I have long said that if we fed our livestock like we do the human population we would all be broke. It is quite mind boggling to me, as the truth about human nutrition begins to become more available, that we have been misled at times about so many elements of healthy living.
For example, we had this rage at one time to remove nitrates from our food supply, yet nitrates are vital to healthy heart function. I still take a daily nitric supplement called NO2U. But what really got my attention recently was the attempt to again mislead the public about cholesterol and hide the fact that it too is vital to a healthy heart.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that
• Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States.
• One person dies every 34 seconds in the U.S. from cardiovascular disease.
• About 697,000 people in the U.S. died from heart disease in 2020—that’s 1 in every 5 deaths.
• Heart disease costs the United States about $229 billion each year from 2017 to 2018. This includes the cost of healthcare services, medicines, and lost productivity due to death.
So the real question should be “Why?” Why is heart disease such a continually growing issue in the U.S.?
Let’s go back to the issue that brought it all forward for me this week. The answer to fixing heart disease, according to “the experts,” is that we take another pill. The fix pill that really needs to go is called a statin. I have spent a great deal of time discussing this with Dr. Nathan Bryan over the years and he has concerns about its fix.
The wonderful aspect about this type of discussion for me is that our oldest daughter is a registered dietician, so not only can I have the scientific discussion about the importance of meat and protein in healthy living, I can also learn about the attitudes of the clients she works with every day. In today’s world, people don’t care what they eat, they simply want to take another pill to fix the problem. How did we get here as a society? Everybody wants a quick fix for everything but that just doesn’t exist when it comes to our health.
The Weston A Price Foundation offers data about how the statin prescribed to fix the cholesterol problem actually disrupts muscle sustainability in the human body. As humans age their protein requirements actually increase yet the majority of the aging population has been led to believe that they just don’t need as much protein. This is wrong, in my opinion.
With all of that said, we must remember—or perhaps realize for the first time—that the heart is a muscle. If your heart is a muscle and you have been conditioned to believe you don’t need protein to feed your muscles, why do you believe that heart disease continues to be a growing epidemic?
Until now I have only focused on the heart aspect of what is going wrong. If my registered dietician would have her druthers, I would have expanded on the impact of diet to the massive growing diabetes problem. Let’s just say the diabetes issues she is dealing with are not isolated to the aging population. I find it hard to believe the number of teenagers with similar problems and no desire to cure it, but rather take an attitude of “just tell me what pill I need to take.”
Folks, we have a serious drug problem in this country. While illegal drugs like fentanyl are a massive problem, that is just the beginning of the real issue. When we start feeding people as well as we do our pigs, life will get better.
Editor’s note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the views of High Plains Journal. Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].
