Number of words: 263

The second factor that thwarted American’s potential for utopia was that Pasteur’s germ theory of diseases unfortunately influenced our medical community to drop the pursuit of diseases prevention. Beginning in the 19th Century, chemicals with drugs actions were isolated from plants, and increasingly drugs were made by chemical synthesis. Our medical community became convinced that the newly discovered drugs were the most advantageous modality with which to practice medicine (i.e., combat germs and other disease-causing agents). Nutrition as “standard of care” (accepted modes of medical care), which had been accepted doctrine from the time of Greek physician Hippocrates (the “father of medicine,” for 460 – 377 B.C.), was unilaterally rejected by modern medicine, which has virtually ignored the impact of nutrition on the building up or breaking down of the body and shifted its focus to treating disease after it occurs – primarily with drugs. 

The medical community’s dismissal of nutrition as standard of care in favor of a drug approach was the first step in our becoming a nation of factory-food eaters because it encouraged people to abdicate responsibility for their own health and place utter trust in the medical community.  As we became a nation of drug takers following the advice of the medical community – which had shunned nutrition – the old wisdoms of food and nutrition were lost. Today few people remember their grandmothers advising them what to eat or drink to prevent or correct illness. That’s because most grandmothers did not learn the simple truths about nutrition from their grandmothers.

Excerpted from page 10-11 of ‘Death by Supermarket’ by Nancy Deville