Are We Eating Ourselves to Death?

In 1900, the average life expectancy in the United States was 48 years old. When you went “toes up,” it was likely caused by pneumonia, tuberculosis, or diarrhea.

Today, our life expectancy far exceeds age 48. We are more aware than ever of healthy behaviors and are inundated with information on how to lead a healthier life. You know—eat right, exercise, and stay away from smoking lung darts and drinking too much booze.

To some degree, we are following this advice. Alcohol consumption is at an all-time low. According to Gallup, 39% of U.S. adults say they have not had an alcoholic drink in the past seven days.

In addition to drinking less, people are smoking less. Back in 1954, almost one out of every two Americans smoked daily. You’d have to have your head examined to pick up a pack of cigarettes in 2024.

By 2020, American life expectancy had risen to 78.81 years. But then, a funny thing happened. U.S. life expectancy started dropping for the first time since, well, forever. Sure, some of that decline was COVID-related, but our life expectancy keeps dropping for reasons beyond the pandemic. We’ve lost about 2.7 years of life expectancy in just four years.

Cutting back on alcohol and cigarettes is responsible for much of the improvement in life expectancy from 1980 to 2020.

By 2024, the incidence of early-onset cancers had increased by 79%. Americans now have an astonishing 41.6% chance of getting cancer in their lifetime. It’s not just cancer that’s rising, though. The number of people living with Parkinson’s disease has doubled in the last 25 years.

Back in the early 1990s, just 2.8% of Americans were morbidly or severely obese. We are now fatter than any other time in history, even though we have more gyms than any other country. I know a lot of people struggle with their weight through no fault of their own. I’m talking about those with a BMI higher than 40 kg/m² . Those people have 100% higher medical costs than others.

This morbid obesity is causing “diabesity”—a condition in which an obese person becomes insulin-resistant and eventually develops Type 2 diabetes. In 1950, 24,000 people died from diabetes. The most recent data from 2021 indicates that 103,294 people died, despite significant enhancements in treatment.

No animal on planet Earth suffers from these types of metabolic disorders. Yet, an astonishing 52% of American adults have prediabetes or Type 2 diabetes. According to the CDC, at age 50, life expectancy is six years shorter for people with this disease. That, combined with obesity, has also led to a 55% increase in deadly pancreatic cancer in the last 25 years.

It’s not just adults. Almost 40% of children are obese today, and an astonishing 30% of children are prediabetic.

We also lead the world in hypertension. A whopping 70% of Americans are projected to develop high blood pressure in their lifetime.

Why should you care? Because we are the only country in the world seeing these kinds of numbers. It’s even putting our national security at risk. According to the Pentagon, obesity is the top medical reason for disqualifying military applicants. More than 10% of eligible recruits are prevented from serving because they are overweight. All five branches of the military missed their recruiting goals last year.

This weighty issue is also costing you a lot of money. 54.5% of Americans are on some form of government healthcare, and Medicare spending for the three largest diabetes drugs was $5.7 billion, and rising, as of 2022.

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As Casey Means, MD, points out in her book Good Energy, it’s not entirely our fault. See, greedy American tobacco companies saw the coming assault on big tobacco.

In 1986, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco purchased Nabisco Foods for $4.9 billion. Around the same time, Philip Morris Tobacco purchased General Foods and Kraft. 

The goal was to do to food what they did to tobacco: make ultra-processed, highly addictive, and highly profitable food, regardless of its impact on our health. And once again, we are the tobacco companies’ guinea pigs. .

But Tom, doesn’t the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) protect us from these greedy tobacco companies? Sure, but around 45% of the FDA’s budget comes from the food industry, meaning their funding is derived from the companies they regulate. 

University of Kansas researchers found that these unlikely bedfellows developed a large number of ultra-processed foods between 1998 and 2001. Tobacco scientists and engineers used fat, salt, and sugar to trigger our dopamine sensors. They engineered food that is addictive, but doesn’t satisfy your appetite. That’s right—the same scientists and engineers that got us hooked on tobacco found a way to get us hooked on ultra-processed food that is killing us.

How do we know that the tobacco companies succeeded? Because the data doesn’t lie. Among peer nations, the U.S. has the highest per-person healthcare spending, reaching an estimated $12,555 per capita in 2022, based on NHE data. (Type II Diabetics cost $17,000 per year.)

Despite all this money, we also have the lowest life expectancy among the wealthier countries. People in Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong now live about nine years longer than us.

We are eating enough ultra-processed foods, loaded with fat, salt, and sugar to destroy our physical and mental health. Those over-engineered foods are bathed in a chemical soup of lab created toxins that block our satiety signals from firing. Most of these substances are banned in other countries.

Yes, cancer, hypertension, obesity, and various metabolic disorders, like diabetes, are to blame for our falling life expectancy. You can also add rising rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and many other health conditions. However, the root cause isn’t the disease itself or even bad luck. The root cause is our over-engineered food supply.

The data is clear—we are literally eating ourselves to death.

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