How food will save the world
Ushering in a golden age of perfect health and good tans
Addressing your own health is important, but there’s a limit to how healthy you can be in a sick society. This article is about how to make society healthier.
People are in bad shape.
And not just because they are overweight and pale.
Mentally, spiritually, emotionally, economically— many innately feel the profound challenges faced by our society, while the more farsighted among us are eager to implement solutions to avoid disaster.
Such attempts— which usually involve exorbitant spending on every type of “social issue” imaginable— vary widely, but all of them will fail for the same reasons that doctors are unable to treat chronic diseases: they all fail to address the root cause of the problem.
This problem is the most fundamental, and therefore least suspected, aspect of life— food.
The Problems
Some of the most obvious issues we have include the following:
Public Health
The U.S. spends $4.1 trillion on healthcare annually. That is almost 20% of our entire economy.
I’d estimate that the vast majority of that, say 90%, is on the treatment of chronic illnesses which are preventable (the remainder is on acute injuries from accidents).
Preventable means “it didn’t have to happen”. Cancer, diabetes, etc.
It’s pretty clear that the right diet, plus a few other minor environmental changes, has the potential to eliminate most of this.
And the cost to society is massive— not just the money; but the pain, suffering, and lack of productivity that plagues a chronically ill society can not even be expressed in dollar amounts.
If you’re reading this, you are likely on the healthier end of this spectrum.
But imagine if you weren’t. Not only would you be in physical pain, your body’s lack of capability might lead you to feel pretty depressed, leading to…
Mental Illness
There is this strange distinction commonly made between mental and physical illness.
Not only is the brain a physical organ, and so nutritional deficiencies cause it to perform poorly, leading to lack of happiness and other less common mental illnesses.
But the lack of physical health also leads to even more depression and anxiety over the fact that your body isn’t working right.
This incapacity of the body and mind makes it harder to be productive, particularly in a world where technological understanding is required to make a living.
Lack of capacity in this regard of course leads to…
Unemployment
Lack of productive and meaningful work causes people to lose a sense of pride and vitality, and of course is a problem that must be solved.
But this is very difficult when many people are not healthy enough to properly perform the functions required by many lines of work.
A great example of this is the fact that 71% of young Americans are not healthy enough for military service.
The military— fighting— that most basic of human functions— is unable to be performed by most people in the country.
By addressing the basic health of people, they become fit to have a job and provide for their families.
Without doing so, people become impoverished, and thus leading to increased…
Crime
Today, over 57% of criminals in the US are poor,
People like to blame this on the poverty itself, but other countries have populations that are way poorer, and much less prone to crime.
What about poverty causes those whom it affects to become criminals?
Perhaps, as Weston Price observed, it has something to do with health.
In Nutritional and Physical Degeneration, he describes a few observations about the state of criminals in the early 1900s.
Nearly all of those observed, he states, had some indicators of obvious nutritional deficiencies that led to developmental disabilities.
The presence of such issues was far higher in criminal populations than in the population as a whole.
If you think of the environments in which the modern poor of America are raised, it’s easy to see how their upbringing was plagued by nutritional deficiencies.
Many of the poor people in the US have been eating a seed oil rich and nutrient deficient diet for generations.
Poor nutrition leads to bad health, and if you follow the consequences from bad health as we’ve done in this article, crime is a natural and obvious conclusion.
But poor nutrition is not the only contributor to bad health. There is also…
Ecology
Our treatment of the environment has led to many problems. To name a few:
Carbon balance upsetting ecological homeostasis (acid rain, acid oceans, etc.)
Environmental toxins from industrial technology
Air and water pollution from energy and manufacturing
Material waste (plastic bags, old batteries, styrofoam, litter, etc.)
Soil degradation from destructive farming methods
Wireless radiation from personal and commercial devices
All of these contribute to air and water that is unfit for animal life. It poisons us directly, as well as the plants and animals we eat, further poisoning us again.
You can eat as healthy as you want, but it is very hard to avoid environmental pollution, particularly if you live in a city, which 83% of Americans do.
Fix the environment, and you fix the second half of the health equation.
The Solution
These problems are pretty obvious, and solving them is the focus, in one way or another, of almost all political and social programs.
Homeless programs and shelters, public rehab facillities and halfway houses, decriminalization or weaker law enforcement, carbon credits and taxes, electric cars, banning plastic bags, cancer research, and psychiatric medications are all examples of such attempts.
How many non-profits and NGOs spend how much money on the above projects, which only exacerbate the problems, while spending billions of dollars in the process?
Here’s an idea. Take those billions of dollars and spend them implementing a food system with the following characteristics:
Numerous small, decentralized farms that practice organic and regenerative agriculture
Efficient distribution of such food such that everyone has access to it
The regulation and elimination of all synthetic processed and industrial foods
The Benefits
Organic and regenerative farming uses much less energy and produces far less environmental pollution.
This requires more manual labor, which solves unemployment.
This new labor force is paid wellwell because cheap industrial food is no longer subsidized, raising prices.
People have more money to spend those higher prices because they are healthier and so spend less money on healthcare while gaining economic productivity.
More money and better health means they will have more opportunities and less recourse to crime and depression.
Higher happiness and fulfillment thus brings out the best in people, and the better tendencies of humanity compound from there.
tl;dr:
Most of the problems of society can be traced back to poor health, which comes from bad food and environmental toxins
Existing methods to solve each issue independently don’t work
A food system which produces proper food increases nutrition, reduces environmental pollution, and the biological benefits pull people out of depression, crime, and despair
This may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. If this is not clear, please leave a question so I know what to focus on for future articles.
This was my impression as well
Is there a post about recommended products? Thought it was part of substack, but maybe you posted it elsewhere. In particular, looking for your cookware recommendation.