Death By Supermarket

“One of the most important books written on nutrition and health. Deville presents a powerful analysis of what is wrong with one of the major suppliers of our foods, the supermarket, and how you can protect yourself and your loved ones from this eminent danger. Everyone concerned with the health of their loved ones should study this most important book.”

—Russell L. Blaylock, MD, Advanced Nutritional Concepts, LLC, visiting professor of biology, Belhaven College, Jackson, Mississippi

“A well-researched and reader-friendly book on the increasing dangers of modern factory food. A wake-up call to boycott supermarket food in favor of certified organic.”

—Samuel S. Epstein, MD, professor emeritus, environmental and occupational medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; chairman, Cancer Prevention Coalition; author of
Toxic Beauty

“Nancy Deville’s
Death by Supermarket
is a must-read for anyone interested in health and wellness. She has painstakingly researched the ugly realities of our food industry and exposes the real causes of the American health crisis.”

—Maoshing Ni, PhD, DOM, Dipl. ABAAHP, cofounder of the Tao of Wellness and Yo San University, author of
Secrets of Longevity

This book is intended as a reference volume only, not as a medical manual. The information given here is designed to help you make informed decisions about your health. It is not intended as a substitute for any treatment that may have been prescribed by your doctor. If you suspect that you have a medical problem, you should seek competent medical help. You should not begin a new health regimen without first consulting a medical professional.

Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press
Austin, Texas
www.gbgpress.com

Copyright © 2011 Nancy Deville

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group LLC

For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Green-leaf Book Group LLC at PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709, 512.891.6100.

Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group LLC
Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group LLC

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)
Deville, Nancy.
   Death by supermarket: the fattening, dumbing down, and poisoning of America / Nancy Deville. — 2nd ed.
   p.; cm.
  eISBN: 978-1-60832-150-6
   1. Food industry and trade—Health aspects—United States. 2. Food industry and trade—Government policy—United States. 3. Obesity—United States. 4. Nutrition—United States. 5. Food habits—United States. 6. Convenience foods—Health aspects—United States. I. Title.
HD9005 .D47 2011
362.196/39800973                                            2010942467

Part of the Tree Neutral® program, which offsets the number of trees consumed in the production and printing of this book by taking proactive steps, such as planting trees in direct proportion to the number of trees used: www.treeneutral.com

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Second Edition

For my grandma, Stella

IN A RECENT FILM,
after most of Los Angeles is destroyed by aberrant tornados, a climatologist warns the president of the United States that he must immediately enforce mass evacuations to save millions of Americans from an impending storm brought on by global warming. The president dismisses the urgency and refuses to take action. True to the climatologist’s predictions, a devastating storm and accompanying ice age obliterate the Northern Hemisphere.

The epidemic of obesity in the United States is as ominous as tornados ripping across Los Angeles. Americans are the fattest people walking the earth today. In a population of 300 million, 68 percent of our citizens are overweight or obese. Some are so large they can’t fly on airplanes, go to a movie theater, or otherwise function in society. New industries have sprung up to accommodate “people of size,” manufacturing larger seats for restaurants, wheelchairs, and toilets; mega hospital beds; and XL coffins. It’s gotten so surreal that we hardly blink an eye at people being hoisted around with cranes.

I believe that the American diet of processed, convenience, junk, fast, and otherwise industrialized “factory” food is the major contributing factor to our obesity epidemic. This diet is also responsible for our skyrocketing rates of degenerative disease. Yet because our medical community and government are not protecting us, the epidemic escalates, with millions of people on a trajectory that is certain to culminate in apocalyptic human tragedy.

