The Standard American Diet (SAD) lacks many essential nutritional components. Composed largely of prepackaged, ready-to-eat foods with few naturally grown food products; this diet has contributed not only to an obesity epidemic, but also to extreme nutritional deficiencies. Although many commercial vitamin and mineral supplements exist, they are artificially manufactured, which reduces bioavailability and promotes chemical contamination. Since Americans are unlikely to ever eat home-grown foods straight from their gardens again, the solution to America's nutritional deficiencies can be found in whole-food supplements, products rich in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients made with real food concentrates.

The problem with the standard American diet

In the early 1900s, most Americans ate a healthy, wholesome diet because they had no other choice. All food was grown by the family or provided from direct local sources. America in the 1900s was a largely agricultural society with most people living in rural areas and able to grow their own food. In the last century there has been a massive migration to urban areas. This has led to the fact that even if one has the desire, most people no longer have the ability to produce home grown food. Either because there is no land or because many do not know how, very few people have a garden and even fewer produce protein in the form of dairy and livestock.

Dwayne johnson supplements , families were encouraged to have a "victory garden" during World War II. This was not to ensure that Americans had a great diet, but to ensure that American families could feed themselves, while sending most of the commercial food production to troops abroad. That was the last period in history in which the United States got most of its nutrition from locally grown foods.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Americans began to recognize the value of vitamins and minerals in their diet. This was discovered as more and more highly processed ready-to-eat foods became available and nutritional deficiencies began to develop.

After the end of World War II, many families became dual earners. Additionally, many more single parents are now raising their children alone. This means that in most families, all adults in a household are likely to work full-time outside the home, leaving little time for food preparation alone, let alone food production. The United States has become a convenience food country that consumes much of its diet from unnatural food sources.

Prepackaged, easy-to-prepare food products are just that, food "products." While they may contain carbohydrates, protein, fat, and some "essential" nutrients, they are not real food. The entire food supply chain is riddled with contamination and chemical processing, and many Americans are unaware of how little nutritional value is contained in the food they eat every day. So much advertising and education focuses on the so-called food pyramid. The government and educational agencies that devised the perfect American diet never really addressed the lack of nutrients other than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of basic vitamins and minerals like vitamin A, vitamin D, and calcium.

While these RDA levels of vitamin and mineral intake may be absolutely essential to prevent obvious deficiencies such as scurvy or rickets, they are hardly adequate and do not reflect only a small portion of the nutrients in whole foods necessary for the promotion of health and disease prevention.

A crisis in America: obesity and other diseases versus malnutrition

The main focus of the American diet in recent years has been to reduce fat and increase carbohydrates in the diet. This line of thinking was intended to curb the growing obesity epidemic, but in the last 20 years, obesity has risen to levels that appear to be a crisis for Americans. In fact, in the last 20 years, the number of obese American adults has increased by 60% to an unprecedented level of nearly 35% of American adults who are considered obese. A much worse situation is that a similar number of about 32% of American children are classified as overweight or obese. For the first time in the history of the United States, the life expectancy of these children may be less than that of their parents or grandparents.

This has led to an epidemic of heart disease, diabetes, and other weight-related problems that are occurring in record numbers not only among adults, but also among children as young as 18 months of age. Other diseases that may be related to a lack of appropriate nutrients other than simple vitamins in American diets can include a wide variety of conditions, ranging from immune disorders related to conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and cancer to psychiatric conditions and neurological such as ADHD. , Autism and Depression.

Most people think that obesity arises because people eat too much. While that's partially true, obesity is also the result of continually consuming the wrong types of food. In the 1900s, when Americans ate a largely natural, whole-food diet straight from farm to table, obesity was an extremely rare occurrence.

As our diet has changed from the nutrient-rich food supply of an agricultural society to highly processed, urbanized artificial foods, our total food consumption has increased. This is partly because even though the body gets more calories from more food, it still starves itself, causing it to eat even more. Also, in our sedentary lifestyle, our bodies actually require less food than when we lived and worked on the farm every day, but we eat more because of the lack of good nutrients, the abundance of readily available processed foods, and other psychological conditions such as stress eating. Ultimately, America has become a nation of people who are obese, but still undernourished and sick.

An attempt to fix the problem

The ideal diet really would be to go back to eating whole foods "from farm to table," with families growing their own food and preparing it within minutes of harvesting it, or at least taking locally grown foods off the market and using them instead. . It can be prepared or harvested in one day. This is no longer possible in today's society. Even when fresh fruits and vegetables are consumed as a major part of the diet, our nation's food supply is contaminated by the use of pesticides, herbicides, and hormones, and much of its nutritional value is lost through transportation of food crops thousands of miles away. Food is harvested before it is fully ripe, irradiated, cold-stored, and transported across states, countries, and even oceans before it reaches our supermarkets as bland, undersized, and nutrient-poor products.

Many people try to only eat locally grown organic produce for this reason. While this may be an improvement over the nutritional value of the standard American diet, it is almost always much more expensive and therefore unaffordable to many and unavailable to others as most markets do not focus on getting said products. So this effort, although valiant, is still not enough.

The good news about the US nutritional situation is that it's pretty easy to fix. With proper nutrition, the human body has an amazing ability to heal itself. Many diseases and conditions caused by overconsumption and malnutrition can be easily corrected through supplementation with whole food products.

Since Americans cannot trust the food supply for adequate nutrition, nor can they trust the source, quality, and purity of most commercially available nutritional supplements, the only answer seems to lie with dietary supplements. whole-grain foods.

What is a complete dietary supplement?

Whole food supplements are defined as dietary supplements that are derived entirely from food. This is a much more natural and beneficial method of getting nutrition from both food and herbal supplements.

Unfortunately, most commercially available nutritional supplements, including vitamins, minerals, and herbal products, are made entirely from single-ingredient extracts or worse, artificially synthesized in a laboratory by chemical processes. While synthetic supplements can provide basic vitamins and minerals that are known to be vital, artificially prepared products lack many of the alkaloids, antioxidants, and phytochemicals that are thought to play important roles in complete nutrition and disease prevention.

The same goes for herbal supplements and treatments, since most commercially available herbal products provide an extract or synthesized form of the herb's main active chemical, they still lack many of the ingredients synergists believed to provide additional benefits of herbal and nutraceutical treatment.