America’s Food System Turned Us Into Lab Rats. Here’s How It Happened.

The U.S. food system has devolved into a massive, unintentional science experiment, and we’ve unknowingly become the lab rats. This isn’t something new, either. It’s been going on for well over a century. We have access to the most advanced medical technology, the most life-saving medicines, and more knowledge about germs and infection than at any other point in human history. So why is our health as a nation declining so rapidly?

Here’s a number that should stop you cold. In the 1930s, roughly one in five Americans had a chronic illness, and that count included things we don’t even tally anymore, such as visual impairment. Today, without counting visual impairment at all, it’s closer to three in five. That’s a jump of roughly 40 percentage points, and most of those chronic illnesses can be connected directly to food and lifestyle. That is not a coincidence, and it is not something that “just happened” to us.