Acids, anticaking agents, bulking agents, food coloring, emulsifiers, thickeners, stabilizers, flavors, humectants, preservatives, sweeteners.
Science in the field of food and agriculture has become very advanced, we are able to preserve things longer, cook things faster, and make things taste better. All these things require a heavy route of processing transforming otherwise healthy ingredients into Frankenstein like concoctions.
It is only the last few hundred years scientists began experimenting with chemicals on food, and only in the past 50 years we have really amped up the process with strong additives for preservation, color, or taste enhancement. Before that, people used to eat things completely unprocessed, and in its natural state. All the “Western” diseases like cancer, diabetes and heart disease as well as obesity were almost non-existent. Nowadays, millions of people die every year because of these illnesses.
Our bodies are meant to run on natural, unprocessed, whole, organic foods, good quality proteins, healthy fats, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. The chemical soup that comprises most grocery store and fast foods that so many people ingest every day wreaks absolute havoc on our immune, hormone, nervous, vascular, and all other systems in our body creating chemical and hormone imbalances, and just like a computer virus, messing around with our body’s processing until everything begins to self destruct.
Forget the low carb, low fat or fat free (loaded with sugar and starch), sugar-free (chemical poison and fat storing fuel). Forget the fast foods and the microwave foods (loaded with a mixture of chemicals and toxic ingredients taking years off your life by stimulating inflammation, immune/hormone/metabolism imbalances, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, just to name a few). Let’s go back to REAL food and REAL water and allow our bodies to clean up, detox, and loose the weight once and for all!
Refined Flour, Pasta, Cookies, Crackers, Bread etc.
In 1911, the bread which made up 40 percent of the diet of the impoverished people of Britain was blamed for widespread poor health. Modern nutritional science confirms the accuracy of this assessment.
Refined white flour contains almost no natural minerals and vitamins. In particular, vitamin B deficiency from poor diet resulted in a range of illnesses that the Victorians called 'wasting diseases'. And white flour at the time was usually laced with alum, which made bad flour look whiter.
According to the Daily Mail:
"[In modern times], the Real Bread Campaign, a non-profit pressure group, claims that bread has actually gotten worse since 1911 in terms of secret adulterants -– enzymes that do not have to be declared on labels -- still being smuggled into it. Today, despite the modern fashion for healthy eating, 'nutritionally empty' white bread accounts for more than 50 percent of what we buy."
Today, there's a whole new breed of health-harming ingredients to contend with in your typical store-bought bread, including:
Many of these ingredients are hidden, as they're not required to be listed on the label due to lobby groups from giant corporations which persuaded government to be very lenient on rules and regulations regarding ingredient labels and food in general.
Refined Foods are Devoid of Nutrients
It's important to realize that when food is refined, vital nutrients are destroyed. In some cases it's questionable whether what remains is even fit to be considered food... at least if the term "food" implies something of nutritional value.
In terms of bread, once you remove the most nutritious part of the grain, it essentially becomes a form of sugar. Processed white flour, or “enriched wheat flour” or just “wheat flour” is missing the most important and nutritious part of the seed; the outside bran layer and the germ (embryo).
Consider what gets lost in the refining process:
How Processed Grains Can Deteriorate Your Health
The end result of the excessive consumption of white bread and other processed forms of grain products can be seen all around you in the form of:
Vitamin B deficiencies in particular contribute to a wide range of illnesses, and vitamin B deficiencies are pervasive around the world. For example, an estimated 25 percent of American adults are deficient in B12 (more than half of the population of U.S. is deficient in the bare minimum RDA, or recommended dietary allowance, of vitamins and minerals)
We've also seen an extraordinary rise in digestive illnesses, such as gluten intolerance and Celiac disease, and modern industrial baking methods are likely a major contributor to these widespread problems. The rise in asthma and allergies may also be related to our modern food processing and manufacturing practices. For example, one of the enzymes commonly used in modern bread making is amylase, which is known to cause asthma.
Many also forget that most commercial wheat production is, unfortunately, a "study in pesticide application," beginning with the seeds being treated with fungicide. Once they become wheat, they are sprayed with hormones and pesticides. Even the bins in which the harvested wheat is stored have been coated with insecticides. These chemicals all contribute to increasing the average person's toxic load, which is a contributing factor to virtually every possible disease imaginable. I can't think of any illness that is not made worse by frequent toxic exposure, such as what we get through conventionally-grown foods and unfiltered water.
