The US leads the world in child obesity, early childhood death and incarcerating its own citizens.

What if I told you it was all one deficiency syndrome caused by one bad decision in the early part of the last century where we added stuff to stop people from dying. That decision has never been questioned and is the cause or the increase in somatic and mental disease.

People are not normally this fat, crazy or sick.

In my daughter's class photo the were the only ones that wern't fat. In my class photo there was one kid who was fat and she had her foot amputated 3 years ago from diabetes.

The chemicals we add to all white flour stop peope from dying, without adding them millions of people a year died around the turn of the century, largely in the south, here immortalized in a Tom Lehrer song:

"I'll go back to the Swanee,
Where pellagra makes you scrawny,
And the honeysuckle clutters up the vine.1
I really am a-fixin'
To go home and start a-mixin'
Down below that Mason-Dixon line."

Here's the problem: the chemical that kills you via Pellagra is vitamin b3, niacin. If you don't get enough you waste away, you go insane, your skin falls off and you shit yourself to death: the characteristic "4 D's" of Pellagra: dementia, dermatitis, diarrhea and death.

The grand evolutionary experiment of adopting grains to out diet took a bad turn with corn. The problem with it is if you eat it the way it is you will get pellagra and die. The reason is there's niacin in corn but it's not in a form that we can use and we absorb zero of it. "You are what you eat" is not true, here's a case where we're eating niacin but can die from a disease caused by lack of any niacin at all: you are what you absorb not what you eat.

Indigenous people of north America had figured this out 100 years before they showed Jacques Cartier how to cure scurvy.

Both the mexican and native americans "myxylated" their corn by treating it with slaked lime - Calcium hydroxide - which made the niacin bioavailable.

The net result being you can die from a steady diet of corn bread but not from a steady diet of tortillas.

So, when in the early 30s we figured this it from a 50 year old German biochemistry paper, we began adding enough so people won't die to al white flour.

The problem is we did exactly that! We add enough so people won't die but not enough for optimal health. We should be adding ten times the amount, the homeopathic dose currently in use may have been all the rage in the 1920s and 1930s but this is the 21st century and before too many more people die lets talk about those three chemicals we add to all flour.

At least we add them back, other chemicals lost during industrial processing are not: vitamin E, a flowery smelling thick yellowish oil is completely stripped from what during processing - we don't add that back although ironically this oily antioxidant, in many ways the oil soluble version of vitamin C is used as a preservative in many foods under the name "Tocopherol" which is about the only things that keeps us safe there in the same way the fashion of eating salads kept scurvy at bay before we knew even what it was.

We managed then to defeat the scourge of Pellagra and stopped people from dying from it. Instead of dying from the acute form of the disease because we only added enough prevent death, now we have people with the subclinical form of the disease: they don't have it enough to show physical symptoms but thinking is confused nonetheless.

We need to add an amount consistent with optimal health, not just enough to prevent death. These are two different levels.

We've been messing with our food supply without ever checking to see if we're doing the right thing. Read up on the 1911 infantile scurvy outbreak that occurred when middle class mothers began warming milk to kill the newly discovered Listeria germs and in doing so destroyed the vitamin C in milk which killed millions of people who never asked for this. The hubris of mans noble experiments with food is so vast yet so arrogantly wrong we wiped out nearly a generation of babies just on one well intentioned piece of bad advice.

This milk wad abandoned and fruit juice was considered a safer alternative until the noticed children were getting fat.

So this problem is 100 years in the making, this is where fruit juice got added to our diet, which now as we are rightly told is not a good thing to drink, you need the whole fruit for the fibre that slows down delivery of surges of sugars into the blood.

Put a 10000x tax on sugar. It's not needed at all and does nothing but harm.

Revisit the additives and adjust 10X up in all three cases. We can start from here and we have a long way to go but we absolutely can do better.

That'll fix it. People can talk all they want, but when they're sick of people dying, eventually they'll end up doing it one way or another if they want this species to carry forward because right now Americans as a population are on an extinction track.

http://hartkeisonline.com/2012/08/24/is-pellagra-the-root-cause-of-violent-shooting-rampages/