27 STARTLING INSIGHTS ON THE STATE OF AMERICA'S PHYSICAL HEALTH

Article by LiveReal Agents Grace and Thomas

What is the state of America’s physical health?

Why is it this way? And what can we do about it?

These are clear, basic questions.

Yet the information we often get along these lines is murky. Speculation and guesswork are rampant. Uncertainty is pervasive. Clarity is rare.

Sounds like a job for your intrepid LiveReal Agents.

In late 2024, a Wisconsin Senator gathered a select group of medical doctors, authors, psychologists, and businesspeople to Washington, D.C., to clarify the situation. Each attendee had been exploring these questions for years. The event was called “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion.”

The following contains a few select nuggets from that roundtable, the full video of which can be found here.

There’s a chance that some statistics, broad points, arguments and so on might be off. But if even half of the below is even close to being accurate, it’s worth seriously looking into.

The below asks the three key questions:

1) What is it?
2) Why it is that way? and
3) What can we do about it?

What is the state of our physical health?

Here are a few notable reference points.

Early-onset cancer has increased by 79% over the past 3 decades.
In the 1960s, about 1% of children had chronic disease. Today, it may be as high as 60%.
Autism has quadrupled in the last 20 years. In 1980, only 3-4 children out of 100,000 kids were autistic. Today, it’s roughly 1 in 36. For children born in California, it’s 1 in 22.
Pancreatic cancer has doubled over the past 20 years.
About 18% of American teenagers have fatty liver disease, a disease that a few decades ago only affected elderly late-stage alcoholics.
One out of every three children is either diabetic or pre-diabetic.
Obesity was virtually unknown a while ago. In 1974, less than 10% of the American population was overweight or obese. Today, roughly 75% are obese or overweight. In the 1980s-90s, youth obesity tripled from 5%-15%. Obesity is on track to prevent smoking as the #1 preventable cause of cancer. In comparison, Japan’s rate of childhood obesity is 3%.
Americans spend four times what Italians spend on healthcare, yet Italians live 7.4 years longer on average.
Infertility has been going up 1% every year, while testosterone levels and sperm counts have been falling for years. Sperm counts in teens are 50% of what they were a few generations ago.
During Covid, the United States had the highest body count of any country in the world.
Americans now have the highest rate of chronic disease on earth.
77% of Americans of serving age are too disabled to serve in the military.
One in four American women is on antidepressant medication.
40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis.
About .5% of our brains, by weight, are now composed of plastic. Eight billion tons of plastic have been produced just in the last 100 years, which later breaks down into “microplastics.” Microplastics are now filling our food, our water, and even our air, where we inhale them, to the degree that they later wind up in our brains.
Puberty typically takes place in American girls around 10-13 years – the earliest puberty rate of any continent. This is 6 years younger than it was in 1900.
Europeans live 5 years longer, have half our obesity rates, have significantly lower chronic disease, have markedly better mental health, and spend as little as 1/3rd as much on healthcare per person.
America has the most overmedicated, sickest population in the world. Instead of having “the best healthcare system,” some say “American health is being destroyed” and that “We are in the midst of an epidemic.”

These are just a few reference points.

Much of this can make things seem a bit bleak.

But the story doesn't end there. As some say, “We know why these diseases are going up. And we know how to fix it.”

Why is it like this?

Modern healthcare is a vast, complex system with many variables.

But under scrutiny, many features become clear to those up the challenge of looking closely.

Apparently, not many do that.

Few ask “Why?” or look deeper.

“No one is talking about the root causes.”

Dr. Marty Makary, surgical oncologist and Chair in Gastrointestinal Surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said this:

"I'm trained in gastrointestinal surgery. My group at Johns Hopkins does more pancreatic cancer surgery than any hospital in the United States. But at no point in the last 20 years has anyone stopped to ask, ‘Why has pancreatic cancer doubled over those 20 years?’ Who's working on that? Who's looking into it? We’re so busy in our healthcare system billing, and coding, and paying each other, and every stakeholder has their gigantic lobby in D.C., and everybody’s making a lot of money, except for one stakeholder: the American citizen…We are not talking about the root causes…”

But some who have asked “Why?” have landed on two key “culprits.”

Culprit #1: Ultra-processed foods.

“Ultra-processed foods” – defined as food that’s manufactured in a factory and often includes artificially-added ingredients such as sugar, grain, seed oils, and various chemicals – currently make up 70% of our diets. 73% of supermarket foods are made up of ultra-processed foods.
Many of the ingredients used in ultra-processed foods didn’t even exist hundreds of years ago.