Whereas old time mills ground flour slowly, today's mills are designed for mass-production, using high-temperature, high-speed steel rollers. Next, the wheat hit with another chemical insult--a chlorine gas bath (chlorine oxide). This serves as a whitener, as well as an "aging" agent. Flour used to be aged with time, improving the gluten and thus improving the baking quality. Treating it with chlorine instantly produces similar qualities in the flour (with a disturbing lack of concern about adding another dose of chemicals to your food).
The resulting white flour is nearly all starch, and now contains a small fraction of the nutrients of the original grain. Additionally, the chemical treatments on the grain results in the formation of a by-product, Alloxan—a poison used in the medical research industry to induce diabetes in healthy mice. Alloxan causes diabetes by spinning up enormous amounts of free radicals in pancreatic beta cells, thus destroying them. Beta cells are the primary cell type in areas of your pancreas called islets of Langerhans, and they produce insulin; so if those are destroyed, you develop diabetes.
Eating even moderate amounts of white flour and foods high in starch devoid of nutrition will make you feel fatigued, irritable, depressed, and lead to chronic illness. This white flour also digests into sugar raising insulin levels, making your body acidic, promoting fat storage, and making you even hungrier.
Why a High-Carb Diet Can be Disastrous to Your Health
Overconsumption of carbs is the primary driving factor for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Unfortunately, the dietary establishment has unwisely been praising the virtues of carbohydrates while warning you to avoid fats. But anyone who bought into the high-carb, low-fat diets has likely struggled with their weight and health, wondering what they're doing wrong…
The truth of the matter is that a diet high in grain carbs (as opposed to vegetables) and low in fat may be dangerous to your health, and if you want to shed excess weight and improve your health, the opposite diet is what you're looking for!
Why are high-carb diets so bad?
To put it simply, overeating carbohydrate foods prevents fats from being used for energy, and lead to an increase in fat storage. It also raises your insulin levels, which in short order can cause insulin resistance, followed by diabetes. Insulin resistance is also at the heart of virtually every disease known to man.
Contrary to popular belief, eating fat does NOT make you fat—carbohydrates, such as sugar and white flour do. Your body has a limited capacity to store excess carbohydrates, but it can easily convert those excess carbohydrates into excess body fat. Any carbohydrates not immediately used by your body are stored in the form of glycogen (a long string of glucose molecules linked together). Your body has two storage sites for glycogen: your liver and your muscles. Once the glycogen levels are filled in both your liver and muscles, excess carbohydrates are converted into fat and stored in your adipose, or fatty tissue.
So, although carbohydrates are fat-free, excess carbohydrates end up as excess fat.
But that's not the worst of it. Any meal or snack high in carbohydrates will also generate a rapid rise in blood glucose. To adjust for this rapid rise, your pancreas secretes insulin into your bloodstream, which then lowers the levels of blood glucose. The problem is that insulin is essentially a storage hormone, evolved to put aside excess carbohydrate calories in the form of fat in case of future famine. So the insulin that's stimulated by excess carbohydrates aggressively promotes the accumulation of body fat!
To Summarise: Too Much Wheat or Grain Gets Converted Into Fat
In other words, when you eat too much bread, pasta, and any other grain products, you're essentially sending a hormonal message, via insulin, to your body that says "store fat."
Additionally, increased insulin levels also:
So, all in all, the excess carbohydrates in your diet not only make you fat, they make sure you stay fat. Cravings; usually for sweets, are frequently part of this cycle, leading you to resort to snacking, often on more carbohydrates. Not eating can make you feel ravenous shaky, moody and ready to "crash." If the problem is chronic, you never get rid of that extra stored fat, and your energy and overall health is adversely affected.
Below is a list of some of the most common complaints of people with insulin resistance (IR). Many of these symptoms may occur immediately following a meal of carbohydrates; others may be chronic:
Does this sound like you?
These killer yeast bacteria destroy other sensitive and less protected cells of our body by discharging a toxic substance which is made up of proteins which increase the permeability (ability to penetrate) of cellular membranes (cell walls) to viruses and pathogens. This killer bacteria divide exponentially at an astounding rate infecting the cells of the digestive tract, then moving on to the blood stream spreading pathogenic bacteria and allowing it to live and thrive while destroying beneficial bacteria (beneficial bacteria under proper nutrition and pH levels are able to produce B vitamins and even essential amino acids!). This leads to illnesses of the digestive tract, and all digestive organs like the stomach, gall bladder, pancreas, and liver.
