There's no getting around it. The ugly truth is, it costs more to eat well than it does to eat junk.

Let's first understand why. In heavily industrialized and populated nations, food is just another "product." For the manufacturers to make a profit, their food products must: 1) reach a wide market, 2) have a long shelf life, and 3) be relatively inexpensive to produce. Add to this, of course, that it has to taste and look good enough for you to want to buy it.

Notice that being of high nutritional value doesn't make the short list.

To reach a wide market, it has to travel well and resist spoiling during the artificially long time it's asked to "remain fresh," -- during processing, packaging, shipping and sitting around on the grocer's shelf waiting for you to buy it.

That means preservatives and chemicals. That means removing, through refining, everything that would cause it to spoil, which, coincidentally, is often the very things that makes it nutritionally useful. And to be economical to produce, it has to be resistant to annoying little problems such as weather, climate, pests, bugs and the like. And that means pesticides.

To make the product palatable, the food industry sweetens it. To make it visually pleasant, they color it. To make it inexpensive, they spray, genetically alter, selectively breed, mass produce, process and package crops, meat, grains and dairy into "food products."

What does the consumer get? Two things: convenience and price. The problem is, it's a devil's bargain. When you realize that there is a strong nutritional component to about 7 of the 10 leading causes of death in this country, then you begin to think that this trade-off might not be such a bargain after all.