It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways (12 page)

At this point, you’re probably wondering, “If this stuff is silent, how do I know if I have it?” That is a very good question—and we’ve got the answer.

First, if you are eating
any
of the foods we’re about to discuss in the next section, there’s a pretty good chance that you have some chronic systemic inflammation. These foods elicit inflammation both directly and indirectly, and their effects are largely universal.

If you’re overweight, you are also systemically inflamed. (You don’t
have
to be overweight to be inflamed, but pretty much everyone who is overweight has some inflammation.) Adipose tissue (body fat) is largely regarded by the scientific community as a separate endocrine organ, producing a number of different biologically active messengers. When fat cells are damaged by being overfilled, certain immune cells are summoned to fat tissue to help repair and clean up the damaged cells. These immune cells then secrete additional immune-reactive substances that increase inflammation in the fat itself as well as elsewhere in the body.

The more body fat you have, the more of these inflammatory compounds your fat cells can secrete. So if you’re overweight, we can be pretty sure you’re also somewhat inflamed. Guess what? Belly fat is
especially
active in this process, contributing to inflammation more than fat stores in other areas (like your buttocks or thighs).

More specifically, however, we believe that silent inflammation isn’t so silent when you know what you’re listening for. This is a comprehensive (but not exhaustive) list of conditions and diseases linked to systemic inflammation or having an inflammatory component. If you experience any of these conditions or symptoms, there’s a pretty good chance you have some of that “silent” inflammation.

Related to Silent Inflammation

That’s a pretty long list, right?

It’s what we’ve been saying: managing the inflammatory status of your body affects your
quality of life
.

This entire book is devoted to the idea that food plays the most important role in your pursuit of optimal health, but it’s not the only factor. Lifestyle choices, exercise habits, your environment, and, of course, your genes also affect your health and predisposition for a variety of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions. But genes may play a different role than you think.

You hear folks saying, “Diabetes/high cholesterol/heart disease runs in my family!” as if to suggest that their destiny is predetermined. Most people believe that what is encoded in their DNA is unchangeable. The good news is that that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Your genetic makeup certainly plays a role in everything from height to eye color to health. But even more important than the genes in your DNA sequence is which of those genes get
turned on.
A gene that isn’t turned on doesn’t actually
do
anything. It’s the intersection of your environmental inputs and your genetics that is truly relevant to your health.

Epigenetics is the study of gene expression—whether genes turn on or turn off, and how loudly their information is expressed. While we are all born with a certain code, we are also born with switches that tell that code what to do. Our environmental input (diet, exercise, air quality, etc.) activates those switches. Think about it this way:

Epigenetics is
also influenced by physical and emotional stress. In fact, gene expression is impacted by how you respond to
everything
that happens in your environment, from air pollution to a move across the country to childhood trauma.

In short, you generally don’t develop diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart disease simply because of a defective gene or a familial predisposition. It takes the intersection of your genes and your environment to turn on those sequences of events.

This is good news.

It means we are not doomed by our genetics.

In the case of diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease (among others), it means that those conditions are largely preventable.

Our gun may be loaded, but if we don’t pull the trigger with a poor diet, lack of exercise, inadequate sleep, excessive stress, and other unhealthy lifestyle factors, the chance of us developing one of those diseases is dramatically reduced
.

So keep reading, because this book is devoted to keeping the safety on one of the biggest potential triggers in your environment—the food you put on your plate.

The good news is that, much like with your hormones and leaky gut, even after decades of poor eating habits and years of systemic inflammation, most of the health consequences are
highly reversible
. You can reduce systemic inflammation, heal from most inflammatory conditions and catch up on those repair and recovery functions your body has fallen behind on.

However, some things may not always be totally reversible.

Eventually, if systemic inflammation is left unchecked, the immune system becomes so overworked and paranoid that it creates illnesses that may, unfortunately, be irreversible. But we’ve found that by doing just one thing, you can drastically reduce or eliminate the
symptoms
of most of these inflammation-related diseases and conditions—and therefore significantly improve the quality of your life.

You know what we’re going to tell you to do.

“I was diagnosed with Lyme disease in October of 2009. My symptoms were stiff neck, headache … I hurt everywhere, I was tired all the time, I could not sleep through the night because I was in so much pain! My doctor told me it could take six months of antibiotics or more to start feeling better. I thought to myself, ‘I do not have six months to wait!’ I found the Whole30 and thought, ‘Let me try it—what do I have to lose?’ Well, I had a lot to lose—like every one of my Lyme disease symptoms, and a few pounds as well! I started feeling better after day three, and I just kept feeling better—to the point at which I feel healthier now than I did before I had Lyme, as long as I stay on my dietary course!”

—
Anita H., Albany, New York

Here comes the part you’ve all been waiting for (or dreading?). This is where we talk about all of the food groups that don’t pass our four Good Food standards. We’re going to use a legend to help explain why.

1. These foods fail our first Good Food standard: a healthy psychological response.
   These foods light up pleasure, reward, and emotional pathways in the brain, offering supernormally stimulating flavors without providing the nutrition that nature intended. These are foods-with-no-brakes, promoting overconsumption and the inability to control your cravings, habits, and behaviors.
   
2. These foods fail our second Good Food standard: a healthy hormonal response.
   These foods disrupt your normal hormonal balance, promoting leptin resistance, insulin resistance (and all of the negative downstream effects that follow), disrupting glucagon’s energy-access function, and elevating cortisol levels.
   
3. These foods fail our third Good Food standard: support a healthy gut.
   These foods directly promote intestinal permeability, leading to a less-than-intact barrier that lets foreign substances get inside the body (where they do not belong). Foods that fail our third Good Food standard by default also fail the fourth.
   
4. These foods fail our fourth Good Food standard: support immune function and minimize inflammation.
   By creating intestinal permeability (or directly promoting chronic systemic inflammation), these foods force your immune system out of a healthy balance. This can lead to the development of systemic inflammatory symptoms or autoimmune diseases and is a central risk factor for many lifestyle-related diseases and conditions.
   

Before we get started, we know that there are some very fun foods in this group; foods that may form the vast majority of your daily diet; foods that may make you close this book, look up at the sky and say, “These people are
bananas
.”

Before we tell you what they are, we just want to ask you a few simple questions.

Is it
just
fine
that some of the foods you eat are controlling your behaviors, making you crave things you don’t really want to eat, and proving impossible to resist even when you really, truly try?

Do you
like
energy slumps, brain fogs, insidious weight gain, frequent hunger pangs, the inability to burn fat, and a metabolism that moves slower than molasses?

Can you
live
with gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal discomfort, fatigue, malnutrition, and food allergies?

Do you
welcome
an increase in illness, infection, aches, pains, and the signs and symptoms of innumerable diseases and conditions, some of which are irreversible?