Let’s start with a simple truth that helps feed the big, fat health and fitness lie. That truth is that the average person would much prefer to go on a diet or take a pill rather than exercise. This is why the fitness industry, at $17.6 billion in annual revenue, pales in comparison with the diet and weight loss industry, which exceeds $40 billion. Even the supplement industry, with more than $20 billion in annual revenue, outperforms the fitness industry. Yet with a success rate of sustained weight loss as low as 5 percent, more than 50 million Americans line up each year to go on a diet. Why? The answer is simple. When people think about exercise, they relate it to work. Even the phrase we use to describe exercise is to “workout.” The truth is that the average American spends the majority of waking life working. Who wants more work? We want to play. We want to relax. We want to escape from the reality of work, Exercise is the last thing we want to do. Instead, we want a shortcut, and the desire for a quick fix is an open invitation for health and fitness parasites.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The smoking gun that reveals the real truth about the state of health in the U.S. is the stratospheric revenue within the pharmaceutical industry. Between 1995 and 2005, prescription drug sales increased by 249 percent to a staggering $251 billion on more than 3.6 billion prescriptions written annually. This doesn’t include the $17 billion we spent on more than 100,000 over-the-counter drugs that contained in excess of 1,000 chemical compounds. As you peel back the layers of the lie, you quickly realize that these record-breaking numbers were made possible by drugs that treat conditions and diseases, which are largely self-inflicted or forced upon us by accomplices that stand to profit from our ill health.