It’s that simple. While we’ve been told that maladies such as heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, obesity, mental illness, ulcers, constipation, and even tooth decay are a normal part of life, in truth these afflictions were barely known to the human race before industrial food processing was introduced to the world. In fact, they appeared so predictably in every new population that adopted processed foods last century they were dubbed the “diseases of civilization.”
Early nutrition research pointed squarely to the vitamin and mineral deficiencies of industrial foods as the reason for humanity’s new plagues. “Because of the denaturation of foods by refining and processing,” Dr. Royal Lee wrote in 1942, “we are overeating the fattening and energy-producing components in foods and literally starving for the vital vitamin and mineral factors.”2