It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways (14 page)

If you sold a product that was generally deemed unhealthy in the scientific literature, wouldn’t you want to find one thing about your product that might make it sound less bad? Of course you would! So if you were Mr. Red Wine Producer, you might read (or fund) some studies on the heart-healthy effects of certain antioxidants, like resveratrol,
^*
realize your wine contains tiny amounts of this healthy compound, and start marketing your wine as “heart healthy.”

We can hardly blame him. After all, Mr. Red Wine Producer isn’t looking out for your health—he’s looking out for his
profits
(nothing wrong with that; he’s running a business, after all). Finding something healthy about his product is very, very good for business.

The problem is, it’s a technicality. A fluid ounce of red wine averages
160 micrograms
of resveratrol (with a wide range of variability between bottles and sources). Most research on resveratrol has been done on animals, not people—and to get the same dose of resveratrol used in the mice studies, a person would have to drink more than
60 liters
(that’s
80 bottles
) of red wine every day.

Seriously?

The other thing that Mr. Red Wine Producer doesn’t mention is that the resveratrol in red wine actually comes from the skin of red grapes.

You’ll get all of the potential (reported) benefits of resveratrol and none of the downsides of the alcohol. Win-win, except if you’re Mr. Red Wine Producer.

The argument is the same for 100 percent agave tequila or gluten-free beer. Just because manufacturers have found a way to make their products “less bad” doesn’t mean they’re good for you.

We are not interested in “less bad.”

Our mission is to present you with
optimal
.

Hear us out, now. We are
not
saying you can never eat any sugar or drink any alcohol ever again. We simply want you to make educated decisions about foods. We don’t want you justifying your choices with marketing pitches or telling yourself that because it’s gluten-free, low-carb, or heart-healthy, it’s a perfectly fine choice.

Why go through all that self-deception, when the fact that [fill in the blank] is just plain
delicious
is a good enough reason all by itself to indulge?

We’re not food robots. We like to indulge from time to time, just like the rest of you. But we’re honest about our reasons, and we want you to be honest too: “This food/drink is not making me healthier, but that’s OK, because it’s delicious/special/culturally-relevant/emotionally-significant.”

We fully support those reasons.

When it comes to less-healthy foods, understand that the less (and less often) you indulge in them, the healthier you’ll be. Where you draw that line is totally up to you.

We’ll talk a lot more about this later. We just wanted to mention it now, so you could stop wondering if we are trying to ruin your life.

“I suffered my very last migraine right before I went on the Whole30 program. This change is totally amazing for me, because I’ve been getting migraines three to four times a year, for a week or more at a time, for the past eight years. I would be totally incapacitated—unable to do anything except just lie there in pain. Now I feel fairly confident that I can look forward to a migraine-free future
.
Thanks, Whole30, for changing my life!”

—Laura R.

Industrial seed oils or vegetable oils are extracted from the seeds of various plants. While these oils come from a variety of sources (peanuts, soybeans, sunflower seeds), they all share two common denominators—a high proportion of
polyunsaturated fat (PUFA)
and a large amount of
omega-6 fatty acids
. Diets high in these types of fats—specifically when derived from seed oils— have been shown to directly promote systemic inflammation, thereby violating our fourth Good Food standard.

Can we just leave it at that? Be our guest and skip the rest of the chapter if you’ll take our word for it. If you’d like the background, read on.

Polyunsaturated fats (PUFA) are one of three general categories of fats. There are many different types of PUFAs, but we’re going to focus on omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. These are both considered essential fatty acids, necessary for human health but unable to be manufactured in the body—which means that the only source of these fats is our food.

We need some PUFA in our diet to be healthy—but
too much
causes problems, especially if it’s too much omega-6. The trouble is, seed oils contain a lot of omega-6, and a modern diet includes a lot of seed oils, because seed oils are in
everything
.