The message we should be hearing is that if Americans stopped eating all factory-food products and ate only what I call “historic” real food we
would calm the unnatural hunger that compels us to eat these injurious substances. Historic real food is organically produced meat, fish, poultry, dairy, vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, seeds, and nuts that could (in theory) be picked, gathered, milked, hunted, or fished. By giving our bodies and brains the necessary nutritional building blocks found in real, living food, Americans would be healthy, sexy, and happy, with each individual fully realizing his or her unique physical and mental potential—we’d be as intelligent, tall, and physically and emotionally gifted as our genetics predispose us to be. This would dramatically reduce the number of patients flocking to obesity clinics, ERs, and shrinks’ offices. As it stands, though Americans worship youth and beauty, we’re aging more rapidly than we have to because we eat dead factory-food products instead of living, real food.

I initially held my beliefs about real food because of the influence of my grandmother, Stella, who taught me about real food. I also traveled the world from ages fifteen to twenty-two, before the American corporate invasion, and witnessed the healthy outcomes of populations that ate real food. Later, when I started writing on health, every subject I wrote about, whether weight loss, adrenal burnout, or Chinese medicine, had the common thread of stopping eating factory-food products and eating real food. But I also believe that our health and weight problems are not just because of factory food.

Before World War II much of our population suffered from malnutrition due to lack of food, which manifested in emaciation, depression, lowered IQ, disease, and premature death. Since World War II, our food chain has become permeated with factory foods, diets, and drugs; we’re now suffering from a new type of malnutrition that manifests in obesity, depression, lowered IQ, disease, and—because we have medical means to keep people alive—long, lingering, ugly death. An unhealthy symbiotic relationship ultimately developed among our medical establishment; government; the food, diet, and pharmaceutical corporations; and us—American consumers. The food industry addicts us to their products, which make us
fat, depressed, and sick. Then the diet and drug industries sell us products, “systems,” and drugs that exacerbate malnutrition and disease.

The agencies that should be protecting us are complying with the corporations that are harming us. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to be responsible for protecting public health by ensuring the safety and efficacy of the substances we ingest, the FDA has devolved into an incompetent and corrupt agency that’s bought and paid for with payoffs and cronyism. In addition, our medical system has become a business that focuses on treating disease once it occurs with drugs, surgeries, and procedures. The majority of doctors in this system have no nutritional training, and the training that they do have supports the factory-food industry.

Since the government and the medical community aren’t coming out against factory food, diets, and drugs, the public takes Madison Avenue’s word for it that these substances are healthy and beneficial. And so we remain addicted to factory food, desperately dieting and taking drugs to try to fix the health problems caused by an unnatural factory-food diet.

Do Americans even care? Reportedly, the factory foods that have the worst nutritional value sell the most briskly. When it comes to suggesting health changes, health educators continue to set the bar lower and lower, ostensibly because Americans are too lazy to make any substantive changes. After fifteen years of research for the books I’ve written, I’m convinced that our fat and disease epidemic is no more our fault than it would be if we were caged lab rats being subjected to mind control, force-feeding, and bizarre experiments. That said, we’ve given in to the industries that have made us fat and sick without much of a fight. As a path of least resistance, we attempt to make ourselves feel better about our fatness, our dumb-and-dumberness, our unhealthiness, and our addiction to factory-food by adopting an affable camaraderie about our diet. We laugh to cope, but unfortunately, this dismissive attitude perpetuates our role as victims.

I want to make it perfectly clear that this book is not a condemnation for being fat, sick, or weak-willed. I also don’t want to imply that eating and
living in a healthy way is an absolute guarantee against illness; some of us will do our very best but still get sick. My purpose is to share with you what I’ve learned about nutrition and the influences of the food, diet, and drug industries so that you can make the healthiest choices.

There’s a kind of division of the classes occurring that has less to do with money and more to do with personal choice. Increasingly, two distinct groups are emerging: the overweight, depressed, sick eaters of factory-food products, who constantly diet and rely on a cocktail of OTC and prescription drugs; and the eaters of organic, historic real food, who don’t diet, avoid taking drugs, and are generally healthy, sexy, and happy.

What’s about to happen in America is analogous to an apocalyptic movie. Picture a few survivors blinking at the devastation they have escaped and brimming with hope for a future utopia. You and your family could be numbered among the survivors.

All it takes to begin is turning the page.