Douglas Schorr

Will there be a million to take to Mars, Mr. Musk?

8 billion humans are in metabolic free fall—not from the end-of-the-world scenarios painted hourly to sell news, but from the simplest daily choice: what we shovel into our mouths.

In an unprecedented blend of global unity and folly, we’ve abandoned the diet that shaped our biology over millions of years, replacing it with fuel our bodies were never meant to process. National statistics reveal a stark truth: a planet-wide health collapse unfolding in slow motion across generations.

The kicker? The world’s geniuses are driving it. Since the dawn of agriculture and medicine, they’ve led the charge. In labs and greenhouses, they lost sight of the human body’s specific needs and transformed what were once grasses, bitter—even poisonous—fruits, and roots (some other animal’s delight) into “heart-healthy” processed foods. When “complications” arose, they simply invented remedies to counter them. Their expert tunnel vision was eagerly purchased by corporations that recognized the limitless profit potential of these “innovations” over addressing root causes or real health outcomes. Together, they’ve brewed a perfect storm: metabolic ruin for humans and unstoppable wealth built on the back of grief for investors.

China stands as both triumph and tragedy in this narrative. Their agricultural revolution transformed ice-age deserts into forests and fish farms. They’ve developed saltwater-tolerant rice and revolutionized crop production under impossible conditions. What began as Mao’s attempt to stop Beijing’s sandstorms has become a technological marvel that blossomed into a “food” production titan. Fuelled by scarce arable land, Western threats of sanctions, and a tech boom, China’s brightest minds have empowered the children of 1990s peasants to operate satellite-guided machinery, yielding harvests and incomes their parents could scarcely dream of.

They didn’t hoard their expertise, either. Remarkable strides have been made in places as dire as Saudi Arabia and the Sahel. China’s turnaround was so striking that it rattled North American farmers by cancelling massive produce orders in retaliation to trade spats and verbal jabs. Yet in their “Healthy China 2030” initiative, they’ve adopted the very nutritional guidelines that have destroyed Western health, accelerating their own metabolic decline even as they celebrate agricultural gains. Like America’s leaders, theirs fail to see the biological fallout beyond their narrow fields of focus.

The U.S., flooded with global talent chasing wealth or missionary zeal, ignited this metabolic plunge over a century ago. The campaign to replace meat with plants gained momentum in the 1870s, fuelled by religious zeal and immigrant intellect. By the 1920s, plant consumption had risen enough to transform farming. Then came the 1970s—when agriculture, banking, food processing, pharmaceuticals, and medicine fused into history’s most profitable machine, backed by America’s lobby system. It drove America to evangelize globally. They pulled levers at the UN, IMF, World Bank, USAID, and mass media, even dictating funding terms to NGOs and groups like the Heart Institute, a small but mighty player with the “right” minds penning influential papers.

Post-World War II Europe, nudged by Germany’s de-industrialization and America’s pivot from weapons to consumer goods, had already tilted toward plant production and diets. Immigrants flocking to the U.S. after the war eagerly adopted the Standard American Diet—SAD. This pyramid prioritizes carbs and veggies, heaps of fruit, some poultry, and scant red meat, with a cornerstone of soaring sugar intake. Billed as a miracle energizer, sugar hooks our taste buds—and us—tightly. What reads like a horror tale is the reality: it’s the most addictive, ubiquitous substance we know, slowly maiming and killing while paving the way for worse poisons peddled for profit.

Unlike religious crusades, this touched everyone. Twenty years ago, America’s advanced collapse made it easy for non-Americans to predict their family’s future medical and grief costs—just check U.S. health stats. Sadly, others caught up fast. Humans love outdoing their neighbours; even tiny countries like Southern Rhodesia poured public funds into crafting top-tier grains and fruit for their climate. The death toll and survivors’ despair continue to rise—still yet to hit unmatched depths.

The evidence is clear: alongside Central and South African countries, America tops the charts as the most metabolically unwell nation. From drug addiction to every chronic illness, it leads in both prevalence and severity. Longevity is backsliding—not shorter lives, but earlier pain, medical reliance, and years of senility. Its military confronts this daily: roughly 70% of Americans aged 17–24 can’t serve, obesity the top barrier. Pentagon brass call it a “national security crisis” before Congress, yet the dietary link goes mostly ignored.

COVID death rates likely reflect not the virus’s lethality but the metabolic fragility of its victims—any respiratory challenge became the final straw. Researchers concerned about the rise in post-Covid-19 deaths might do well to look beyond vaccinations at the simple phenomenon of the “tipping point.” Without some miracle intervention—perhaps a China-engineered ruminant-style replacement stomach—this pattern will accelerate. Death rates will climb alongside disability rates. The immigration solution is fantasy—the entire world follows the same dietary pattern, producing the same metabolic breakdown.

Trump’s reindustrialization dreams and neocon profitable-war fantasies share the same fatal flaw: a population physically incapable of sustained effort, either in factories or combat zones. Investment focus for the next 50 years – Bitcoin and burial plots.

China’s agricultural miracle thus becomes its greatest mistake. Rather than achieving human flourishing, they’ve compressed America’s century-long metabolic decline into 25 years. Diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, depression, and dementia now explode through their population. Exploding just as quickly is the expansion of China’s hospital network—state of the art but focused on prescribing running repairs with little concern for the roots. The dark joke: only their robots will remain productive. Chinese prospects dim as metabolic health fades—but the greatest collapse may come from India, agriculture’s supposed laggard.

India is a fascinating case study in metabolic decline. Like America, its health deterioration has religious roots, but with ancient lineage. Nearly 40% maintain strict vegetarianism, while others overconsume refined carbohydrates like white rice and wheat. Even meat-eaters predominantly consume processed products. Studies show roughly 70% of daily calories come from carbohydrates, heavily weighted toward refined sugars and processed foods. Their population persists, but with irreversible damage to the biological template nature designed over millions of years.

Elon Musk’s Mars-bound charity earns applause, yet he sounds like another genius blind to the closer peril: our plates have engineered a population crash. The millions eyed for Mars face early graves or pill-dependent lives instead. We must rethink what we swallow.

The tragedy lies in how preventable this collapse remains. Our bodies maintain remarkable resilience—remove the metabolic disruptors, reintroduce appropriate nutrition—meat and fat, eggs and butter—and restoration begins almost immediately.