Americans Don’t Eat as Healthy as They Think
Written By: Jan McBarron M.D, N.D. (Natural Remedy News)
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Published - Jan 21, 2011
According to two related reports Americans claim that they are eating healthy yet rarely limit their sweets, sugars and fats and at the same time suffer from gross vitamin deficiencies. Let’s take a look at these reports and you can decide for yourself if the American people are in denial on how healthy their diet is, uninformed as to what a healthy diet is, or perhaps they are trying to fool everyone including themselves.
A poll of over 1,200 participants released by Consumer Reports show that nine out of 10 Americans believe their diet is healthy. Over 50 percent described their diet as “somewhat” healthy, over 30 percent described it as “very” healthy, and about 5 percent described it as “extremely” healthy.
Can a diet be healthy if you don’t limit your sweets, sugars and fats? In today’s world where food is so plentiful and the stimuli encouraging us to eat is so prevalent I am not sure you can. If I didn’t closely watch my sugars, sweets and fats I am afraid I would be twice my current weight. While 90 percent of Americans claim to have a healthy diet only 28 percent limit their intake of sweets and sugars, 26 percent limit their fat intake.
On the other hand, the healthy and nutritious fruits and vegetables are being under consumed. The Department of Agriculture recommends five to ten servings of fruits and vegetables per day while only 30 percent of Americans are meeting the minimum of five servings daily.
Perhaps one could argue that rather than deciding if a diet is healthy based on the intake of sugars, sweet, fats, fruits and vegetables it can be determined by vitamin and mineral intake. Well according to our second study released by the Milk Processor Education Program Research Institute the results of the American diet judged by those standards are just as dismal.
According to this report, nine out of ten Americans are deficient in 11 key nutrients. In my opinion many of these vitamin deficiencies are not only overlooked but mistakenly diagnosed as disease.
It seems that today there are many factors impacting our declining health in America. Maybe it is time we take an honest, objective, and informed analysis of our diet and make the changes necessary to get back on the road to health.
With the methods of growing and processing our food today I am not sure just how realistic it is to get all of our nutritional needs met without a little help from a good multiple vitamin and some proven dietary guidelines. My advice is to follow the guidelines outlined in the Mediterranean diet and take my favorite one a day multiple vitamin, Daily Extra.