The stomach is covered with a mucous membrane which provides protection against stomach acid. A diet high in yeast, sugar, and acidifying foods (coffee, sugar, white flour, alcohol, meat products, pasteurized milk products etc.) progressively destroy the mucous lining leading to ulcers, indigestion, and acid reflux. Such a diet also leads to formation of plaque deposits and stones in the gall bladder, liver, pancreas, and constipation. The mucous lining in the digestive tract also takes a giant hit by the pathogenic bacteria slowing down toxin removal, damaging the fine lining of the digestive tract, reducing its defence functions and reducing its ability to digest and use vitamins and minerals from the food as well as seriously hinder its ability to synthesize vitamins (again, our intestinal bacteria are able to synthesize soluble vitamins and even essential amino acids).
So instead of completely changing ones diet, many uninformed consumers just cover up this dangerous concoction brewing in their stomach with acid reflux medicine like pepto bismol. It's like putting a band-aid on a broken leg.
Bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections easily penetrate the digestive walls migrating to the blood stream and from here to the entire body leading to severe decreases in cellular metabolism, biochemical changes of the blood, putrid slime deposits in the plasma of the blood, slower and more viscous blood flow, micro thrombi develop (blood clots), lymphatic system overstress, nervous tissue changes, irritable bowel syndrome, and many other serious health conditions.
The most serious of all is acidosis (high acid or pH level in the body). This leads to fatigue, fibromyalgia, lupus, irritability, mental fatigue, nausea, digestive problems, acid mouth, a white or grey film on the tongue, gastritis, black rings under the eyes, muscle pain from excess acid, and many other nasty ailments. The body uses colossal energy to try and restore the acid-base balance and increase pH levels to normal amounts (7.4 pH is normal; pathogenic bacteria/fungus/yeast thrive at anything lower. MOST ferments and enzymes can only function in a basic environment, in an acidic environment cholesterol coagulates and becomes plaque and debris, in an acidic environment amino acids deteriorate) by using its own alkaline minerals like calcium, magnesium, selenium, and iron from bones and teeth leading to poor tooth health and osteoporosis and bone/joint issues.
A French scientist named Étienne Wolff studied the effects of yeast on cancerous tumors. After a 37 month experiment he cultured a tumor growth with fermentative yeast and his results showed that the tumor growth increased two and three fold in just one week! As soon as yeast was removed from the solution, the tumor died. He concluded that yeast contains something which stimulates the growth of cancerous tumors. (You will learn more about cancer and how it forms in Part 2)
If you see “yeast” in the ingredient list avoid that product like the plague! (This sadly means that if you value your health, most mainstream breads are out of the question). Start looking for sourdough or rye breads made by smaller bakeries.
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Artificial Sweeteners – Splenda, NutraSweet, Aspartame
Are artificial sweeteners the answer to sugar? Do they really help you lose weight? Are they a great alternative for diabetics?
The answer to the last question is a big no - a study done in Israel actually found that they increase the rates of type 2 diabetes!
The belief that eating artificially sweetened foods and drinking artificially sweetened beverages will help you to lose weight or is in any way healthier is a carefully orchestrated deception. So if you are still opting for sugar-free choices for this reason, you are being greatly misled.
For years now studies have shown that consuming artificial sweeteners breaks the connection between a sweet sensation and a high-calorie food, thereby changing your body’s ability to regulate intake naturally.
In one study by psychologists at Purdue University’s Ingestive Behavior Research Center, rats that ate yogurt sweetened with an artificial sweetener consumed more calories (and didn’t make up for it by cutting back later), gained more weight, and put on more body fat than rats that ate yogurt sweetened with sugar.
Other studies, too, have shown that eating artificial sweeteners might hinder your body's ability to estimate calorie intake, thus boosting your inclination to overindulge. Your body and your brain simply do not have the same biological response to artificial sweeteners that they do to regular sugar, and this can pose some serious problems.
The truth is artificial sweeteners are toxic substances which not only trick your brain and make you gain weight, but have been linked to numerous neurological disorders, swelling and redness of the skin, heart palpitations and other very serious conditions.
In reality there is absolutely no evidence to show that zero calorie artificial sweeteners actually help you lose weight, on the contrary, evidence shows they may actually be stimulating your appetite and insulin response.
First of all, lab made artificial sweeteners trick your brain into thinking you have just eaten a sugary, carbohydrate rich meal. What normally happens when we eat sugars or complex carbohydrates like starches is they are broken down into glucose which enters the blood stream (glucose is small chain sugars, while carbohydrates and starches are long chain sugars). Our pancreas then releases insulin which “unlocks” our cells and allows glucose to be transported into the cell for energy and to normalize blood sugar levels.
Since there are no actual sugars to be broken down, your body feverishly activates the hunger response to try and get some actual sugars into your system to get rid of all that insulin floating around in your system. Appetite is activated, you get hungry and want to eat even more than before, and if you don’t, this leads to insulin resistance, and diabetes! Artificial sweeteners make you gain much more weight.
