With all the hype about the pendemic of obesity in America, it's hard to separate fact from fiction. Obese people eat too much and are lazy. Obese people have more heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and a host of other diseases. Obesity is the nation's #1 killer. Obesity is bad. Obesity means people no longer have discipline or are just too lazy to get out and exercise. Obesity is the devil.

Isn't that always the way? Demonize the problem -- or the person -- and fail to get at the root cause. It is the way of this information saturated world and there is little of truth or verifiable data to be had. Getting grants to study where and how people migrated by studying the roots of fairy tales are easy t get, but a study of what makes people fat, other than the obvious reasons, is either under reported or nonexistent. What is going on? Why are more people getting fat?

Is it the boom of fast food restaurants cropping up all over the country? That can't be it since there are bumper crops of fast food restaurants all over the world and the people in those countries aren't nearly as obese as Americans. Is it because fewer Americans walk everywhere or maybe it is because more people are unemployed in America than ever in history? What is going on and how do we get at the root cause?

For my money, it's what is and isn't in the food served at all those fast food restaurants and in grocery stores all over the country. What isn't in the food is nutrition.

According to scientists opposing Monsanto's Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), the genetic code of crops has been changed and that means when we eat GMOs we are eating information. Our intestinal tract is being turned into a chemical factory that does not digest food and turn it into nourishment, but may be creating pesticides that repel certain weeds and insects. Sounds more like science fiction than fact, but it could be possible. Generations have been eating GMOs without knowing it and the people in the middle and lower classes of society buy cheap food, cheap GMOs, that is changing the very nature of their bodies.

Eat food without nutritive value, with very little nutrition, and you have to eat more of it to get any benefit and be satisfied. Reminds me a lot of cigarettes. Tobacco comanies changed the tobacco to be more addictive so that people would need to buy more cigarettes and smoke more to satisfy their cravings. How is food any different? Engineer the food so that people need more to get more benefit and the resultis obesity. Even less nutritious food contains calories and eating more calories means the body deposits more adispose tissue -- more fat. It's not the fat that is making people fat, but the genetically modified food-like stuff. 

People also get more sodium (salt) and the wrong kind of sodium at that, which erodes the inside lining of blood vessels which in turn creates weakness in the cellular structure of the veins and makes people more susceptible to high blood pressure, aneurysm, and stroke, among other serious health problems. Few people realize that the body needs salt to help regulate temperature and maintain the body at its factory levels (that means original state), but the wrong kind of salt, processed salt/sodium, which contains minute particles of glass and sand are that act like sandpaper on the inside of blood vessel walls. It's like sandblasting, or glass and sand blasting in this case, and that is what is used to clean the outside of brick and stone buildings. If it can remove centuries of dirt and decay from stone, think what it can do to the tissues inside the body carried by the force of the blood pumped from the heart, which means all that sand and glass is also sand blasting the inside of the heart. Do you begin to see a connection? I certainly do.

There may also be substances in the food that are being used to calm and make the population docile, in addition to the lack of nutrition. People in jails and prisons are fed a high carbohydrate diet to keep them slow and make them docile. I don't personally know about adding salt peter to the Kool-Aid to quiet the hormonal urges, but at the heart of every fairy tale is a kernel of truth. A docile prison population without hormonal urges is just what the warden wants -- and needs.

It might also follow that a government intent on destroying the country, or at least raping and pillaging the economy and democracy, would want their greed and evil doings overlooked by a docile population. Engineering the food supply to provide that docility is just what the politicians want and need. They could use a partner in crime and Monsanto is made to order. So are pharmaceutical companies with the Prozac and Ativan and Seroquel and other mood levelers and enhancers. If the people get too worried about their sex drive, there's always Viagra to get them up to speed.

I kow. It all sounds like crazy conspiracy talk. I'll bet you think I wear a tin foil hat and mark up newspapers and books with highlighters looking for the hidden code. Not at all. I'm merely following the money and adding 1 and 2 so that they equal 3. It's probably an effect from eating more organic and natural food and staying away from processed fast food -- except for the occasional steak quesadilla from Taco Bell that keeps singing it's siren song for me.

The point is that it's time to take a look at obesity and health problems from a different angle. Everyone cannot afford to eat expensive organic food when they have about $5 a day to feed themselves and their families. Michelle Obama tried her limited, good food approach at some schools and the children were unable to concentrate and constantly hungry because they weren't getting enough food -- enough nutrition -- to fuel their brain and help them grow. The bite of gnawing hunger does not help people learn or behave since the body is saying it's not sufficiently fed. There seems to be an almost addictive reaction going on as well. Something isn't right and the only place to look is at the food and where it comes from.

Why are so many children now diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder) and ADD (attention deficit disorder) than ever before and on medication? Why are those same children often obese? Why has there been a rise in autoimmune diseases and intestinal problems? Why are there more behavioral problems, outside of the fact that most parents don't teach and enforce discipline and morals in the home? Why is road rage and rage disorders almost to epidemic proportions? What is going on in this country that we are missing?

It may sound like conspiracy theory, but there has to be a conspiracy for so many things to go wrong for so many people in the same way while corporations like Monsanto, pharmaceutical companies, and politicians keep getting richer while the people who pay for their goods are getting poorer and fatter. Most people don't know that more than half of the obese in this country are malnourished, which wouldn't be the case if they were getting nutritional value from the quantities of food they eat. Heart and kidney disease, diabetes, and obesity are on the rise in a country where there is now more unemployment than during the Great Depression, and people tended to be much thinner in those days because there wasn't enough food -- or money to buy food.

When there are more people taking more drugs and eating fake food with no nutritional value, there is a link. I wonder if we are smart enough or angry enough to demand answers -- or at least ask the questions. How about funding a study on what is actually going on and how we can turn back the tide? We need answers and we need them now.