5 Hard-to-Swallow Statistics About the SAD

America is hooked on highly processed, refined foods. It’s been known since the 1920s. In fact, Catalyn®, our first supplement, was developed specifically to address the deficiencies in nutrition caused by a refined food diet.
We’d like to report that the American diet has improved since then, but unfortunately, the opposite is true. Because we, like many who will read this, are alarmed by the fact that so many have a continued reliance on the standard American diet (SAD), we want to keep this issue front and center.
That’s why we’ve created this infographic highlighting five sobering statistics that illustrate the state of nutrition in America.

1. Processed foods make up close to 70 percent of the U.S. diet. Frozen fruits and vegetables count as processed, but this is still a sobering statistic.
2. Americans spend 10 percent of their disposable income on fast food. One in four Americans eat fast food every day.
3. The average American consumes 130 pounds of sugar in a year. That is equivalent to about 3 pounds every week per person.
4. More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese (not just overweight), with an estimated associated annual medical cost of $147 billion. Of U.S children ages 2-19, 17 percent are considered obese.
5. In the early 2000s, 60 percent of all American middle schools and high schools sold soft drinks in vending machines. In good news, federal guidelines were established in 2014 to phase out the marketing of soda and other sugar-laden drinks and food during the academic school day.

For us, statistics like these just reinforce our ever-vigilant commitment to countering poor nutrition found in the SAD. And oftentimes all it takes to change people’s habits is information that resonates, a practitioner who can identify the problems, and nutrient solutions that work to counter nutritional deficiencies. Click here to find a health care practitioner near you.