Chapter 1: The True Cost of Cheap Food
The system we inherited from this history is now the water we swim in. It is so pervasive, so "normal," that we are trained to see its failures as our own. We are sick, tired, inflamed, and in debt, and we blame our genes or our lack of willpower. We are failing at "diet and exercise," when in fact, we are behaving exactly as the system was designed for us to behave. The dollar price on a fast-food menu or a box of cereal is a fiction. The true cost of this "cheap food" is externalized, paid over and over—in our soaring hospital bills, in our lost productivity, in the mental burden of chronic "food guilt," and in the catastrophic degradation of our soil, water, and climate.
The indoctrination begins in childhood. This system does not wait for us to become consumers; it creates us. Corporations pay for exclusive "pouring rights" in our public schools, placing vending machines full of sugar water next to the gymnasium. They sponsor "educational" materials that teach nutrition using their own branded mascots. We are told children under three should have zero added sugar, yet most are consuming well over that. The official limit for an adult is 25 grams a day, but our children are consuming double, adults triple, and teenagers are consuming six times what they should—all while their brains are still developing, a process that continues until age 25. Most cynically, the national school lunch program, underfunded and overwhelmed, has become a dumping ground for the surplus commodities of the very agricultural system that profits from us. The subsidized blocks of processed cheese, the mystery ground beef, the sugary fruit "cups"—these are not nourishment. They are byproducts of an industrial machine, and we are, in effect, allowing private corporations to purchase access to our children's minds and metabolisms, hard-wiring a preference for the very foods that will one day make them sick.
Yet, cracks in the facade are showing. What separates champions from everyone else? It's not just talent or hard work. It's what they put in their bodies and, more importantly, what they don't. The ultimate symbols of health—the world's greatest athletes—are pushing aside millions in sponsorships to show us what they believe.
At a 2021 press conference, soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the greatest of all time, sat down, pushed two Coca-Cola bottles aside, held up a bottle of water, and said one word: "Agua." The next day, Coca-Cola's market value dropped by $4 billion. He later admitted it irritates him that his own son drinks it. One bottle has 65 grams of sugar (three times an adult's daily limit) and phosphoric acid that weakens bones.
At an NBA press conference, Kawhi Leonard quietly removed the sponsored Gatorade bottles, saying, "Kids don't need to be drinking that." In that bottle is 56 grams of sugar and artificial dyes linked to behavior problems in children. The truth is, the liquid inside the "Gatorade" bottles on the NFL sidelines is often just water. The athletes aren't drinking the product; they are just paid to be near it.
Most champions follow diets with no sugar, no Gatorade, no fried foods, and no canola oil. Why? Better recovery. Brain studies on NFL players show that those who avoid cheap fried oils and sugar have less brain damage and recover faster than those who eat poor diets.
Novak Djokovic, one of tennis's greatest champions, follows a plant-based, gluten-free diet and sponsors Joe and the Juice, a company making drinks from real carrot, turmeric, and ginger—foods with anti-inflammatory nutrition, not sugar and dyes.
Tom Brady, seven-time Super Bowl champion, called Coca-Cola "poison for kids" and criticized Kellogg's for marketing sugary cereals to children. His own 80/20 diet (80% organic plants, 20% lean, clean meat) is built to reduce inflammation and boost energy. If it works for a man playing elite football in his forties, imagine what it could do for a growing child's brain.
Steph Curry and his wife, Aisha, co-founded Plezi, a company focused on healthier drinks for children, actively promoting water over Gatorade.
Why do they do this? They risk fines and cost their sponsors billions, but they understand the science. Your brain on sugar and fried canola oil suffers from impaired focus, slower reaction times, poor decision-making, mood crashes, and brain inflammation. In comparison, real food delivers sharper focus, faster reactions, stable moods, and reduced inflammation. These athletes need to make split-second decisions under immense pressure. Sugar and fried foods destroy that ability. Real food builds it.
The truth about fried foods isn't just the fat; it's the oils. Industrial seed oils (canola, vegetable, soybean) are not the "heart-healthy" products they claim to be. When processed with chemicals and high heat, they create toxic byproducts that damage our cells and cause free radicals in the brain. You find them in donuts, french fries, chips, and fast food. If you eat out in a restaurant, you can almost guarantee they are cooking with overheated canola oil. It's this deadly COMBINATION of sugar and salt and damaged fats that creates cognitive decline and makes up the bulk of the American diet.
Elite athletes avoid these foods because they don't just slow you down; they damage you. If it's not good enough for peak athletic performance, it's not good enough for developing brains and growing bodies. Champions choose real food. Your children deserve champion-level nutrition.
This truth is fought at every turn. When Michelle Obama launched the "Let's Move!" campaign, its initial message was revolutionary for a First Lady: plant a garden, cook real food, challenge the industry. The backlash from the food lobby was immediate and overwhelming. The message was swiftly "silenced"—diluted and refocused away from systemic change and onto "personal responsibility." The problem, we were told by industry-funded "energy balance" campaigns, wasn't the quality of the food; it was that we were too lazy to exercise it off. This was a classic misdirection, brilliantly shifting the blame from their addictive, metabolically destructive products to our personal failings. The industry taught us to confuse calories with nutrients. They taught us to believe 100 calories of Skittles is the same as 100 calories of almonds. It is not. Sugar was always meant to come with something else—the fiber in fruit, the fat and protein in honey. You cannot live on sugar alone.
