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Americans are spending 40 percent of their food dollars eating out. Our food is processed, refined, concentrated, sugared, salted, and chemically engineered to produce taste sensations high in calories and low in nutrients. Our cattle get fat in feedlots without exercise and with antibiotics and growth hormones. The result: bigger cattle producing juicier steaks containing nearly twice the fat as ranged cattle. In addition, we are paying dearly for these advances. Although we eat to live, what we eat is killing us.

The foods that we eat are causing most of the diseases that we are seeing in major numbers today. The statistics are real. In 1900, about 10 to 15 percent of Americans died of heart disease and strokes. Today it is 45 percent. Back then, less than 6 percent died of cancer, while today the figure is over 25 percent.

This is not nature's way. We were not meant to die in such numbers from heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and from cancer of the lungs, breast, prostate, and colon. Significant cardiovascular disease started to emerge in America after World War I. It became rampant only after World War II, when people could afford diets rich in animal products and when the food industry started producing processed foods crammed with calories and emptied of nutrition.

This problem is unique to the westernized people. Rural populations in China and Southeast Asia who have little access to rich foods experience few heart attacks. Similarly, most people in rural Africa and South and Central America have little fear of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Yet in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and the increasingly rich countries in Europe and Asia, where diets are rich in fat and cholesterol, heart disease and diabetes are epidemic.

The villains, low fiber, high fat, and cholesterol, take their toll by damaging the body's oxygen-carrying arteries and by upsetting important metabolic acts. Because of thickened, narrowed arteries, 4,000 Americans have heart attacks every day, every third adult has high blood pressure, and thousands are becoming crippled from strokes. Because of disordered metabolisms from unbalanced lifestyles, obesity is epidemic, and a new diabetic is diagnosed every 50 seconds.