Culprit #2: Toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment.

There are more than 80,000 toxins that have entered our food, water, air, and homes, created by various industries, many of which are banned in Europe. They’re sometimes known to alter our gene expression, alter our microbiome composition and the lining of our gut, and disrupt our hormones.

There are also heavy metals like aluminum and lead present in our food, baby formula, personal care products, soil, and many of the mandated medications like vaccines. Some of these are neurotoxic and inflammatory.

We’re eating more artificial food dyes.

Consumption of artificial food dyes has increased by 500% in the last 50 years. 43% of products marketed to children contain artificial dyes.

We’re using more pesticides.

We spray over 70 million pounds of synthetic pesticides in the U.S. every year. 99% of the farmland in the United States is sprayed with synthetic pesticides. Many of the pesticides come from China and Germany, and these invisible, tasteless chemicals are strongly linked to autism, ADHD, sex hormone disruption, thyroid disease, sperm dysfunction, Alzheimer’s, dementia, birth defects, cancer, obesity, liver dysfunction, female infertility, and more.

The modern food industry was created in part by the cigarette industry.

For a long time, we used tobacco products without understanding their toxic effects. By the 1990s, the two biggest food companies in the world were Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds – two cigarette companies. They were some of the biggest employers of scientists. They worked to engineer cigarettes to be as addictive as possible.

Eventually, we started to understand the harmful effects of cigarettes and tobacco. Those tobacco companies lost sales, and were in trouble.

So they moved over to the food industry. The cigarette industries purchased all the big food companies and used the same playbook. They employed laboratory scientists to “weaponize” our food, create the classic “Food Pyramid” (which prompted us to eat mostly carbs and sugar), and invented new chemicals to create ultra-processed foods that were more addictive.

Our food is engineered to be addictive.

If you wonder why "no one can eat just one" or why sometimes it's so easy to just eat the whole bag, per the above, much of what we now consume as food is actually Frankenfood – chemical products that were deliberately created by scientists not for the purpose of nourishing our bodies, but to sell more food.

There’s the Scientific-Industrial Complex.

Due to humans employing science in the food game to its own ends, the focus has shifted away from patient care to corporate gain. Many of our health problems are unintended consequences of the industrialization of agriculture and food. Corporations can earn immense profits for their financial growth, yet they bear none of the downside costs of poisoning our population.

The referees have been bought off.

Our health agencies are largely influenced by the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. The medical education community is largely controlled by the pharmaceutical companies. This means the healthcare system isn’t broken; it’s rigged.

Professional organizations that we get out practice guidelines from, like the American Diabetes Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have taken tens of millions of dollars from Coke, Cadbury, processed food companies, and vaccine manufacturers like Moderna. 80% of NIH (National Institute of Health) grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. 95% of the people who created the recent USDA food guidelines for America had significant conflicts of interest with the food industry. 75% of the funding from the FDA doesn’t come from taxpayers; it comes from corporate funding. The FDA, USDA, and CDC are all controlled by for-profit companies. As a result, they now advance the agendas of the pharmaceutical/food industry.

Big Pharma and Big Media are also a little too friendly.

Big pharma is the biggest advertisers in most media. This creates a conflict of interest. What news program is going to risk saying anything negative about those who are paying their salaries?

The incentives are way off.

Every institution that touches our health in America makes more money when we’re sick and less when we’re healthy. Viewed as a purely financial asset, “The most valuable asset in the country today is a sick child.”

We’re now all unwilling guinea pigs.

As a result of the above, for the last 50 years, corporations have been running the largest uncontrolled science experiment ever done on humanity, without their consent.

“Food” has become “Frankenfood.”

85-100% of corn and soy crops are now genetically modified.

For a more in-depth look at one example, 80% of GMOs are engineered to withstand glyphosate, a herbicide and crop desiccant that was discovered by Monsanto in 1970. Roughly 280 million pounds of glyphosate are sprayed on U.S. crops annually (as of 2024). Glyphosate is now classified as a carcinogen by World Health Organization (https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-glyphosate/). It also isn’t labeled on our food.

In 1925, Bayer merged with five other German companies to form IG Farben, the world’s largest chemical and pharmaceutical company. Due to its role in the Nazi war effort and involvement in the Holocaust, IG Farben was broken up again after WWII. In 2016, Bayer purchased the multinational corporation Monsanto. In June 2020, Bayer agreed to settle over 100,000 lawsuits over the use of the herbicide brand “RoundUp,” agreeing to pay $8.8-$9.6 billion to settle those claims and $1.5 billion for any future claims. (Source)

The company later genetically engineered plants to be tolerant to glyphosate, known as “Roundup Ready” crops. As a result, glyphosate is now in 90% of food.

