Cheap Poison, Anyone?

In my latest posts, I have repeatedly talked about the healthcare system and the politics driving it. Today, I want to continue this discussion about our declining health with one simple question: why do we end up in this situation?

Quite a few years ago, when I was still working as an anesthesiologist, I noticed that most of the cases we operated on at the hospital were cancers. Visceral surgery, thoracic surgery, oral and maxillofacial surgery, and gynecology were probably 80% tumor-related operations. Most of them were curative, meaning that the primary goal of the medical intervention was to cure the patient, while a considerably smaller proportion had a palliative approach, where the only logical medical intervention was to reduce the patient's suffering without aiming for a cure.

JWK Minden has 18 operating rooms, with an average of 30–40 operations every day. Can you imagine how many cancer patients I must have seen on the operating table for me to reach the conclusion that this was practically all we operated on? The only real relief came when I was giving anesthesia in pediatric ENT or pediatric urology, where the patients were, on average, under two years old. At the time, although I was disturbed by the predominance of oncology cases, I associated this phenomenon with the extraordinary ability of doctors to diagnose these diseases. In my mind, the only reason there were so many patients was because we were doing an incredible job of detecting the disease early.

Do you remember how disappointed you were when you discovered that Santa Claus wasn't real? A few years later, I came to my own realization: there were so many cases not because we were diagnosing them early, but because we were simply full of them. Patients are beginning to develop these diseases at younger and younger ages, and many of them lack the traditional risk factors. At some point, the entire healthcare system will be overwhelmed by these cases. And then the tragedy isn't only that cancer patients are getting younger and younger, but also that they consume resources that would otherwise be available to other patients. That's how you end up operating on cholecystitis and appendicitis at 3 a.m., because that's the only time you have left. Should I tell you how accurate a doctor is after already working in a stressful environment for more than 18 hours? Or perhaps we should start the debate about why a truck driver has to take a break after eight hours while a doctor can legally work for well over 24 hours? If you wouldn't want to drive next to such a truck driver, why would you want to be operated on by such a doctor?

But this situation, in which people are becoming ill at increasingly younger ages, doesn't change the question I asked at the beginning: why are young people getting sick earlier, and why is the incidence of certain cancers increasing? A few days ago, I made a house call to a 98-year-old woman. Ninety-eight. She is still remarkably lucid and can easily hold a normal conversation for quite some time. You know that expression, "They don't build them like they used to"? Do you think it could apply to people as well? Could we say something similar about people born after, let's say, 1940? Do you think this is predominantly a matter of genetics, or of how well the human body is maintained over the course of a lifetime?

So what has changed so dramatically over the last 80 years? In just two generations, we somehow managed to screw ourselves over and destroy something important, something we didn't even realize we had. What didn't exist in its current form 80 years ago? That's easy! The modern food industry. The food industry has changed enormously, with perhaps its most important revolution taking place over the last 50 years. It has transformed itself around one fundamental desire: to make money! You understood that perfectly. Nobody really cares about your health, not even the health insurance companies. To them, you are simply an obstacle who needs to remain healthy enough to work and pay your contributions, while if and when you do become sick, ideally you would die immediately without generating high costs.

Imagine a simple yogurt. A yogurt produced 70 years ago, made from simple, natural ingredients. Back then, it was relatively inexpensive. Decades of inflation and today's levels of public and private debt had not yet accumulated. Debt that is often created unnecessarily. Just think about how that idiot Trump increased America's national debt from 37 trillion to 40 trillion dollars in only two years. Three trillion dollars? That's three thousand billion dollars pulled through the machinery of the state. Can you see that money anywhere in the system? Were improvements made from which the population—the people who will ultimately have to pay that money back—actually benefited? The cost of living has done nothing but increase for 99% of Americans. From there, we might wonder how much of the inflation accumulated over the last 80 years arose under similar circumstances, with a relatively small part of the population ultimately benefiting.

The food industry had to adapt and reduce production costs, not only because of the selfish desire to make money, but also because of the need to remain competitive. Periods of high inflation create uncertain economic conditions for any producer who cannot manufacture cheaply enough. And producing cheaply enough most often means identifying which ingredients can be replaced by cheaper alternatives—or which ones can simply be removed altogether. When was the last time you reduced both the quality and the price of something and were then surprised to discover that its overall value had fallen as well?

In this race for competitiveness and attractive prices, we have most likely crossed a threshold that is toxic to our species. A species whose future we increasingly seem willing to gamble with. Now imagine a potato crop that has to be sprayed with toxic substances to prevent pests from eating it. If the farmer loses half of his harvest to pests, he will have to sell the remaining potatoes at roughly twice the price because his costs do not simply disappear. If, instead, he sprays the potatoes, he can maintain a competitive price. Just think about how absurd that idea is: human beings are the only species we know of that deliberately spray their own food with substances designed to kill other organisms in order to save it from pests—only to eat that same food afterwards.

Are we talking about inflation here, or stupidity? If nobody bought food treated with pesticides anymore, I can assure you that within ten years we would have high-quality food again. But the modern consumer is strange. Take Germany. What do Germans actually want? They want schnitzel with French fries for €3.99. Once you subtract the taxes paid by the seller and the retailer's profit margin, how much can the actual food possibly cost? One euro? And that same German will happily eat it before climbing into his €100,000 Mercedes. Find the error.

Throughout all these years, we have seen a successive degradation in the quality of our food, sometimes bordering on criminal, alongside the widespread use of substances or products associated with carcinogenic risk. So what exactly do we expect from our bodies?

My train of thought changes direction here—if you can still keep up with the stampede inside my head: how do you raise your children in a world where you cannot completely trust the people producing their food? How do we, as a society, return to the food standards we once had? How do we change our habits again so that we can live healthy lives and reach a peaceful retirement in which we can actually enjoy being alive?

And more importantly, how do we make these changes on a scale large enough to have a meaningful impact on the world's population? This change would have to involve a considerable part of the population before we could expect to see a reduction in the incidence of cancer. Looking at the direction in which global politics is currently moving, however, I worry that the situation may only become worse over the coming decades.