Everyday groceries contain ingredients that cause heart disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis and other chronic diseases

If you go to your favorite corner drugstore, you'll find two types of things for sale: 1) processed foods and beverages that cause disease, and 2) prescription drugs that treat the symptoms of those diseases. It's a brilliant racket: buy the stuff at the front of the store and get diseased, then you become a customer for the drugs sold at the back of the store. That's called "customer retention" in marketing-speak.

The floor plan of these drug stores even encourages this codependent cycle: the pharmacy is hidden away in the back of the store, forcing customers to walk through aisles loaded with high-impulse junk food items like soft drinks, chocolate bars and snack chips. This is no coincidence: store designers know exactly how to boost impulse sales by forcing customers to navigate through shelves that are intentionally stocked with the most high-profit (and low-nutrition) items available.

And, just to make sure nobody gets away without being at least partly diseased, these drug stores also sell products that claim to be helpful for people with diseases, but that actually give them even more disease. For example, did you ever look at the ingredients on those meal replacement shakes for diabetics? The first three ingredients are water, sugar and sugar (sucrose)! It's primarily sugar water, sold as a product for diabetics. With products like this on the shelves, even people who think they're enhancing their nutrition actually end up with a lifelong diabetes problem. (Sugar for diabetics... gee, can it get any crazier?)

On top of all this, virtually every grocery store in America sells a vast array of foods that promote chronic diseases. Foods made with white flour are very common. That includes most breads, cookies, crackers, pastries and pastas. And this one ingredient -- refined white flour -- strips the body of essential nutrition, leaving it deficient in B vitamins as well as minerals like magnesium and zinc. These are precisely the minerals that children need in order to build healthy nervous systems and avoid behavioral disorders later in life. These are also the same nutrients that pregnant women need to be able to give birth to babies that don't have birth defects.

Every grocery store in America sells foods containing cancer-causing chemicals (sodium nitrite), heart disease promoting ingredients (hydrogenated oils), and drinks that promote osteoporosis and bone loss (carbonated soft drinks). It's almost like a disease store, not a grocery store, since most items on the shelves are actually "disease in a box" rather than real food.

In Washington these days, there's a lot of talk about "protecting Americans." But I say that if we really want to protect Americans, we need to start banning the food ingredients that are killing Americans. We could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year right here in America if we just banned hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and the refining of whole-grain flour into unhealthful white, bleached flour.

And if we told Americans the truth about their foods -- if we gave them honest nutritional advice and dietary advice -- we would help people make better decisions that would eliminate chronic disease in their own life, and, for expectant mothers, allow them to give birth to children without birth defects. We need honest food labeling and we need to outlaw toxic ingredients like aspartame, monosodium glutamate, food additives and chemical preservatives like sodium nitrite that directly cause cancers of the digestive tract.

These ingredients are, technically, chemical assaults on the American public. While the Bush administration is out there worrying about biological agents like anthrax and smallpox, people are consuming bacon every morning all across America made with sodium nitrite, a chemical additive that causes colon cancer. And yet the USDA remains silent. The FDA remains silent. The Bush administration remains silent. And the food companies, playing a full-press game of food politics, continue to insist that all of these ingredients are perfectly good for you, even while suppressing precisely the information that would educate you about ways to enhance your health by making healthier food choices.

Thankfully, there is a growing list of pioneering doctors and researchers out there who are telling the truth about foods; people like Dr. Russell Blaylock, Dr. Gary Null, Dr. Julian Whittaker and Dr. David Williams. Book authors like Dr. Elson Haas and Eric Schlosser. I feel honored to be joining those people in telling the truth about the dangers of the American food supply and the real cause of chronic disease in this country. Because we have all our priorities mixed up in this country. We're spending $300+ billion fighting a war in Iraq, and we won't spend even $100 million a year educating our own people on how they can prevent cancer, diabetes, heart disease, birth defects, osteoporosis, clinical depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other diseases.

And the decision makers in our federal regulatory agencies who claim to be acting on your behalf are actually censoring the information, making sure the American public doesn't learn the truth, because the truth would hurt the corporate profits of soft drink companies, food processors, fast food restaurant chains and drug companies. After all, there are lobbyists to please. The public be damned.

To turn the tables on the food lobbyists, and in an effort to educate the public about the details of which grocery ingredients to avoid, I've written a book on the subject called "Grocery Warning." This book reveals all the dangerous ingredients to be avoided, along with which foods and beverages contain them. It presents shopping lists: foods to avoid vs. foods to buy, and helps shopper make informed, health-enhancing foods choices each time they shop for groceries. You'll find details on this book at TruthPublishing.com