Douglas Schorr

“Who are you looking at? It’s my genes, for gods’ sake!”

We’re not chimps. Yet here we are, hooked on the biggest social experiment ever: the modern diet. For 99.99% of our history, we ate what fit: meat, fat, occasional wild plants—fuel that kept us sharp and strong, nature’s Rolls-Royce. Then, theologians, the woke, and politicians engaged brilliant minds to “improve” nature’s design. Enter GMO-enhanced grains, carbs, and “humane” practices.

Although through the advocacy of Christian churches in America, because of its negative effects on spiritual health, the vision of reducing meat consumption began 100 years earlier, for the wider world the real crash hit in the 1970s. American bureaucrats and well-funded Christian-aligned university programmes, financially co-opted institutions and NGOs, and the ultra-liberals (today’s woke) pushed the Standard American Diet (SAD): cheap carbs, sugar floods, and seed oils. And we loved it.

“God, that tastes good! Opium, crack, and marijuana are for weirdos; hand us—the screwed-up 99%—that sugar.”

30 years on, babies with ENT issues, 4-year-olds with ADHD, teens with diabetes and depression, athletes collapsing mid-game, and 40-year-olds sitting with me in waiting rooms to have arthritis and macular degeneration tests became common characteristics of society—it’s not bad luck; it’s bad fuel. Openly, supermarkets and restaurants peddle sugar-soaked traps, not nourishment.

Ironically, the scale of ill health spawned a façade of human flourishing never before experienced. The enormously powerful tripartite alliance enlisted America’s corrupt lobby system to create the industry of human manipulation and exploitation. Pushing profit-driven junk, it turned us into taste sensation seekers, rust buckets patched with pills and demanding hospital beds to use the insurance cover we paid for. Our ill health is a corporate goldmine that towers over the much-spoken-about military-industrial complex. When I came to my town, there were 3 doctors’ practices and 2 dentists. Now I trip over them. They all offer the same: relief from sugar.

That we are again eating like chimps is a mismatch that is leading, generation by generation, to worldwide metabolic ill-health. Good for population control and the perfect people-funded GDP growth ladder to Mars, and we’re ecstatic because we’ve learned to sing, “It’s just genetics.”

It takes hundreds of millions of years to write genetic code. It remains largely unchanged over millions of years, but enter epigenetics. Because we know, we don’t need all the signs to tell us we must not feed zoo animals, yet we gorge on the “treats” we’d like to feed them!

Genetics set the stage; diet pulls the trigger. Epigenetics shows every bite flips gene switches that don’t just affect individuals but can alter gene expression, influencing metabolic health across generations. That’s worth repeating: generations of processed slop crank up inflammation, weaken repair, and etch damage into our kids’ DNA. Our grandkids inherit a body primed to break. Everyone’s tipping point comes. And I’ve discovered from family and personal history that it can be speeded up: if a body part is damaged (in my case lungs, stomach and skin pre-cancer) and you continue abusing it, the deterioration speed is frightening.

Nature has precise boundaries. As we read in Part I, our biological specifications dictate that what nourishes one species can poison another, trigger autoimmune responses, induce inflammation, and destroy the specialized guts that drive the precise digestive machinery every living thing is uniquely born with.

It is such basic engineering that I cannot understand how it is not understood. Goodness, if you know to put the plug in a bathtub and to switch the water off a while later, you understand system requirements. So why expect your body’s complex digestive machinery to process foods it was never designed for? A bicycle chain must match its gears precisely or the whole mechanism fails. Your digestive system is infinitely more complex—feeding it the wrong fuel isn’t open-mindedness; it’s biological sabotage. You can ignore the mismatch and scoot along for a while, but eventually, the system breaks down completely

What we eat tweaks switches on/off our genes. Did we put the plug in before or after we opened the taps?

Did he die from Covid or was it just the straw that finally collapsed his system?

The real culprit stares up from our plates.

In just 4 generations, on the food plate lie the hacks of our system that shredded mental health and compromised our bodies. We are patched up with forever newer and (at genius level) better medical remedies — follow the money.

Genetics set the stage; we dared to alter the performance. This epigenetic programming doesn’t just affect us—it cascades through generations. When people see three generations of obesity in a family and declare “it’s genetic,” they’re missing that it’s the shared eating pattern altering gene expression in each new generation. The grandmother who adopted a high-carb diet didn’t change her DNA, but she did change which genes her body activated, creating metabolic patterns that her children and grandchildren inherited and reinforced through similar diets. This isn’t genetic destiny—it’s familial programming that can be interrupted when we recognize food as the trigger.

The difference is in the detail—your family and mine will experience different combinations of metabolic failure, but there will be universals, and the source will be in the gut.

Our gut microbiome, a gift from ancestors, craves the diet we evolved on. Feed it junk—carbs, sugars, fake fats, seed oil—and it fades. Chaos takes over, and your descendants start with a gut too weak to fight. It’s not just digestion; it’s the fuel refinery. Bad fuel means power outages in your cells, your brain, your everything. Obesity, acne, celiac, dementia, cancers—it’s a legacy warped by what’s on the fork.

Unless we accept the job to break the cycle, your family will self-destruct.

No other species engineers its food away from what its body needs. Eighty years ago, these plagues were rare; now, we’re drowning in them. Next time someone blames “genetics” or “age,” point to their plate, ask, “What are you eating?”

The proof is in the eating. Stop the abuse—drop the chimp diet—and relief hits fast. Reclaim the lion’s plate, and you can mend, often permanently, from the gut inwards. Start today: remove one inflammatory food from your plate. Replace processed oils with animal fats. Swap bread for eggs. Trade a sugar hit for meat. Small changes accumulate like compound interest. Your body is waiting to heal—it just needs you to stop the assault and start the restoration. Your ancestors’ genes are still there, waiting for the right signals to reactivate health. Feed them what they recognize, and watch what happens.