With all the present news about our health care crisis, it is worth asking how we got into it. The culprit is history, not conspiracy.

Consider that the latest several hundred years witnessed a huge technology change from the prior several hundred millenia in which we evolved from cave men.

Item: Nearly all of the presently treatable medical conditions were unknown when our average life span was about 20 to 35 years. Blame not only ignorance, but the fact that our ancestors died before the symptoms could show up.

Item: Before refrigeration, non alcoholic juices did not exist much beyond harvest. Before water treatments, most people of all ages had to drink beer or dilute wine to prevent ghastly diseases, such as cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever. Now, heavy use of alcoholic beverages is known to damage heart, liver, brain, and to help cause Alzheimer’s. By the way, tea is also a good prevention for water borne diseases.

Item: Before automobiles and electric appliances, good “health foods” included fatty sausages. Fat helped to preserve foods, allowed compact transport of a day’s calories, and let us stay alive without spending all day grazing, as cows do. Now, being overweight and using tobacco are the two major contributors to nearly every disease, including blindness and cancer.

Item: Fit or fat used to be a choice only for royalty, priests, government employees, and wealthy merchants. Everyone else got a lot of exercise, whether they wanted to or not.

Item: Salt used to be very precious, away from where it was harvested in some way. Too little salt in the diet means lack of stamina, poor resistance to heat, digestive and excretion problems, heart attack, and so forth. Now, excess salt and sodium based preservatives are a major contributor to high blood pressure, strokes, heart attacks, some forms of cancer.

Item: Refined sugar is a relatively recent invention. Old time foods were made sweeter with honey, dried fruits, and so forth. Present per capita consumption of sweeteners is now about 25 times the level of 1901, and growing. Prepared foods at the grocery store now have sugar, fructose, honey in things that taste quite good without that stuff, thank you. These additives not only help make us fat, but cause medical conditions in children that are then treated with drugs. That is DUMB. Low calorie sweeteners (aspartame, saccharin, and sucralose) are no better, because they can cause the symptoms of some really serious diseases, such as cancers, lupus, and multiple sclerosis.

Recognition of a problem situation can be the first step towards resolving it. We have done that.

The next step ought to be correctly identifying causes, so we can deal with them. We are NOT doing very well on that part. Read the rest of this entry »