The Reason 90% of Americans Are Ill

Every year, people start catching colds and flus in October and cease contracting them sometime around March or April of the following year. The number of people who are thrilled to have a throat filled with acid toothpaste, nostrils that let out grossly green goblins, and a forehead that sizzles like asphalt on a hot summer midday has yet to exceed the number of high-flying horse fish or deep-diving doves. In an effort to prevent the invasion of a virus, many people ingest vitamin C tablets. Alternatively, if a virus has completed a successful infiltration, people will gulp down cold and flu medication, such as DayQuil or NyQuil, to alleviate the symptoms of a cold or flu.

Colds and flus are infectious diseases that are, in the grand scheme of diseases, relatively harmless. Your body knows how to deal with these tiny forms, hence its deployment of the painful symptoms that aid to eliminate the pathogens. However, as you are aware, not all diseases are infectious, nor are all diseases trivial. There exists a disease that close to 90% of Americans have. This illness never uses humans as vectors to help it spread. It is also not minuscule. What is this mysterious illness that 9 out of every 10 people of this nation carry? This is an illness called metabolic syndrome.

“Metabolic syndrome,” emphasized by Robert H. Lustig in Metabolical (2021), describes the condition in which the body stores energy in its cells in an ill-suited manner. Why is this syndrome problematic? This biological defect fertilizes the soil from which other more commonly known diseases sprout; type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease, to name a few. Metabolic syndrome can be conceptualized as a disorder involving any combination of the following sub-cellular processes: glycation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, membrane integrity, inflammation, epigenetics, and autophagy. These processes interact with each other, so a deficiency in one of them will affect the others. The cell is the foundation of living processes on Earth. Healthy cells support healthy bodies.

The primary contributor to metabolic syndrome is insulin resistance. If a person is insulin resistant, then the glucose in his body is unable to get into certain cells. Cells require glucose to function. Glucose is a form of energy. What causes insulin resistance? The consumption of processed foods, particularly those that are high in added sugar. An excess amount of sugar burdens the liver. Added sugar is composed of two molecules – glucose and fructose. 80% of glucose is metabolized by bodily tissues, while the remainder goes to the liver. Insulin instructs the liver to convert the glucose to glycogen (stored energy). Fructose, on the other hand, is able to be processed by only the liver. Insulin has no effect on fructose. It is, therefore, much easier for fructose to overwhelm the liver and cause mitochondrial dysfunction. Additionally, fructose fails to shut off a hunger hormone called ghrelin and is addictive.

Biologically, the human body requires glucose to survive, but does not need any fructose whatsoever. The human body generates the former automatically. You technically don’t need to consume glucose from external sources (albeit it is useful for people that do lots of cardio, be it in a gym or outside). The latter is the molecule that sweetens food.

At this point, you may be thinking to yourself: “Some natural foods have sugar too. Apples have sugar. Oranges have sugar…” Indeed, some real foods have sugar and are sweet. However, unlike counterfeit foods, real foods have a sufficient amount of micronutrients as well. Your body needs both macro- and micronutrients to function properly. Most processed foods have been stripped of their nutrients. “It’s not what’s in the food, it’s what’s been done to the food,” argues Lustig.

For example, most of the loaves of “whole grain bread” you see on the shelves at a commercial supermarket are milled and processed. The starch and gluten are dissociated from the bran of such loaves. Perhaps, says Lustig, the fluffy “whole grain bread” makes for great avocado toast, but it also generates a high insulin response after being consumed. Unlike the imitations you typically see at the grocery store, bread that is relatively natural is dense and crumbles easily. This bread is tough enough to knock someone unconscious if thrown at their head. The starch and gluten of the bread rest inside the kernel. The glucose response produced by the body after eating it is minimal compared to that produced after eating processed bread.

Both the standard supermarket type of bread and the authentic type of bread have soluble fiber, but only the latter has insoluble fiber. Your body needs both types of fiber. Both soluble and insoluble fiber form a gel inside your body that slows down the absorption of sugar. This reduces the transport of said sugar to the liver. As a result, insulin sensitivity, which is the inverse of insulin resistance, is kept intact. Soluble fiber is anti-inflammatory and suppresses the pancreas’ secretion of insulin. Insoluble fiber cleans out dead cells and reduces the risk of cancer.

For the gel to form, both soluble and insoluble fiber need to work as a team. The former is shaped somewhat round, the latter is structured like a string. Both create a barrier inside the duodenum. The latter constructs the wireframe of the barrier; the former fills in the gaps of the wiry framework. This is the barrier that reduces the absorption of glucose and fructose.

The dysfunction of sub-cellular processes mentioned above can be cured by the incorporation of nutrient-dense foods. Pharmaceutical drugs only alleviate the symptoms of chronic diseases. Such medication never fixes the foundational cause of these diseases, which is, according to Lustig, metabolic syndrome. It is more profitable for industries within the field of medicine to endlessly treat health problems instead of permanently resolving them. At face value, it often seems like the government cares about promoting beneficial health habits to citizens. In reality, the government cares, little, if at all, about the well-being of the citizens it’s conceived to serve.

You must take responsibility for your own health. Eat real food. Exercise. Get some fresh air. Do research. Sharpen your critical thinking.

Nobody cares about your health more than you.