We Live in a Food Simulation. Change or Die.

Once upon a time, we ate to sustain ourselves. Now the food itself is toxic.

A Recipe for Disaster

What do you get when you mix:

A food industry fueled by government subsidies of crappy foods
A group of bought and paid for scientists
A Federal Trade Commission bought and paid for by the food industry

...drum roll....

An obese country with a population that is sick and dying.

Your Favorite Burger isn't a Burger

If you have a guilty pleasure that you indulge in every once in a while it's at least knowing whats in it.

Let's take a cheeseburger for instance.

The Founder of Onnit, Aubrey Marcus, describes the modern fast food cheeseburger as..

It was meat and bacon that had been shot full of hormones and antibiotics and raised on Monsanto corn. It was yellow "cheese" that was somewhere in between milk and Nickelodeon "gak," engineered not for flavor but for its ability to "melt" over the "all-beef" patty like a coat of high-gloss latex paint.It was sugary BBQ sauce for tang, and breaded onion fried in canola oil for crunch, all of it sandwiched between two fluffy slices of refined blood-sugar-spiking carbohydrates.

Tough reality. We live in a food simulation.

Foods that taste, smell, and look like food, but aren't food.

We know about the opioid industry.

It was incredibly destructive, ruining countless number of lives and tearing apart families through addiction (Both of my half-brothers died early due to opioid addiction. It sucks.)

But what if I told you Food Industry (Big Food) does more damage than opoiods?

Would you believe me?

Let's find out why.

Who is Big Food?

Similar to Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, and Big Oil, Big Food is characterized by the domination of a major market by just a few large companies. In this case, the industry is food being marketed and sold to consumers by companies like Kellogg's, Nestlé, and General Mills. (Big Food: What Is It and How Is the Industry Deceiving You?)

If you look at a grocery store aisle, the vast majority of items are owned by the same handful of companies. It doesn't seem that way because there are different brand names, but they all ladder up to the same umbrella companies. This is called the illusion of choice. The foods are made with crappy ingredients, cheaply made due to government subsidy. The worst part is they're marketed as healthy.

As a result, America is in the midst of an obesity epidemic, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting the highest‐ever population obesity rate of 37.7% for 2013–2014.

Low‐income communities often lack basic resources such as nutritional literacy and access to affordable fruits and vegetables, which compounds their risk factors for chronic disease.

Uncomfortable Truths about our Health

In the past 25 years the average American man has gained twenty-nine pounds and the average woman gained twenty-six. Between 1989 and 2012 Americans collectively spent more than $1 trillion on weight loss. In that same period of time, obesity grew by more than 50 percent and extreme obesity doubled.

Adult-onset diabetes had to change its name to type 2 diabetes because so many children are now being diagnosed with what was formerly considered a metabolic disease of grown-ups.

Every % increase in ultra-processed foods increases cancer by 1.2% and diabetes by 1.5%.

75% of the world's food produced from only twelve plant and five animal species, the lack of biodiversity in our diet is failing to support our health.

The Scale of Big Food

Grosses $1.9T a year.
$700B in gross profit.

Big Food wants to make big money. So much that many ingredients used in the US are not allowed in the European Union because of their negative impacts on human health.

The food sold in the US is generally of a lower quality than that sold in the European Union, with fewer whole ingredients and more additives, resulting in a less healthy product.

Food makes the disease. Big pharma is happy to treat it. Food is twice as lucrative as pharma.

People have to understand what's going on and why everyone's getting sick. This won't change until we make a move.

Prior to 1975 the profit margin of Big Food was 1%, at that time our population was going up 1%. Since 1975 the profit margin is 5% with lowering birth rates.

Translated: Big food sells more food to fewer people. They spend millions to develop addictive "foods".

What is a Government Food-Subsidy?

There's a simple rule in economics of government that says if you want more of something, subsidize that thing.

If you want less of something tax that thing. Simple carrot and stick approach. We see how that plays out in our food.

If the farmer grows corn, the government will pay them a certain amount of money per acre. If they grow soy, they'll get a certain amount of money per acre. If they grow fruits and vegetables, they get nothing.

Farmers are incentivized to grow corn and soy. They are not incentivized to grow fruits and vegetables. That's why when you go to the store it's so much more expensive for you to get organic raspberries than it is for you to get anything that is made from corn or soy.

The trend of farm subsidies in the US Over time, by crop

The government puts its finger on the scale to distorting the free market in favor for those crops. This encourages farmers to take actions regardless of outcome because they'll sell the product regardless if it's profitable or not.

Let me repeat that.

The government incentivizes farmers to grow crops that poison our population. It encourages farmers to grow as much food as possible. We grow 2x the amount of calories the population needs. 3 crops get 70% of the money, ~$6B a year. Thats corn, wheat and soybean.

Shoddy Science.

There's something in Food called the Snackwell effect which was named after Nabisco's line of fat-free snacks. They found by replacing the fat in the cookies they created that they'd get consumers to purchase and consume more cookies than they would have if the cookies had fat in them.

This leads to worse outcomes for consumers.

Buying off Scientists and Creating Shadow Groups

The following are a handful of Food industry sponsored groups that influence congress

Academy of Dietetics gets 90% of operating budget from Big Food. Obviously won't bite the hand that feeds them. Sounds like a nice organization, but its just big food.
School Nutrition Association. Down-right evil. They run all the school cafeterias in America. They are the largest fast food franchise in the world.
Citizens for Health
American Legislative Exchange council

They call themselves Grassroots. They're not. They're funded by big food.

Marketing to Children

Is it legal? Yes. Is it ethical? High unethical. We know from studies that children can't tell the difference between the commercial and the TV show until 8 years of age so they don't know if they're being marketed to.

Socioeconomic Trends

The healthiest people are the higher earners, who have time to get educated and have time to cook. The poorer class are the ones who suffer from obesity. Obesity is the leading cause of chronic disease. Chronic diseases eat up the majority of the cost of US healthcare. We pay the most out of any country for our country. There's medicare for the elderly and medicaid for the poor. We all pay the bill.

If we started to think about how to create better outcomes for everybody the government would give subsidies for farmers creating better foods.

If you go anywhere you'll see foods that have long shelf life like sodas, chips, candies. You don't see anything healthy.

Extra corn turned into ethanol, which is now mandated to put into our gasoline. Ethanol has a reputation for clogging engines.

Make the Scale of Deaths Easy to Understand.

To give you an idea of the scale of deaths due to heart disease take a look at this chart.

You can see we have ~17M worldwide heart disease deaths per year. That's 46,575 deaths per day. That's 1,940 deaths per hour. That's 32 deaths per minute. That's 1 death every 2 seconds.

19 Foods to Avoid like the Plague:

Doritos
Fried Sweet Food
Ramen
Fruit Loops
Milk Shakes
White Chocolate
French Fries
Ice Cream
Salty Fried Foods
Flavoured Yogurt
Donuts
BBQ Sauce
Margarine
Frozen Pizza
Mayonnaise (unless Primal Kitchen)
Nachos
Hot Dogs (unless real meat)
Skittles and M&M's
Fake Dark Chocolate

Learn more why these foods are bad for you here.

What Can We Do About It?

Get educated on what is food and what is not food by filling your social feeds with people who are talking about food.
Create a practice of reading the ingredients on the back of the box.
Avoid foods that have ingredients you can't pronounce.