The cureto healthcareis a grocerystore.

The paper

I wrote this solution in 2018.

It was a paper for nurse practitioner school. The assignment was to propose a fix for the American healthcare system. I proposed the one you are about to read. I got the grade, closed the laptop, and within months I was gone from the program.

Here is what the paper taught me that the program never meant to teach.

Every semester of nursing education, from the BSN through the graduate coursework, hammers two words into you: education and prevention. Teach the patient. Prevent the disease. It is the first principle of the profession and the first line of every textbook.

It is also the last thing the system actually practices.

I was in trouble with my instructors constantly, and always for the same thing: spending too long educating patients so they would not have to come back.

One week before I left, on a pediatric rotation, I noticed a kid showing the early signs of a hallmark congenital disorder, the kind that declares itself young and gets harder to treat every year it goes unaddressed. I told my preceptor. She said we could not touch it. He was there for a general checkup, and that would be a separate ICD-10 code.

A separate billing code. In pediatrics the entire game is catching it early. The sooner you start, the less it takes from the rest of a life. And the system had a code for why we would wait.

That was the moment the illusion cracked. Leaving the program was the best decision of my life. Surrendering the license came second, because now I can say all of this out loud.

This is the veil. Let's lift it.

The number

The United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024. That is $15,474 per person and 18 percent of everything the country produces.MEASURED

Per person, that is almost $5,000 more than the next highest spending country on earth.MEASURED

And for that money? A 2024 comparison of ten high-income nations across 70 performance measures ranked the United States dead last overall. Last on access. Last on equity. Last on health outcomes. Americans live the shortest lives and suffer the most avoidable deaths of any country in the study.MEASURED

We call ourselves the most advanced nation in science and technology on earth. Highest cost, lowest outcome. The math does not add up. Unless the model was never designed to produce health, and was designed to produce revenue, in which case the math is perfect.

Here is the part that matters. The CDC states that 90 percent of that spending goes to people living with chronic and mental health conditions.MEASURED

So the machine has a customer profile. It is you, once you become chronically ill. And the shortest path to chronic illness in this country is sold in aisles three through nine.

I traced the money side of this machine act by act in People Over Profit. This piece is about the shelf.

The shelf

I have a biology degree, a nursing degree, and half of a nurse practitioner program. None of that is required to understand the shelf. The research already did the work. I never name anyone. The research does.

What we know is carcinogenic. The World Health Organization's cancer agency classifies substances into groups by strength of evidence. Group 1 means carcinogenic to humans, no ambiguity. Three things in your grocery cart sit in Group 1:MEASURED

• Alcohol
• Tobacco
• Processed meat, at roughly 18 percent higher colorectal cancer risk for every 50 grams eaten per day

What we know is killing people even without the cancer label. A 2025 analysis of more than 428,000 people across nine European countries, run by scientists at that same cancer agency, found ultra-processed food intake tracked with higher death from every cause, plus circulatory disease, stroke, heart disease, digestive disease, and Parkinson's. The association held even after removing alcohol from the picture.MEASURED

A meta-analysis pooling 40 cohort studies and 5.75 million people put the highest ultra-processed food consumers at 29 percent higher all-cause mortality than the lowest. Sugar-sweetened drinks, artificially sweetened drinks, and processed meat each carried their own independent risk.MEASURED

What we know is engineered. Ultra-processed food is not food that happened to be unhealthy. It is built. Fat, salt, and sugar are concentrated to the ratios that fire the brain's reward circuit hardest, and the fillers and preservatives exist so it survives a shelf, not so it feeds a body. In the only tightly controlled trial to test this, adults given an ultra-processed diet ate about 500 more calories a day than the same people on a whole food diet matched for sugar, fat, fiber, and salt, and gained weight in two weeks. The food itself drove the eating.MEASURED

Here is my read on why. The body is hunting for nutrients it never finds in a nutrient-empty calorie, so hunger stays switched on. You are full and still eating. Repeat that daily for a decade and you have obesity, cardiac disease, and the metabolic disorders that follow.MODEL The working framework in nutrition science calls this the protein leverage effect, and it is one of the better supported explanations for why the modern diet overshoots.

Whether you call that addiction is a definitional fight I will leave to the journals. The engineering is not in dispute.

What we know disrupts metabolism. This is where I keep my own house honest. Maltodextrin, high fructose corn syrup, and refined sugar are not classified carcinogens. They are metabolic disruptors: rapid glucose spikes, insulin resistance, the on-ramp to type 2 diabetes and the cluster of disease that follows it. The cancer link runs through obesity and diabetes, both of which are established risk factors for digestive and hormone-driven cancers.MEASURED Whether the filler itself deserves a Group 1 label is a question the research has not settled. Whether it belongs in a child's breakfast is not.

That is the shelf. Every item on it has a body of evidence behind it, and every item on it is legal, subsidized, and placed at eye level.

The incentive is the illness

Here is the simplest way I can say it.

An insurance company makes money on premiums minus claims. A grocery store makes money on volume. A hospital makes money on admissions. A pharmaceutical company makes money on prescriptions.

Now trace the calorie.

The grocery store sells the filler at margin. The body processes the filler into disease. The hospital admits the disease. The pharmacy manages the disease for life. The insurer prices the risk and passes it back to you as a premium.

Nobody in that chain gets paid when you stay well.

That is not a conspiracy. It does not need to be. It is just incentive, running unopposed for a hundred years. The system is not broken. The system is working exactly as designed. It was just never designed for you.

The cure is bad business

Follow the last hand in that chain, because it is the one that tells you the truth about all the others.

