Paul Saladino· MD
we have now 196 million people well this is really what we see with heart disease and with cancer and with type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome and obesity and we can go through those if you want to because i've investigated the history of those but they will then we can you know talk about how the diet has changed over that time paul if you want to go you want me to go through that but in a nutshell um i will say that here's what's happened is is if i'll just i'll just hit the the highlights here in that period of time you know the diet the entire diet has almost become it's become 75 processed in other words so those there's four things basic basically that have changed in 200 years and it's sugar refined wheat flour or refined uh cereal grains which are nutrient deficient vegetable oils which we didn't have and trans fats and between 1866 and 2009 we went basically from almost zero processed foods the only thing we had in 1865 was sugar in really small quantities and by 2009 63 of the american diet is processed food and 75 percent of the of americans diet is i'm sorry 63 would be considered ultra processed 75 is processed the world's diet now is considered 75 processed food meaning it's mostly made up of those four ingredients sugars refined wheat flour uh vegetable oils and trans fats those are nutrient deficient and then there's a great deal of toxicity associated particularly with the seed oils with the trans fats and and if the if if it's high enough the fructose component of sugar so you put all that together and you have a toxic milieu you have a toxic diet that is you know driving pro-oxidative it's pro-oxidative pro-inflammatory toxic and nutrient-deficient meaning it's deficient in the vitamins and minerals that were are so incredibly important to our health and to you know not only to our growth but to our health in adulthood and i think that if medical and nutritional history were overlaid like this in medical school medical students would wake up in ways that they never have and these to me are the most interesting pieces of the detective story because i really think that's what we've become as medical detectives you and i and many other physicians now are medical detectives we are looking at an epidemic a pandemic of chronic disease and so i think about it in much the same way if you look at the incidence of chronic disease pick any chronic disease heart disease stroke alzheimer's disease cancer diabetes obesity age-related macular degeneration which happens to young people too they're all tracking in the same way essentially unheard of 150 years ago unheard of essentially unheard of indigenous cultures that live without processed foods and yet rampant in westernized culture and if you look at the rates of obesity i've spoken about this before obesity and overweight 70 of the us population 13 to 14 diabetes it's rising in asia heart disease is rising everything is skyrocketing in the last 100 to 150 years