of our children. 120 years ago, when somebody was obese, They were so rare, they were sent to the circus. They were literally there, with case reports done about them.
Obesity was almost unknown in Japan, childhood obesity rate was 3% compared to 50% now. Half of Americans have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. 50 years ago, juvenile diabetes was effectively non/existent.
A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire career, a 40 or 50 year career. Today one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic. The mitochondrial disorder that caused diabetes, also causing Alzheimer's, which is now classified as diabetes, and it's costing this country more than our military budget.
Every year there's been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never existed before, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette's Syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, Autism. In the year 2000, the Autism rate was one in 1500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36, according to CDC; nationally, nobody's talking about this.
One in every 22 kids in California has Autism, and this is a crisis that 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military. What is happening to our country, and why isn't this in the headlines every single day?
There's nobody else in the world that is experiencing this. This is only happening in America. Fifty years ago the autism rates were about one in 10,000. This generation it is one in 34. I'll repeat in California, one and 22. Why are we letting this happen? Why are we allowing this to happen to our children?
These are the most precious assets that we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them? About 18% of American teens now have fatty liver disease. That's like one out of every five. 50 years ago that disease only affected late stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing, in both the young and the old, young adult cancers are up 79%.
One in four American women is on antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis, and 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, and half a million children on SSRIs.
So what's causing this suffering? I'll name two culprits, first and the worst is ultra processed food. About 70% of American children's diet is ultra processed, that means industrial manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
Laboratory scientists who form many of them formerly worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and 80s. They deployed 1000s of scientists to figure out chemicals, new chemicals, to make the food more addictive. And these ingredients didn't exist 100 years ago. Humans aren't biologically adapted to eat them.
Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe, but are ubiquitous in American processed foods. The second culprit is specific toxic chemicals additives in our food, our medicine, in our environment. These pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies.
These assault on our children's cells and hormones is unrelenting problem. Many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors. America's puberty rate is now occurring at age 10 to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the earth.
Breast cancer is also estrogen driven, and now strikes one in eight women. We are mass poisoning all of our children and our adults. Considering the grievous human cause of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy, as it is crippling the nation's finances.
50 years ago, our country has spent $0 on chronic disease. Today, government health care spending is almost all for chronic disease, and it's double the military budget. It is the fastest budget item in the federal budget. Chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole, costing at least $4,000,000,000,000. 5 times our military budget.
And that's a 20% drag on everything we do and everything we aspire to. Our minority communities suffer disproportionately, as these people rely on the cheaper fast foods, and package highly-processed foods. We are poisoning the poor. We are systematically poisoning minorities across this country.
Industry lobbyists have made sure that most of the food stamp lunch program, about 70% of food stamps and 70 or 77% of school lunches are processed foods. There are no vegetables. There's nothing that you would want to eat. We are just poisoning the poorest citizens, and that's why they have the highest chronic disease burden of any country, and the highest in the world.
The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry. These policies are destroying small farms, and they're destroying our soils. We give about eight times as much in subsidies to these poisons than we do to fruits and vegetables.
It makes no sense if we want a healthy country. The good news is that we can change all this. We can change it very, very quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that, we need to do three things.
First, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies.
Second, we need to change incentives in our healthcare system.
Third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again.
80% of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These people appointed to new panel of NIH to decide the food recommendations are all people who are from the industry. They're all people who are from the processed food companies. They're deciding what Americans think is healthy and the recommendations on the food pyramid are what goes to our school lunch programs, which also go into the Food Stamp programs.
They are all corrupted and conflicted individuals. These agencies—the FDA, USDA, and CDC—are all controlled by giant for-profit corporations. Seventy-five percent of the FDA funding doesn't come from taxpayers; it comes from pharma, and pharma executives, consultants, and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies.
A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. American children or adults get sick with a chronic condition, they're put on medications for their entire life. Medicare starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month, and it's being recommended for children as young as six. To offer it for the condition of obesity that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago, and 74% of Americans are obese.
And in our country, the recommendation now is for ozempic to children at age six. Novo Nordisk is the biggest company in Europe, and virtually its entire value is based upon its projections of what it's going to sell to America at a $3 trillion cost that is going to bankrupt our country.
For a fraction of that amount, we could buy organic food for every American family three meals a day, and eliminate diabetes altogether. This could bring healthy food back to school lunches and save our country.
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