It raises questions. Why does an agro-chemical company decide where so much of our food comes from?

It’s always possible to purchase organic food from other sources. But that means Americans are being forced to pay more for food that isn’t poisoned.

The foxes often guard the hen-house.

When brand-new chemicals are introduced into our food supply, who does the testing to decide whether they’re safe or not?

As of 2024, it’s the food manufacturers.

In other words, the FDA allows food manufacturers to introduce brand-new chemicals into our food supply without adequate testing. (Most Americans would probably be surprised to hear this.)

Food is created differently in other places.

To answer the question of why citizens of Europe are often healthier than Americans, part of the answer could be how their food is made.

In Europe, when it comes to new chemicals that are added into food and deciding what’s safe or not, the basic idea is “guilty until proven innocent.” A food manufacturer must prove that its products are safe (“GRAS” or “generally recognized as safe”) before they’re allowed to distribute them widely.

In America, the method is “innocent until proven guilty.” Food manufacturers are generally allowed to declare that a given chemical is safe, and start selling it. If a product generally proves to be harmful – which can sometimes only happen after decades of testing, lawsuits, and PR campaigns (see cigarettes) – then they’re withdrawn from the market, sometimes after making billions.

Bad chemicals for us, good ones for them.

Per the above, American food companies sometimes sell the same exact products overseas without certain chemicals, but serve Americans the more toxic version. The same product can have one set of ingredients for the “American version,” and another for the U.K., Canadian, Australian etc version. (Examples: fast-food french fries, Gatorade, Doritos, Froot Loops, etc.)

We use over 10,000 food additives here in the US. In Europe, only 400 are approved.

The Pima Indians offer a good case study.

The Pima Indians lived on a traditional diet and were generally healthy. The Arizona Pima then started eating standard American food. They now have the highest rates of diabetes and obesity in North America. An estimated 50% of Pima adults are obese, and of those, 95% have diabetes type 2. (https://foodfactsandfads.com/2020/06/25/the-pima-indians-a-study-of-lifestyle-and-obesity/)

Those who settled in Mexico, on the other hand, and stayed with their traditional diet, remained much healthier.

The study results sometimes depend on who is studying.

When studying processed food to determine whether or not certain food is harmful, the process is supposed to be objective and scientific.

But there’s a huge difference depending on who funds the studies.

If the studies are independently funded, 82% show harm from processed food. But if the studies are industry-sponsored (that is, paid for by corporations that sell food and etc), 93% of them suggest no harm.

If you ask the folks who make sugar cereals, sugar cereals are good for you.

The dominant medical model reduces us down parts.

Decades ago, John D. Rockefeller/Halstead funded medical schools based on the model of an intervention-based system, which emphasized invasive surgical procedures as the best model and stigmatized holistic & nutritional remedies. It’s reductionistic in the sense that it downplays the body as an interconnected system instead of reducing it to a series of disconnected parts. The effects of this can be dehumanizing. A patient can be seen – and treated – as a collection of symptoms instead of as a person.

We commit category errors.

We sometimes assume all problems are biological. This is due to our materialistic worldview, where the governing assumption is that physical matter determines everything else.

Based on that assumption, we imagine that we need to study biology more, and more, and more, and the only possible solution must lie exclusively in that direction.

But the entire premise could be mistaken, which would invalidate at least some of the efforts that are based on it. If the problem is coming from the environment, for example, we don’t need to understand every tiny facet of biology, and we’re barking up the wrong tree. Even in other instances, the idea that all problems stem from chemical imbalances, trauma, or stress is wholly insufficient to explain what we’re seeing.

The results of this can lead to looking for solutions in all the wrong places.

Doctors have been sidelined.

Doctors can sometimes find their roles weakened by bureaucrats. The move toward corporate medicine and mass consolidation has meant more and more doctors being told to put their heads down, “Do your job billing!” and “Stay busy coding short visits.” It feeds a bureaucracy where people become a process, and patients are treated as tiny cogs in vast, impersonal machines. “We’ve not given doctors the time, research, or resources to deal with these chronic diseases.”

Medical error and medications are the 3rd Leading Cause of death in the U.S.

(We don’t see this point advertised on many commercials during the ball game, for some reason.)

Prevention counts for only $.02 of every research dollar spent.

