Super Human Radio

I was shopping this week and as I walked into the grocery store I was besieged by little cherub faced girls pushing Girl Scout cookies. Little did they know, but they are contributing to the advanced onset of aging and disease in this country. Its not just the Girls Scouts either. If you understand the mechanisms that signal the body to age - glucose signaling being that mechanism, you understand that we Americans have chosen a host of habits and indulgences that create the perfect storm or aging and illness. Some day when anthropologists look back at our civilization they'll say - "wow they ate themselves to death". And its not the sheer quantity of food that they'll be talking about. Its the choices we make.

Until we all understand this, debating health care is a moot subject because we will always be playing come-from-behind basketball as it relates to the rate of disease outpacing the rate of health.

Numerous accredited studies now show that it is glucose signaling that speeds the aging process. We already know that Type 2 Diabetes is at epidemic levels with over 23 million Americans already stricken with the disease - a disease that is entirely avoidable and completely reversible. In fact while many point to obesity as the cause of Type 2 Diabetes I say its the other way around. Once you become insulin resistant you get fat. Most people are undiagnosed pre-diabetics for decades and fat accumulates over this period of time.

And make no mistake. The metabolic function that leads to insulin resistance was once a sought after genetic quality. Remember we were animals not too long ago. And food was not abundant. An animals body is designed to operate very efficiently in times of famine and scarcity. Having high insulin sensitivity was a marker of efficiency. Our bodies would function at high levels in the absence of food as our bodies would convert fat and protein to glucose to run the bodily functions. Now take that efficient running body and flood it with glucose from the standpoint of today's carbohydrate-centric diet and you have our current situation. A body which responds by reducing insulin sensitivity to compensate for the over abundance of glucose. Soon you have a body that is completely desensitized to insulin and disease and aging sets in.

One need only look to the reliance on carbohydrate rich diets to understand what's afoot here. The agricultural agenda is to sell more wheat, grain, corn potatoes, rice, sugar beets and the like-based products regardless of the impact on the populations overall health. Its business at the end of the day that's killing most people. Compound this with the excessive use of sodium in processed foods and our reliance upon caffeine - two things known to artificially elevate blood glucose levels and spike insulin - and you can see that if we stay the course of our current habits and pass them down to our children, we will be the first generation to bury our children in large numbers.

Childhood Type 2 Diabetes has risen from a rate of less than 5 percent before 1994 to 30-50 percent in current years. Let me restate that. Three out of ten to five out of ten children will be diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes!!!! Do you have a child? Chances are if you don't take action your child will develop complications due to Diabetes in his or her early 20's. And die from those complications in their 30's and 40's. WAKE UP!! And exercise is not enough when you are counteracting that exercise by bombarding your body with foods that promote insulin resistance.

Watching pundits and politicians on TV talk about saving this population with health care reform when all they talk about is funding the current madness frustrates me to no end. I find myself talking to the TV and asking them if they are crazy.... when its actually I who's crazy expecting them to hear or listen. Talking about health care while ignoring the root of all illness and disease in our society today is like trying to rebuild your home while the fire is still blazing. You have to put the fire out before you can begin building. And we have to be honest and  address the real issues here before we can change the fate of this Nation. Our political leaders have to take the unpopular positions and piss of some large companies and possible political supporters in the process. But in the end the people will know who's doing the good work and vote their conscience.

The sad part is while most of us know and understand this to be true, very very few will take any personal action. No one will be willing to give up their 3 giant cups of coffee a day, and that scone that goes along with it.. or those damn Samoas that little pixie of a Girl Scout wants me to buy. Few will want to encounter the conflict with their child in a public setting when you have to say no to a food choice you know to be bad for them. "Next time" we'll say to clear our conscience of the bad choice. But we have to start somewhere. We may not be able to change a societies bad habits over night but surely we can change our own. And like Michael Jackson said... "I'm looking at the man in the mirror". I just have to change him to start.

Oh yeah... and if anyone from the Girl Scouts is reading this... how about adding a protein bar to your offerings? Then I can patronize your project without impairing my health. It would be good for the girls too.