The pharmaceutical industry defends its prices by pointing to research. Research is expensive. Research saves lives. Pay the price and fund the cure.

Look at the books. An analysis of ten major drug manufacturers found seven spent more on selling and marketing than on research and development. Across those ten companies, marketing outspent research by $36 billion in a single year. That year was 2020, the year the entire industry claimed to be racing toward a cure.MEASURED

Now the part nobody in that industry will say out loud, so an investment bank said it for them.

In 2018, the same year I wrote the paper, analysts at a major bank circulated a report to biotech clients asking one question in the title: is curing patients a sustainable business model? Their case study was a drug that actually cures hepatitis C, over 90 percent of the time. Revenue from that cure peaked above $12 billion in 2015 and collapsed below $4 billion within three years, because cured patients stop paying. The analysts concluded that treating chronic illness is a better business than curing it.MEASURED

So the machine does not just fail to prevent. It has a documented financial incentive not to finish the job.

The move

The moment the entity that pays your hospital bill also stocks your shelves, the incentive flips on its axis. The healthiest customer becomes the most profitable customer. The insurer's actuaries and the store's buyers now sit in the same meeting, and the buyers get a very short list:

• Whole food at the lowest possible price, because every dollar of margin lost on produce is ten dollars saved on a claim.
• Metabolic disruptors off the shelf, because the insurer is the one paying for the diabetes.
• Group 1 carcinogens out of the building entirely, because the insurer is the one paying for the oncology.

No new agency. No thousand-page bill. One ownership change and the calorie starts flowing the other direction.

This is not theory. It has been run.

A health system in Pennsylvania that also owns its own insurance plan built a "food pharmacy." Doctors wrote prescriptions for groceries. Patients with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes and food insecurity got enough whole food for their entire household, two meals a day, five days a week, plus coaching.MEASURED

After 12 to 18 months, average A1c dropped more than two full points, from 9.6 to 7.5. Adding a second or third diabetes medication typically moves A1c by 0.5 to 1.2 points. Food outperformed the drug.MEASURED

Each one point drop in A1c is estimated to save around $8,000 per year in healthcare costs. The food cost the system about $2,400 per participant. Risk of death or serious complication fell roughly 40 percent. Several participants reduced or eliminated their diabetes medication.MEASURED

Now the part that proves my point. It worked because the hospital and the insurer were the same entity. When the savings from a healthier patient flow to a remote insurance company, no hospital has a reason to buy the groceries. When the insurer and the provider are one house, the savings stay home, and suddenly feeding people is the best investment in the building.MEASURED

Put the grocery store in that same house and you have the cure.

The ban

Ownership fixes the incentive. It does not fix the shelf on its own, because the disruptors will still be sold next door. So the second half of the prescription is federal.MODEL

Remove known carcinogens from the American food supply:

• Alcohol
• Tobacco
• Processed meat and the category of ultra-processed food the evidence now ties to early death

Remove or restrict metabolic disruptors from anything marketed as food:

• Maltodextrin
• High fructose corn syrup and added fructose
• Refined sugar beyond a labeled threshold
• Any filler with an established link to insulin resistance and metabolic disorder

I know how a ban on alcohol reads in a country that already tried one. I am not naive about the politics. But I am a nurse, and I was trained to read a diagnosis and a treatment plan, and this is the plan the data writes. The country has spent a hundred years arguing about how to pay for the damage. Nobody with money has spent a single year arguing about how to stop causing it.

Start there, and you stop killing people.

You also start killing the industries that have been profiting from killing people for over a century.

That is the trade. I am at peace with it.

What you do tomorrow

You do not have to wait for an insurer to buy a grocery store. You own your cart today.

• Shop the perimeter. Produce, protein, whole grains. The center aisles are where the shelf lives.
• Read the third ingredient. If sugar, fructose, or maltodextrin show up in the first three, it is a disruptor wearing a food costume.
• Treat Group 1 like Group 1. Alcohol and processed meat are not moral failures. They are dose-dependent carcinogens. Dose accordingly.
• Run your own protocol. I documented six months of mine in the War Mode Protocol, not as a prescription but as a record. Source, not force.
• Treat the whole self. The body is one system. So are you. That is the work inside Unify the Self.

Every one of those is a claim you never file. Every claim you never file is a dollar the machine never gets.

If you are the nurse reading this. You are burnt out, carrying a heavier patient load than last year with less support staff and more liability, inside a building that clears billions and routes it to the executive floor. Leave the hospital. Become a patient advocate.MODEL

The largest patient population in history is aging into the system right now, and their kids are not in the room. Those patients need someone to sit in the appointment, ask the questions, take the notes, and call the family after. It is in demand, you set your own patient load, and you answer to the patient. I think it becomes the fastest growing role in healthcare outside the hospital walls.

Every advocate pulls one more person's care out of the machine. Fewer admissions, lower costs, better lives. That is the whole prescription in miniature. And a short-staffed hospital has to answer to its patients instead of its vendors.

Simplicity

People ask me why I left nursing. This is why.

I did not just leave the program. I surrendered the license. I could not keep standing at a bedside as the face of a system that promises help, and hands people an illusion of a solution at the single most vulnerable and most exploitable moment of their lives. Every shift I worked was a shift that made the machine look like it was working.

I could spend a career managing the outcome of a system that is designed to produce that outcome. Or I could spend it saying the simple thing loudly enough that someone with the power to buy a grocery store hears it.

The cure to healthcare is not complicated. It is a grocery store with the right owner and a shelf without poison on it.

I wrote a whole small book on that instinct, that the true thing is usually the simple thing. It is free: The Simple Book of Life.