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When COVID-19 hit, our government and many Americans went haywire. Sometimes it felt as if we were living in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Our entire country was turned upside down and livelihoods were wiped out over a virus with a survival rate somewhere between 99.5% and 99.8%. In addition, according to a report from Brightwork Research and Analysis, the average age for mortality from COVID-19 is 81.5 years old.
Compare that figure to the average life expectancy in the U.S.: 77 years old for men and 81 for women.
Meanwhile, every year in the United States hundreds of thousands of Americans die from obesity.
The estimated number of annual deaths attributable to obesity among US adults is approximately 280,000 based on HRs from all subjects and 325,000 based on HRs from only nonsmokers and never-smokers.
The really dangerous “virus” that’s impacting everyone, comes from the highly addictive high-carb, and sugary processed foods that are making everyone fat, lazy, and riddled with diseases.
There’s a processed food pandemic that’s causing Americans, and people all over the world to become morbidly obese.
According to the World Health Organization, over 340 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 worldwide were overweight or obese in 2016; 39 million children under the age of 5 worldwide were overweight or obese in 2020. A video presentation by the CDC Public Health Grand Rounds discusses efforts to reduce the obesity epidemic that affects 17% of all children and adolescents in the United States.
The obesity epidemic has extended from the general populace to our nation’s children. Administrators, health officials, and politicians have already joined forces to combat what has been termed a “crisis proportion” of childhood obesity. Research has resulted in numerous community-based interventions, but progress is slow and resources limited. In combination, obesity and math illiteracy each pose a threat to the future of the United States and its principal resource — children.
And now, a new study shows that highly processed foods are linked to cognitive decline. The study out of São Paulo, Brazil is among the first to explore the connection between high calorie, ultra processed foods and cognitive decline in countries with higher incomes.
Study participants at the upper end of ultra-processed food consumption — for whom the daily energy percentage contribution of such foods was above 19.9% — showed a 28% faster rate of global cognitive decline, and a 25% faster rate of decline in executive function — the mental skills used every day to learn, work and manage daily life.
That’s compared with people who ate no ultra-processed foods or, if they did, stayed below the 19.9% threshold over a follow-up period that averaged eight years.
The study focused on ethnically diverse young and older people.
A team of researchers led by Natalia Gomes Gonçalves, of the Department of Pathology at the University of São Paulo Medical School in São Paulo, Brazil, set about to investigate the association between ultra-processed food consumption and cognitive decline among 10, 775 participants in the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health.
The study involved an ethnically diverse sample of public servants, ages 35 to 74, who were recruited in six Brazilian cities.
The study was done in three parts that included a group eating unprocessed or minimally processed foods. Another group eating processed foods like canned meats, cheeses, and bread, and then a third group who ate ultra processed foods.
The study took 8 years to complete and the findings may explain why cognitive decline is on the rise in the US. For example, right now over 6 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s, but that number is expected to go up to nearly 13 million by 2050.
The scientists looked at participants’ cognitive performance over a median follow-up period of eight years, alongside their level of consumption of ultra-processed foods.
People were tested up to three times every four years, testing memory via immediate recall, late recall, and recognition word list tests from the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer Disease.
The researchers tested people’s executive function by using tools including verbal fluency tests.
“These findings support current public health recommendations on limiting ultra-processed food consumption because of their potential harm to cognitive function,” the authors concluded.
Despite the comprehensive studies showing how highly addictive processed foods are killing hundreds of thousands of Americans per year and are now linked to dementia, our government remains suspiciously quiet and unaffected by this ongoing deadly “pandemic.”
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