Several years ago I spoke with a food scientist at one of the major organic cereal companies. He told me what I already suspected — boxed breakfast cereals, even if "healthier" are just dead foods. He said that they are cooked, baked and fried — to death — until there is no nutritional value. Knowing this, they infuse a powdered chemical into the cereal that contains a host of synthetic vitamins and minerals. It's an empty gesture — just as empty as its nutritional value. Too bad that so many millions of people rely on these cereals to start their day.

Author Scott Bruce, Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, writes, "Americans buy 2.7 billion packages of breakfast cereal each year. If laid end to end, the empty cereal boxes from one year's consumption would stretch to the moon and back."

Convenience trumps nutrition

Perhaps this is the best and most succinct assessment of breakfast cereal as we know it today. Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian, writes, "One of the earliest convenience foods, processed cereals represents a triumph of marketing, packaging and US economic and foreign policy. They are the epitome of cheap commodity converted by manufacturing to higher value goods; of agricultural surplus turned into profitable export. Their ingredients have a disconcerting overlap with my cat food. Somehow they have wormed into our confused consciousness as intrinsically healthy when by and large they are degraded foods that have to have any goodness artificially restored."

Many years ago, when I was writing my thesis, I realized that there is a major flaw in the entire concept of taking vitamins to improve one's health. I called it the missing link in vitamin therapy, and the essential idea is that real foods contain a host of nutrients that vitamin pills do not. And we need these other nutrients — often more than the vitamin itself — for healing, prevention and cellular function. In real food, vitamins exist within a complex of interwove, interactive and interdependent nutrients. Vitamins and multivitamins, on the other hand, do not contain this complex and therefore do not act as natural nutrition inside the body.

Vitamins do not work like foods, and foods are what our bodies were designed to use by virtue of evolution and biology. There is no substitute for food nutrition, and no matter how you look at it, vitamin pills are an invention of scientists, so they are prone to cause side effects, be incomplete and lack what we need to overcome our health problems.

Most Americans have read about the Salem witch trials in their history classes. Outside of religious beliefs that led to hysteria, it is difficult to imagine what might have sparked the insanity of 1692 as transplants from Puritan England fought to survive in a foreign and often inhospitable land. But there are a few researchers who have come up with a possible cause - ergot poisoning.

When religious beliefs spark a deadly explosion

Certainly people of the 17th Century were familiar with madness, but to the unenlightened, mental and emotional problems were linked to an evil force possessing the soul.In 1692, scientific thinking was only recognized by scholars and not by the superstitious and poorly educated settlers who huddled in fear at the thought of evil spirits holding sway over  their lives. If they had been open-minded enough then perhaps they would have made a connection between the symptoms and the effects of eating tainted food.

It's an old debate — is weight loss all about limiting what you eat? The answer is not a definitive "yes." In fact, there's more evidence to the contrary.

It is clear that weight gain is not caused by what popular diet and health gurus say it is — eating too much fat, not exercising enough and eating too many calories. A recent study published in the journal PLOS Medicine has reported the rise of obesity in an Algerian refugee camp where people are not getting enough nutrition.

Above all else, the United States is the marketing capital of the world. Our society is built around products and services and all the ways they are advertised to us in a way designed to outpace the competition. While it may be unethical to do so, marketing fosters its share of lying, truth-twisting and censorship by omission. The food industry is a model food chain — the big guys try to swallow the small guys, which is why organic foods are slandered by food giants and Big Agra.

Over the years I have read several so-called "studies" that would have us believe that organic foods are no different than non-organic foods. While these may be confusing for many people, those who have been eating organically for many years remain unmoved. The scientific evidence of the dangers of pesticides and other chemicals used in growing and processing non-organic foods is too great to ignore.

The Paleo — prehistoric, or early human — diet seems to create more questions than answers. This is because its premise is based on a theory that eating like primitive humans is the closest diet to perfect. But the biggest problem comes in an attempt to identify what early bipeds really ate without considering a host of other important factors ranging from stomping grounds to food availability and everything in between.

When I first read about FODMAPS I was puzzled by this strange acronym. When you see what each letter stands for, it's understandable why the actual term is rarely used. And when you read what these foods do, you can see why you may have digestive problems after eating them.

FODMAPS stands for Fermentable Oligo-, Di- and Mono-saccharides And Polyols.

People suffering with irritable bowel syndrome and similar digestive tract problems may want to take notice.

Many who have irritable bowel symptoms have been diagnosed, while others have struggled with digestive difficulties without knowing why they can't easily digest certain foods. FODMAPS are among the foods that seem to cause the most trouble.

Peering into the politics of the food industry is like getting a peek behind the curtain where the Wizard of Oz is working the controls. It seems quite obvious that food giants like Kellogg work hard to become reputable and good not by the products they produce, but by the friends they make. You really have to look at the whole picture to see what's going on in the PR arena to understand why, in the end, the consumer gets it in more ways than one.

Several decades ago the modern world went crazy with its dietary habits. People were told to stop eating fats because they led to weight gain and heart disease. The government was behind this advice as well as the American Heart Association, hospitals, manufacturers of cholesterol-lowering drugs, food manufacturers, dairies and doctors.

Here we are thirty years later and obesity and heart disease rates have gone up instead of down. Now some (not enough) researchers are saying the low-fat idea was a big mistake.

In typical fashion, the Mayo Clinic makes this statement on its website: "[T]here is a dark side to fat. The concern with some types of dietary fat (and their cousin cholesterol) is that they are thought to play a role in cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Dietary fat also may have a role in other diseases, including obesity and cancer." 

Is this true, or is it simply an assumption that has been proven wrong? Or is it the kind of misinformation you'd expect from drug companies that manufacture cholesterol-lowering drugs and food giants who make billions selling low-fat, non-fat processed cereal, yogurt, drinks, pizzas, cookies and ice cream?

We need fats in our diets. It's a matter of biology

Fats are essential to human health. The Weston A Price Foundation tells us, "Fats from animal and vegetable sources provide a concentrated source of energy in the diet; they also provide the building blocks for cell membranes and a variety of hormones and hormone-like substances. Fats as part of a meal slow down absorption so that we can go longer without feeling hungry. In addition, they act as carriers for important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. Dietary fats are needed for the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, for mineral absorption and for a host of other processes." (westonaprice.org)