No One Wants Around “In 2004, there were more than 236,000 deaths in the United States with a digestive disease as the underlying cause.”11 —The Burden of Digestive Diseases in the United States “To go or not to go?” is not the question. It’s “can I go, or am I constipated?” Or, “I don’t want to go, please make it stop!” Let’s examine and define some of the more common digestive diseases that plague us here in the United States and Canada. I specify these two countries, because our ailments, although they sometimes overlap, are different from those in other areas of the world, particularly developing countries. In many developing countries, digestive problems are generally caused by such things as parasitic disease, tuberculosis, contaminated water, and malnutrition.12 In North America, we suffer from what Dr. T. Colin Campbell, PhD and co-author of The China Study, calls “diseases of affluence,”13 which are brought on usually by poor dietary choices, caused in most part by the high level of miscommunication and terrible nutrition education that we who live in North America are privy to.
