{"success":true,"data":{"id":"ae55dcf1-a522-4b6b-9d98-55491405563c","title":"America’s Food System Turned Us Into Lab Rats. Here’s How It Happened.","summary":"The U.S. food system has devolved into a massive, unintentional science experiment, and we’ve unknowingly become the lab rats. This isn’t something new, either. It’s been going on for well over a century. We have access to the most advanced medical technology, the most life-saving medicines, and more knowledge about germs and infection than at ...","content":"The U.S. food system has devolved into a massive, unintentional science experiment, and we’ve unknowingly become the lab rats. This isn’t something new, either. It’s been going on for well over a century. We have access to the most advanced medical technology, the most life-saving medicines, and more knowledge about germs and infection than at any other point in human history. So why is our health as a nation declining so rapidly? Here’s a number that should stop you cold. In the 1930s, roughly 1 in 5 Americans had a chronic illness, and that count included things we don’t even tally anymore, like visual impairment. Today, without counting visual impairment at all, it’s closer to 3 in 5. That’s a jump of roughly 40 percentage points, and most of those chronic illnesses can be connected directly to food and lifestyle. That is not a coincidence, and it is not something that “just happened” to us. I wanted to understand exactly how we got here, so I sat down with Steven Rofrano, CEO and co-founder of Ancient Crunch, the company behind Masa chips, tortilla chips made with whole-food ingredients and fried in grass-fed beef tallow. Steven is on the leading edge of making snack food real food again, and he doesn’t need a research budget to make his case. “Go pick up some history book and just look at photos of people,” he told me. “You don’t need a doctor to tell you that someone with like 32 perfectly straight white teeth who never had braces and is like six foot two, who lives in the jungle of wherever … you don’t need a doctor to tell you that person’s healthier than the average person today. It’s just so obvious if you look.” It really is obvious once you look back. Not that long ago, in the early 1900s, Americans were shopping at local mom-and-pop grocers within walking distance of home, stocked with local goods because refrigerated transportation didn’t exist to move food any real distance. There were butchers, milkmen, cheese shops. Actual specialists, not aisles. The “classic American diet” of that era, as Steven put it, consisted of staple carbohydrates like potatoes, corn, and wheat; fats like butter and pork; beef once it caught on in the mid-1800s; and whatever vegetables happened to be in season. That was it. Those were your options. “The additives that we are trying to avoid now … it just didn’t exist,” he said. “Citric acid? What citric acid? Red 40? What Red 40? There wasn’t any of this stuff.” Then the grocery stores got bigger, and bigger stores needed longer shelf life. That’s the moment preservatives, chemicals, and seed oils entered the American diet, and it wasn’t some accident of nature. It was three forces working at once: the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which used pesticides, GMOs, and fertilizers to massively increase agricultural output; a wave of new food additives designed to extend shelf life and cut costs; and a food system that rewarded whoever could sell the cheapest calories, regardless of what those calories did to the people eating them. Cheap food was, and still is, treated as a kind of God-given right in this country. The market gave us exactly what we asked for. Nowhere is that clearer than in the story of seed oil, which now makes up roughly 30% of all American calories. It is by far the single biggest processed ingredient anyone eats, by volume, nationwide. And the origin story is almost too strange to believe. In the 1870s, a German immigrant invented a method for pressing oil out of cottonseed, which until then was just a waste byproduct of the cotton industry. Procter & Gamble, the soap company, bought the process because they were looking for a cheaper alternative to the fats used in soapmaking. But the oil itself was, in Steven’s words, “kind of gross … foamy and smelled weird,” so it got shelved. Eventually someone figured out how to process it into a solid fat that resembled lard or butter at room temperature, and somebody at Procter & Gamble had the idea to just sell it as a cooking fat instead of soap. That product became Crisco, marketed in the early 20th century as clean, modern, and “enlightened” at a moment when people actually associated processed and chemical with progress rather than danger. Liquid seed oils got a second life during World War II as machinery lubricant. When the war ended, the oil-seed producers were sitting on a mountain of surplus supply, and that’s when they started selling it as food. What’s almost more disturbing than the ingredient itself is how it stayed unquestioned for so long. Steven pointed out that billions of dollars of industry-funded research