Editor,
Saturday morning’s PBS programming offered an M.D. who wants Americans to be healthy. He said only 3 percent of us are really healthy. He is probably right.
I, a child of the ‘60s learned about the “white death” (sugar), the dangers of meat, chicken and eggs with antibiotics, vegetables sprayed with pesticides, and fruits & grains intoxicated with herbicides. I would not have made it to being 80-years-old if I had not started eating healthily.
I am so grateful to our Farmers’ Market. Those women and men work so very hard to bring us truly nutritious, organic, chemical-free food. I spend all of our food money there and I would give more if I had it.
So, why are most Americans so unhealthy? It is not only our ignorance about what is added to our food, how much of it is contaminated, and how dangerous all these pesticides are… it is that our government subsidizes the sugar industry, President Cheatolini loves the president of Dow Chemical, and, there are so fewer agriculture inspectors to assure the public of clean, non-polluted food.
There never has been a serious attempt by our government to offer organic products or support organic growers or make sure agribusiness is honest and clean. The white men who run our country have traditionally been in the pockets of the rich, the growers, agribusiness, the banks, the Farm Bureaus, those who pollute for profit.
We need a single-payer healthcare system like Bernie is sponsoring.
Until we throw out the money-grubbers and change our government to truly represent all of us, we can at least wean ourselves off the poisons of sugar, bacon, soda pop, alcohol and cigarettes, lard, meat, salt, processed food, and fast food. We can go back to our great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ ways of eating: vegetables, fruit, beans and rice, meat raised without poisons, yard eggs and plain, old cold water, sometimes in herbal teas.
We are addicted and it is not easy to get off any drugs, but living a healthy life and living on into old age outside of nursing homes, out of wheelchairs, and able to enjoy each beautiful day and cool night is worth it.
T.A. Laughlin