The other negative effects of artificial sweeteners are even worse.
There are 6 artificial sweeteners approved by the FDA. Saccharin (Sweet-n-Low), sucralose (Splenda), aspartame (NutraSweet), acesulfame potassium (Ace-K, Sunett, Sweet One, Neotame), and a natural non artificial sweetener Stevia (Truvia) or Rib-A derived from the herb Stevia rebaudiana.
Saccharin, aka benzoic sulfinide or E954, was the first artificial sweetener on the market, and just like the others it has no calories. It is a synthetic white powder, has absolutely no nutritional value and is not easily digestible by our bodies. Interestingly enough it was discovered in 1879 when a researcher was looking for a coal tar derivative! This guy was not looking for anything related to food, but somehow came upon this substance (maybe accidentally tasted it?) then he commercialized it, and ever since then controversy rages on over its safety.
In 1977, a study accused saccharin of being a carcinogen after it was linked to bladder tumors in mice. The US National Toxicology Program put saccharin on their cancer causing list, officially labeling it as a carcinogen. Cyclamate, an earlier version of saccharin, was banned in 1970 for similar reasons. The FDA later ruled that saccharin should carry a warning label regarding its cancer connection. These labels were soon removed due to inconclusive evidence, but it was most likely due to heavy corporate lobbying due to financial interest, as it is usually done.
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Trans Fats, Vegetable Oils, Margarines etc.
Most of us believe, as told by the media, that fat is the main thing we should be avoiding. It has the most calories per gram (fat has 9 calories per gram, carbs/proteins has 4) so it should be the most fattening, right? Wrong. Eating the right kind of fats will not only make you healthier but will actually make you lose weight. Saturated fats and cholesterol are not unhealthy as we have been led to believe, but the culprits are actually vegetable oils and trans/hydrogenated fats.
When the essential fatty acids are missing from the diet (essential fatty acids are very volatile and are removed from our foods to get a longer shelf life), cells have no choice but to substitute inappropriate fats (margarine, shortenings, fried fats, animal fats) into their structure, resulting in type II diabetes and even cancer. This makes cells brittle and hard like an eggshell instead of a healthy, soft, porous membrane.
These fats when used in the cell wall interfere with the absorption of nutrients and damage the mitochondria (an organelle inside our cells that produces energy needed for the cell to live), thereby interfering with production of ATP (the energy source or “food” for our cells), then this can cause significant damage to the cell because ATP is needed for important cellular processes such as membrane transport, lipogenesis and protein synthesis. This causes cells to become dysfunctional blocking proper metabolism, nutrient absorption, oxygenation, and a poor ability to respond to glucose.
Despite these dangers, trans and hydrogenated fats are widely used in all sorts of processed foods; cookies, breads, crackers, pastries, cakes, chips, fast food, margarine, popcorn, pretty much most of what is found on grocery store shelves.
What about vegetable oils? Yes, they are better than trans fats but they also have some very negative effects on the body. These oils like canola, soybean, sunflower, safflower, and others contribute to major inflammation (the main cause of disease and aging) due to the upset in the ratio of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids.
Before the age of food processing people had a good balance of fats, especially omega 3 and 6, with a ratio of about 2:1 or 3:1 (2 parts omega 6, to 1 part omega 3). The ratio now is about 20:1! This high imbalance leads to inflammatory related diseases such as diabetes, autoimmune, cardiovascular, and oncologic.
Consuming large amounts of vegetable oils wrecks havoc on the natural balance damaging our whole body, leading to irritability, learning disabilities, liver toxicity, decreased immune function, mental and physical growth problems, increased acidity, and they have been linked to mental disorders like Alzheimer’s, dementia as well as accelerated aging - all signs of inflammation and acidity in the body. A 1994 study appearing in a leading medical journal showed that almost three quarters of the fat clogged in arteries was unsaturated. This means it was not the “artery clogging” saturated fats, but "healthy" vegetable oils that cause disease!
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Nowadays you don’t have to stomach the “beany” flavored, drab soy products of the past to gain these supposed benefits because today you can find chocolate-flavored soymilk, soy burgers, soy ice cream, soy cheese, and just about any other soy food you could imagine. But those aren’t the only sources of soy. Soy is now in just about every processed food out there -- even those that you’d think have nothing to do with soy, like condiments, yogurt, bread, sausages, and pasta sauce -- often in the form of soybean oil or the emulsifying agent soy lecithin (which is made from the sludge left over after crude soy oil is processed).
In fact, you may be surprised to learn that soybeans provided a whopping 75 percent of the edible consumption of fats and oils in the United States in 2006.