over the past several decades have gone into cementing the idea that seed oils are good for you. Studies get funded on whatever someone has a financial interest in proving. Nobody is spending serious money studying whether kombucha is good for you, he noted, not because kombucha is bad, but because nobody profits from that research. The same imbalance applies here, at a much larger scale, and it should make you a little more skeptical of the “settled science” you see stamped on a cereal box. Naturally, I asked Steven whether it’s actually possible to feed this many people without relying on cheap, unhealthy ingredients. His answer surprised me: current farming isn’t even optimized for total calories per acre, let alone nutritious calories per acre. It’s optimized for profit per farm, which is a completely different calculation. Regenerative farming, which rotates cattle and pasture and lets animals shape the land and cycle nutrients back into it instead of leaning on pesticides, can produce more healthy calories per acre than conventional monoculture. “It is relatively easy to conceive of a structure of managing farmland that could produce even more food than we’re currently producing. It would be healthier,” Steven said. “It just might not be as cheap or maybe not as profitable.” So what do you actually do with all of this? Steven’s advice is refreshingly simple. Avoid seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup. “If you just avoid those two things, like 90% of the things that are bad for you will automatically, by default, get kicked out,” he said. His broader rule of thumb: if you can’t imagine an ingredient sitting in your great-grandmother’s cupboard, don’t eat it. You don’t need to know what maltodextrin or carrageenan actually is. You just need to know your great-grandmother didn’t either. And on the cost question, because there’s always a cost question, Steven reframed it in a way I haven’t stopped thinking about. Most Americans now spend only about 10% of their money on food, a fraction of what our ancestors did. So increasing your food budget by 50% might raise your total household spending by only about 5%. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself what you actually want, and what you’re willing to trade for it. The answer to our modern health problems will not be found in convenience. It takes some sacrifice, and sometimes some money; what we have collectively been willing to sacrifice at the altar of convenience and cost is, intentionally or not, our own health, our futures, and our most valuable resource: our limited time here. The good news is that the shift is already underway, and not just in my own kitchen. With huge credit to the moms of the movement, major grocery chains like Target are banning certain food dyes. Fast-food chains are advertising that they cook with tallow. Hershey’s has pledged to go back to using real chocolate. This isn’t a fringe, overprotective-parents movement anymore. It’s becoming mainstream, and if brands want to keep their customers, they’re going to have to get with the times. I feel this shift in my own life, too. Eating foods that were completely normal for me just a few years ago genuinely tastes bad to me now. Same with my husband. It felt like a long process of rewiring our brains, but once you actually know and care what you’re eating, you stop being a passive consumer of whatever’s on the shelf or in the commercial in front of you. I look at supermarket shelves in a completely different light now, and it forces me to get creative with the whole foods that are actually available. It’s less convenient, yes, but it’s entirely possible. It may feel like an antiquated idea in 2026, but we can even grow some of our own food for close to free, on a balcony or in a backyard. This is our health we’re talking about. How can we call ourselves a strong nation if we’re this sick? It’s not normal, and we need to stop pretending it is. We need to look for small ways to cut the excuses and take back control of our health in the most natural ways possible. Start by getting out of the rat race. Stop feeling like a drugged-up lab rat, and instead lean back into the traditions of our ancestors, for the sake of our health, our longevity, and our overall well-being. It’s worth it.","source_name":"The Daily Wire","source_url":"https://www.dailywire.com/news/americas-food-system-turned-us-into-lab-rats-heres-how-it-happened","url":"https://www.dailywire.com/news/americas-food-system-turned-us-into-lab-rats-heres-how-it-happened","author":"Reagan Conrad","author_name":"Reagan Conrad","published_at":"2026-07-24T11:19:33.000Z","publication_date":"2026-07-24T11:19:33.000Z","image_url":"https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/07/GettyImages-583867574.jpg","category":"world","topic":"world","tags":[],"political_bias":null,"bias_score":null,"confidence_score":null,"credibility_score":null,"factual_quality":null,"reading_time":8,"word_count":1534,"view_count":0,"breaking":false,"breaking_news":false,"ai_analysis":null,"fact_check_status":"unverified","archive_status":"hot","language":null}}