A doctor and bestselling author rings the alarm bells rising disease rates In the US, he argues, Americans are becoming more sick each year because of a reliance on highly processed foods, while the health care system is profiting from the toxic dependency.
Dr. Casey Means, co-author of “Good Energy” joins “The Brian Kilmeade Show” To discuss how Americans’ reliance on “ultra-processed” food is fueling a spiral of disease and how lifestyle habits have led to an increase in certain cancers and other disorders.
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“This is the first year in history that more than 2 million new cases of cancer are expected to be diagnosed in the United States, so we’re spending money on cancer research and cancer rates are going up,” Means told host Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday.
“The reason for this is that we are focusing on the symptoms of cancer. We are focusing on treating cancer after it has developed. We spend approximately zero dollars on cancer prevention.”
Means said “ultra-processed foods” can be blamed for a variety of health problems facing Americans, including a rise in colon cancer, particularly among young people.
He argued that sleep deprivation and “artificial toxins” that are contained in everything from food to everyday personal care products also have an impact on health and are linked to disease.
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“We know that most cancers, especially colon cancer, are linked to our terrible ultra-processed diet in the United States,” said Means, whose book has become a New York Times bestseller.
“It’s because of the environment we’re living in, and unfortunately, there are trillions of dollars of incentives between the food system and the health care system, which makes money when we get addicted to substandard food, and then we get treatment.”
“I think people really understand that the financial incentives of our healthcare system right now are to make more money when patients are sick and make less money when patients are healthy,” he added. “So I had to leave the system, because that’s the financial reality of the American healthcare system.”
Colorectal cancer is now one of the most common cancers. Major Reasons Cancer deaths It’s the leading cause of cancer death for young adults, according to a report from the American Cancer Society (ACS) earlier this year. By 2024, it will become the leading cause of cancer deaths in men and the second leading cause in women.
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The woman is eating a donut and drinking cola in her kitchen. (iStock)
Overall, the ACS expects there will be more than 2 million new cancer cases and 611,720 cancer deaths in the US in 2024.
Some of the primary risk factors include family history, obesitysmoking, excessive drinking, a diet rich in red and processed meat, a personal or family history of inflammatory bowel disease and polyps, according to Dr. Aparna Parikh, medical director of the Young Adult Colorectal Cancer Center at Mass General Cancer Center.
Means argued that food companies that produce “ultra-processed” products are following an addiction-based business model to maximize their profits, which amount to about $2 trillion, and sick customers keep coming back to buy more.
“Americans are getting sicker every year,” he said. “We’re spending $4.3 trillion on healthcare costs, and Americans are getting sicker every year. Brian, life expectancy in the United States is going down.”
He said, “The problem that we have is that 93% of Americans, according to research from the American College of Cardiology, have a fundamental problem with the way they’re powering their bodies, which is the most fundamental part of health, and we now know that science is telling us that this is leading to an increase in the risk of diseases like cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, stroke, fatty liver disease, cancer, all of those diseases at the same time.”
a diet rich in highly processed foods Rising cancer incidence may increase the risk of developing and dying from various types of cancer, according to a study released last year by London’s Imperial School of Public Health.
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the study from the UK Using the NOVA food classification system to determine the level of food processing, the diets of 200,000 adults aged 40 to 69 were tracked over a decade. Designed by researchers at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, NOVA categorises foods into four groups: unprocessed, processed culinary ingredients, processed and ultra-processed.
The study found that people who ate higher amounts of ultra-processed foods were more likely to develop all types of cancer — especially ovarian and brain cancer,
Means emphasized that the drop in life expectancy and increased illness were not caused by COVID-19, despite some critics thinking so.
“The pandemic is not the cause,” he said. “It had already begun a sustained decline before the pandemic, the longest period of declining health since the 1860s. We’re going down. So we extended our lifespan in the early 1900s because of infectious disease control. Now it’s going down because of chronic lifestyle conditions rooted in metabolic dysfunction.”
“And now 93% of American adults have a metabolic disorder that’s linked to diet and lifestyle, so that’s what’s killing us now. It’s not infectious disease. It’s lifestyle diseases based on our toxic food system, our sedentary lifestyle, our poor habits,” he added.
Means graduated from Stanford and later served on the university’s faculty. After leaving the field of conventional medicine, he co-founded Levels, a health technology company dedicated to reversing the world’s metabolic health crisis.
Fox News’ Melissa Ruddy contributed to this report.