Why such a massive increase in consumption? Well the media did a great job advertising it as a “cure all health miracle.” This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Back in 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a health claim for soy, and suddenly -- after a heavy marketing campaign from the soy industry -- an onslaught of “healthy” soy products bore the logo: “Diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol that include 25 grams of soy protein a day may reduce the risk of heart disease.”
The resulting fanfare over the soybean has been every marketing director’s dream: Eat soy, they say, and you can lose weight, protect your heart, lower your cholesterol, have more energy, and reduce the symptoms of menopause, among many other reported benefits.
Consider these facts from the Soyfoods Association of North America:
Marketing has done a great job convincing the people that soy is a health food, but the truth is SOY IS NOT THE HEALTH FOOD YOU BELIEVE IT IS (the exception here is fermented soy which will be explained below).
Far from being the health cure-all it’s purported to be, “thousands of studies link soy to malnutrition, digestive distress, immune-system breakdown, thyroid dysfunction, cognitive decline, reproductive disorders, and infertility -- even cancer and heart disease,” says Dr. Kaayla Daniel, author of the book The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food.
The following is a breakdown of unfermented soy’s major problems:
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Farmed fish have much more inflammatory omega 6 content which creates a heavy imbalance of omega 3 to omega 6 levels. Farmed fish have more than double the omega 6 content than wild species. The healthy omega 3 levels are also much smaller in farmed fish.
Studies have shown that farmed salmon accumulates far more cancer causing PCBs and poisonous dioxins than wild salmon. Tests on grocery store farmed salmon showed that they contain up to twice the fat and 16 times the PCB levels as compared to wild salmon. These toxins are stored in the fat and end up on your plate.
We get most of our fish from China. They do 61% of the world aqua farming.. As we eat more fish, their ponds become increasingly packed with more fish to accommodate the demand. A more tightly packed pond means more disease and pollution from fish waste. Antibiotics and other drugs are liberally used to combat this problem including malachite green, an antifungal and potential carcinogen. Safety standards and practices are much less stringent in other countries, and the fish being sold to us from overseas is full of toxins, pesticides, mercury, and other cancer causing agents, all in the name of profit. They pollute lakes, oceans, promote the use of toxic substances, and sell us food full of chemicals that only harm our body. Vote with your wallets folks, only your purchase habits can put a stop to terrible practices.
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Coconut Oil – The Healthy Saturated Fat
You have probably heard for the last 60 years or so from health care officials and media that saturated fats are bad for you and lead to a plethora of negative health consequences like high cholesterol, obesity, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.
At the same time during the last 60 years the American population has witnessed the levels of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, and Alzheimer’s disease skyrocket compared to our ancestors and even primitive societies that use saturated fats as their dietary staple.
Studies on the Pacific Island population who get around 30-60% of their total caloric intake from fully saturated coconut oil have shown almost non-existent rates of cardiovascular disease. Something does not add up here.
The fact is, not all saturated fats are created equal. The key word here being “created” because some fats are naturally saturated and full of nutrients, while other fats are artificially saturated and have a host of negative health consequences, as already mentioned.
Hydrogenation adds a hydrogen atom to vegetable oils, manipulating them through a heating process and producing a rancid, thickened oil who’s only benefits is longer shelf life and increased profits for the greedy corporations.
The medical and scientific community are pretty much united in the opinion that hydrogenated oils (called trans fats) fats should be avoided. And the concerning thing here is that these same damaging oils were proclaimed to be “healthy” and “heart friendly” for the past 60 years by giant multinational corporations protecting their greedy profits.
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Raw Unprocessed Nuts
Raw nuts are nutrient powerhouses that are perfect as a snack pretty much at any time of the day (nuts/seeds/grains are more difficult to digest so eating them in the morning/night might lead to fatigue, sluggishness, sleepiness and loss of energy, it is best to eat them during the day).
Several studies over the past several years have shown the health benefits of nuts -– which contain monounsaturated fat, vitamin E, folic acid, magnesium, copper, protein, and fiber, and are rich in antioxidant phytochemicals.
They are a powerhouse of good nutrition that can dramatically reduce the risk of heart disease. They've also been shown to play an important role in helping to lower "bad" cholesterol levels and raise "good" cholesterol levels. In addition, they can help dilate blood vessels and prevent hardening of the arteries.
In the Nurses' Health Study, which followed 86,016 nurses for 14 years, researchers found those who ate 5 servings or more of nuts per week reduced their risk of dying from heart disease by 35% and diabetes incidence was 27% less than those that didn't eat nuts. They also noted that the nut-eaters t