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950,000 people in the US will die every year from cardi-vascular related illnesses.
About 2/3rds of those are preventable and it's because people eat, not just too much food, but too much sugar in what they eat along with the fact that dietary information is fairly bad.
But you say, 'oh Lilith, everyone knows sugar is bad' and people go out of their way to avoid the things with sugar in them, well...
See this is where we get into the murky area of what 'is' a sugar.
Long and short of it, I go to the US and get sick from sugar in everything, so I did some looking around-
Sugar as in cane and beet sugar is fairly clearly labelled on most commodities but whats a little less obvious is the use of fructose.
Fructose's are sweeteners and of particular note is the high fructose corn syrups which are sometimes labelled as a "HFCS" and this stuff was quite happily it seems to be dumped in virtually everything that was a processed food and some where I never expected it like milk. It's basically sugar, just with a different name for all effects and purposes but it does get converted into fatty acids at a greater rate from memory.
Bit more digging around and it came down to either starving or looking for something organic and expensive to substitute into what I'd normally eat and that wasnt easy either. A lot of what has 'natural' on the label can have HFCS added to it without violating any local laws there and this is where it started getting kind of murky and worrisome as I was reduced to fruit, some kinds of bread and small amounts of meat.
Theres a general preference in the US to use a HFCS over a cane sugar because of the agricultural policy of the government, sugar in fairly much any country you can name is always a heavily subsidised commodity to support the people growing it. So I wasnt terribly suprised to find a lot of it wandering around, the main provider of such things like processed farm produce, (flour and things like HFCS) is a company called Archer Daniels Midland which I was passingly familiar with from commodities trading.
This is kind of interesting too-
http://www.newsmeat.com/ceo_politic...len_Andreas.php
Seems to keep a lot of politicians in his good books, which in turn seems to pay off in the long run because they allow you to sell products in an environment where laws are favourable to you selling a lot of them.
"Interesting..."
(Damn, politicians are cheap, I'm going to buy me one as a pet! $5000 a year and maybe he'll even mow my lawns, wash the car and dance for my plea... eew no maybe not that last one)
Would it be too presumptuous for me to say, a great deal of poor nutrition stems back to governments allowing companies to produce food which has added ingrediants that arent healthy to the population in such large amounts?
I dont think so, seeing as sugars and salts get labelled as being the prime evils of heart disease, obesity and other diseases like diabetes. It's also a very different version of what I generally used to take for granted as being 'natural' as well. Change the label and it ceases to be as demonised.
Course, this wasnt as interesting it seems to most people as religous fanatics in foreign countries blowing people up, so my topic died. 
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