Preventing people from getting sick in the first place could potentially save a lot of money and suffering. But for some, that would be less profitable. Less than 5% of the budget of the National Institute of Health focuses on nutrition & mental health. Some say this is no accident. If we follow the money, for example, we might find that lobbyists for food manufacturers, for examples, might not benefit when certain root causes of certain conditions are discovered.

Kids today spend less outdoors than maximum security prisoners.

American children are getting less time outdoors now than a maximum security prisoner. On average, adults spend 93% of their time indoors, even though we know from the science that separation from sunlight destroys our circadian biology, and circadian biology dictates our cellular biology.

Sleep deprivation doesn't help, either.

Five nights of sleep deprivation can induce full-blown pre-diabetes. I learned nothing about sleep, and we’re getting about 20% less sleep on average than we were 100 years ago.

There’s a connection between food and mental health.

300k people study: those who eat ultra-process foods daily are 3x more likely to struggle with their mental health

Healthcare is still one of the top reasons for bankruptcy.

If a system is designed to drain bank accounts, well, sometimes that system can become really good at its job. Hospitals and healthcare administrators can become very wealthy, but that can come at the expense of the rest of us.

What can we do about it?

Again, the above paints a bleak picture.

The good news: the situation is fixable.

We know how to fix it, or at least take some big steps in that direction.

We can vote with our wallets.

What Americans buy – or don’t buy – might be the fastest and most effective tool that exists.

If we decide to stop buying ultra-processed foods and start buying whole, unprocessed, non-chemically-altered foods, entire industries could transform almost overnight.

The pharmaceutical industry is the largest funder of news, medical research, medical schools, politicians, and more. It spends five times more in politics than the oil industry. We can support institutions that aren’t part of this, and pull our support from those that are.

We can walk more.

Food and exercise can sometimes be the most effective treatments.

Walking 7,000 steps a day slashes by 40-60% our risk of Alzheimer’s, dementia, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

The average American walks only 3,500 steps per day.

We can elect individuals who understand this, and communicate with them.

We can help elect those who get the above and are willing to act on it.

Then we can let them know what we think. For example, we can urge them to get rid of blatant corruption. We can urge them to stop USDA officials who make nutritional guidelines from taking money from food companies. We can urge them to separate “food” and “drugs” from the Food and Drug Administration, so the individuals in charge of drugs aren’t also in charge of food, and so the FDA won’t be funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

We can urge them to help ease the burden on doctors, so they have more freedom and control to treat and heal as they see fit. We can urge them to help remove insurance bureaucracy from having power over real medical professionals and to get more nutrition courses in medical schools.

We can ask them to help initiate flexible healthcare accounts.

We can let them know that we need to change the incentive structure so that it no longer rewards bad food, bad drugs, or disease.

In conclusion: it’s time to smell some coffee.

Difficult situations can make us confused, timid, and sleepy.

They can also put us on full alert, and force us to get into gear.

A shift toward “full alert” can mean re-prioritizing common sense.

It’s possible to appreciate real science without promoting an overreliance on scientific studies at the expense of common sense. We don’t need ten years of studies to know that we shouldn’t have plastic in our brains, consume toxic chemicals, or witness dramatic downturns in almost every measure of physical health.

It’s one thing to be positive and optimistic. It’s another to live in denial. Natural optimism doesn’t need to translate into the hope that technology alone will necessarily save us. Real optimism means having the strength and willingness to face reality.

Much of the discussion isn’t about mere nutrition, habits, or even corruption.

Much of it boils down to becoming stronger as a person.

It all points toward bigger issues.

The discussion about physical health echoes the same discussion about “mental health” or psychological health.

And ultimately, it’s a spiritual matter.

One of the biggest applause lines of the event came from Dr. Casey Means:

“This is a spiritual crisis. We are choosing death over life. We are choosing darkness over light.”

As a single line, it works. But it also opens other questions – and questions that aren’t small. Where do we go from there?

It points us toward other areas of battle.

And that seems to be where the action is taking place: body, mind, heart, and soul.

It’s a good time to move, and to move on all fronts.

Note: The information referenced above came from the roundtable, “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion,” which can be seen in full here. The speakers at the event, and the source of most of the above information, were Alex Clark, Bigham Buhler, Calley Means, Dr. Casey Means, Dr. Chris Palmer, Courtney Swan, Jillian Michaels, Jordan Peterson, Dr. Marty Makary, Grace Price, Jason Karp, Max Lugavere, Mikhaila Peterson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Sen. Ron Johnson, and Vani Hari. The above also is a summary, compilation, and reorganization of many statements from the above for the purposes of entertainment, and isn’t medical or legal advice.