Why Chronic Disease Is On The Rise

Intro

to move on to this question of why are people getting sicker and why are we seeing you know more and more illnesses some real some just made up by pharmaceutical companies to sell you nonsense um

Where Are They Coming From

924 is not a thing okay let me just say that um i i have noticed that and perhaps you guys have too that when you were kid that in your classes there was maybe one kid who was a little bit off but by and large everybody else was cool nowadays something like 30 percent of kids are on medication um people have you know fibromyalgia and this and that and i do think that these ailments i’m not going to cause them to call them diseases i do think these ailments are real but the question is where are they coming from how many of you can i see a show of hands soft food inc okay for those of you who have not seen it it streams on netflix go home and watch it one of the things that they that really struck me in that documentary was they talked about the yield in corn per acre that has happened over the last 100 years and i don’t remember unfortunately i don’t have brenda’s brain so i don’t remember the exact numbers in terms of how many bushels they used to get from an acre at the beginning of the 20th century versus the latter end of it but the yield i think had at least tripled so think about this ladies and gentlemen you still have the same amount of dirt with you know x amount of minerals and you know nitrogen and whatever else in that dirt but now you are growing three times as many plants out of it that means that those plants themselves are going to be nutrient deficient okay and they they they make them look pretty by jazzing them up with petrochemical fertilizers to make them grow and look nice and big but they are empty in terms of the calories then what do they do they turn around and take this corn and feed it to farm animals you see people think that when they’re eating you know beef or chicken that they’re eating the beef and chicken that their ancestors from several hundred years ago ate no those animals were actually roaming in the environment actually eating real plants getting adequate nutrition you are now eating animals that have been fed nutrient-depleted corn okay it gets worse than that these animals are also given what’s called growth enhancing technology which are series of uh steroid implants and other uh hormones and chemicals to make them grow faster because of course the faster you and more cheaply you get an animal to market weight the better your profit margin so people are eating animals whose tissues are loaded with a bunch of synthetic hormones and chemicals and that and then our at baseline nutrient depleted and i think that that is showing up in our bodies by the fact that our bodies are screaming out in agony for the uh micronutrients and even macronutrients that they’re missing because they are eating what is essentially depleted garbage and it’s showing up in a thousand different ways that is my opinion i don’t have proof of that but that’s the best way i can put this together yeah it’s good [Applause]

Is It All About Food

i i do understand why we’re here but i’m under wonder if i might expand the view there’s a great answer but it’s not all about only food of course and i i have five children and you know and so you know i’ve got kids in the sort of the millennial group and uh unbelievable amounts of mental anguish in that group and you know they’re concerned about a planet in peril they’re concerned about our divisive politics and and you know principles of our democracy you know they’re facing existential threats and and that’s affecting them they they’ve been born into an uncontrolled experiment involving the internet and social media everything about the nature of communication and human interaction has changed i think all of that is part of the mix you know what’s happening above the neck is relevant to everything below and then i wanted to throw in an anecdote because i agree with everything you said milton but um the youngest of my five kids is my son and there’s an interesting anecdote about gabe from many years ago i was giving a talk at dartmouth gabe was five at the time he’s now turning 21 and he got restless during my talk he was driving my wife crazy and my remedy was to propose that he stopped torturing his mother run up the stairs out the door along the carter in the other door down the stairs and come back to his seat and sit still stop fidgeting so he did that and i kept talking he came back sat down gave me a sort of cheeky in your face look dad and took off again and when he came around the second time he didn’t sit down he just waved and kept going and two kids got up and took off after him and then when the three of them came around basically every kid in the audience under the age of 12 and people were there with their families to go so we now have 30 kids running laps around the audience a program was born that day we called it abc for fitness activity burst in the classroom we developed this at the prevention research center we studied it we made it freely available it’s in thousands and thousands of schools and the idea is you could basically integrate bouts of controlled physical activity throughout the school they have it add up to 30 minutes make the kids better behave better learners and healthier into the bargain but in the aftermath of that experience with my son and all the years of studying and deploying that program i developed a rant the proper remedy for rambunctiousness in children is recess dammit not ritalin we take naturally rambunctious kids bolt them to chairs all day long so they can grow up to become adults we can’t get off couches with crowbars and when they complain about it we medicate them that’s horribly wrong you’re absolutely right i was horrified to learn that kids don’t have recess anymore i’m like are you kidding me we live for recess when when i was in school you