Food engineers were hired to study one thing: "What does it take to get a human to eat as much as possible?" A famous study illustrates this perfectly. Scientists trying to induce heart disease in healthy monkeys failed when feeding them pure fat (lard) and failed again when feeding them pure starch (bread). But when they combined the fat and starch and fried it, the animals became universally sick with heart disease. They called these "monkey biscuits." One day, a researcher looked at a donut and realized: "This is a monkey biscuit! This is literally what's causing heart disease!" It's not just sugar. It's not just fat. It's the hyper-engineered combination, cooked in ways our bodies can't handle, that makes us addicted, sick, and unable to feel full. Other animal studies are just as terrifying. When fed a "potato chip diet" of processed foods for just 10 generations, cats and monkeys became infertile, so sick they could no longer reproduce. We are perhaps two or three generations into this same experiment.
This misdirection hides a dark reality: the system doesn't just make people sick; it makes everything sick. To produce meat at the impossible prices we demand, animals are treated not as industrial units. Today, 97% of American cows, pigs, and even farmed salmon are fed grain. Cows are not meant to eat grain—they're meant to eat grass. When they eat the wrong food, they get sick, their omega-6 to omega-3 ratios are destroyed, and they require antibiotics just to survive in their Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). And when we eat sick animals, we get sick, too. This prophylactic use of antibiotics is a primary driver of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, a global health crisis that threatens all of us. We are, quite literally, consuming a product of profound sickness, and we are surprised when we become sick ourselves.
The sickness extends beyond our plates. Today, children are born with 200 known toxins in their umbilical cord blood—chemicals that did not exist 100 years ago. Each generation is dealing with a greater buildup, which affects everything from their taste buds to their microbiome—the gut bacteria that regulate mood, stress, behavior, and hormone production. 95% of American food is sprayed with pesticides. Glyphosate (Roundup), a primary component of which was derived from Agent Orange, is designed to kill. It kills weeds, but it also kills the beneficial gut bacteria in your stomach. Crops are genetically modified to withstand more of it, and while it doesn't kill us immediately, it slowly deteriorates our health. Worse, these safety studies only look at chemicals in isolation. Nobody is studying the combined, synergistic effect of the pesticides on our food, the plastics from our containers, the fragrances in our candles, and the cleaning sprays in our air. This environmental shift is profound. Studies of Japanese women show that while they have the same baseline cancer cells as everyone else, those cells activate when they move to America and adopt our diet. It's not just genetics; it's the environment.
Why do we defend it? Why do we fight for the "right" to consume the products that harm us? It is a form of societal Stockholm Syndrome, reinforced by biology. Food preferences are set young. A toddler’s "picky" phase between one and three is an evolutionary mechanism: in the wild, an adventurous walking baby would likely eat poison. We are hard-wired to trust what our parents give us. It's often said it's easier to change someone's religion than their food preferences. This bias is even embedded in our language. In English, the "refined" French words (beef, sauté, bouillon) describe finished products, while the "barbaric" Germanic words (cow, apple,pig) describe the raw ingredients. We are culturally programmed to believe that "progress" (processed food) is better than the "barbaric" (real food).
This places us at a crossroads, facing a calculation that is both selfish and profoundly selfless. The selfish calculation is simple self-preservation. We are tired of being sick. We are tired of the brain fog, the inflammation, the energy crashes. The selfless calculation is for the next generation. Do we want to pass this broken inheritance on to our children?
This is why it matters: our kids. Our true inheritance is our genetics, and the science of epigenetics gives us the answer. As the book Deep Nutrition explains, our DNA isn't a fixed destiny. It coils and uncoils based on the signals we give it. Sugar and bad oils literally damage you at a DNA level. But real food can help it unwrap and express its best, strongest self. As The Biology of Belief describes, every cell in your body is in one of two states: growth mode or defense mode. When your cells are flooded with stress, sugar, or toxins, they are in defense mode. They can't heal, regenerate, or build. They can only protect. We are living in a sea of inputs that keep our cells in a constant state of defense. We can hear it in people's voices, see it in their skin, and feel it in our own energy. We are waiting until the heart attack to change, when the change is needed now.
The path forward, then, is not one of new, complicated rules. It is not another restrictive diet or a new line of expensive "health" products, which are often just the same system in a different package. The path forward is a radical act of reclamation. It is about recognizing the design and choosing to un-design it, one meal at a time. It is about choosing to put our cells back into "growth mode." It is about understanding that the most revolutionary act you can take is to feed yourself and your family simple, real food. This is not about purity; it is about direction. It is about taking back the power that was taken from us, one kitchen, one garden, and one community at a time. This is where the solution begins.
