We all know it.  What we (Americans) eat is not healthy.  It is so contaminated with things so foreign to our bodies that we are suffering without really knowing it.  But what choice do we have?  What can we do to stop it from altering our very chemistry?

I spend a semester abroad in London in Fall of 2023.  I lived there for a good four months.  I seriously consider going back to work/live.  My only reason I hesitate is because of the food.  It is very hard to find the high-sugar foods that have become my diet from living in America.  Unhealthy, processed food has been ingrained into my system throughout my life.  England, and most European countries, don’t have that.  While they still suffer from some of what we face, it is not nearly on the same scale.  It is because Europe has not been the developmental face of “junk food”, “fast food”, or any of the other concepts that have emerged from American companies.  While I was in London I cooked a lot of my own meals.  It was an adjustment to find the English version of things.  I bought chicken breasts that weren’t as big as my hand.  I bought cheese that hadn’t been artificially colored.  There aren’t a lot of processed sugary foods.  The cereal aisle wasn’t even an aisle.  It was more of an end cap.  The differences were astonishing. 

My biology professor in London had us, the Americans, explain what high-fructose corn syrup was.  He couldn’t explain it because it is not allowed to be put in anything there.  As Johann Hari says, food has lost “a lot of its nutritional value” (Hari 199).  Especially American food.  When European countries noticed what these chemicals, dyes, and other substances were doing to their food they put a stop to it.  American companies make their money by infiltrating our food with all of this.  So they’re not going to do anything to stop it.  We “feed their profit margins rather than…brain health” (Hari 203).

Our brains and bodies are no longer receiving what they require.  It has been impacting us for decades, but the repercussions are finally starting to be realized.  Why is it that America has one of the highest ADHD rates?  Maybe because our brain chemistry is being so severely altered by what we consume that it is quite literally affecting us.  Sure, our focus, or lack of, can be traced back to a lot of things, but this might be a good place to start.