Almost every restaurant cooks with them, whether they’re fast-food joints, chain restaurants or fine-dining establishments. They’re found in most processed foods as well—everything from tortilla chips to soups, salad dressings to fruit snacks. The estimated consumption of soybean oil alone in the United States increased more than a thousandfold (!) between 1909 and 1999; the National Institutes of Health estimates that soybeans, usually in the form of oil, now account for an astonishing
10 percent
of total calories in the United States.

Ten percent of total calories is a lot.

These seed oils are ubiquitous because they’re cheap—but they are not
healthy
.

Scientists believe our growing PUFA intake from industrial
seed oils
has played a significant role in the increase of inflammation-related conditions like obesity, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and cancer over the past few decades. And it’s quite likely that
most of the diseases of modern civilization
^*
are linked to the radical shift in the composition of fats in our foods.

The first concern with PUFAs in seed oils has to do with their stability when exposed to external stressors like air, light, and heat. Exposure to these stressors can cause molecules in these oils to react with oxygen in the air and form free radicals, a process called
oxidation,
or “going rancid.”

Mother Nature gave all oily seeds a built-in defense mechanism to protect their fats from oxidation. These compounds (appropriately termed
antioxidants
) inhibit the oxidation process, delaying rancidity.
^*
We want our dietary oils to contain these healthy antioxidants—but seed oils contain few (if any).

Industrially-produced seed oils have been refined, bleached, and deodorized—usually using nasty chemical solvents—to remove their natural flavor and aroma, making them easy to blend undetected into any food product. The trouble is, the refinement process also removes a large percentage of the health-promoting antioxidants. (Some manufacturers try to combat this by adding artificial antioxidants back into their seed oils, but numerous studies have shown that
supplemented antioxidants
don’t work in the same protective fashion as naturally occurring antioxidants.)

Even before processing, PUFAs are the least stable kind of fat, but with their natural antioxidants largely removed, seed oils are even more vulnerable to rancidity.

We then
cook
with these seed oils, exposing them to yet more air, heat, and light. During the cooking process, the antioxidants that survived the refining process “sacrifice” themselves in a futile effort to prevent further oxidation. Once oxidation starts, it’s hard to stop—“auto-oxidation” occurs at an increasing rate, like a free radical chain reaction.

Does eating rancid oils sound like a terrible idea to you too?

Studies show that some of these oxidized fats are transformed into toxic substances that can create damage in the liver, which means ingesting oxidized PUFAs
puts your health at risk.

But that’s just strike one.

One of fat’s jobs is to help build and maintain our cell membranes. This means that the type of fat we eat is
reflected in the makeup of our cell walls.
If we eat too many PUFAs, some will probably have oxidized in the bottle (and our frying pan), leading to toxic byproducts when ingested. The rest—which hasn’t oxidized—is then built into our cell walls. But just as seed oils are the least stable on the shelf and in the frying pan, they are also the least stable
in the body
.

When we eat too much PUFA-rich seed oil, it makes up a larger and larger proportion of our cell membranes, which in turn makes our cells
themselves
more vulnerable. (It’s like building a house with termite-ridden wood. The more termite-damaged wood you use, the more unstable the house.) The PUFAs in our cell walls can be oxidized by free radicals, creating toxic byproducts and setting off a cascade of equally destructive chain reactions. These reactions cause all sorts of damage, and provoke (you guessed it!)
systemic inflammation
.

Strike two.

Remember when we said seed oils are in everything
,
and so we eat a lot of them? It’s not just about the amount of PUFA we consume—it’s also about how much of that PUFA comes from omega-6 fatty acids. Seed oils contain an abundance of omega-6, while providing us with virtually no omega-3s. While some omega-6 fatty acid in our diet is essential for good health, too much throws our body’s fatty acids out of balance. And if the amount of
omega-6 in our bodies
is disproportionately high compared with the amount of omega-3, that spells trouble—specifically, more pro-inflammatory compounds in the body, and less anti-inflammatory activity. Which is the long way of saying:

Strike three, they’re out. For these three reasons, industrially-processed seed oils violate our fourth Good Food standard.

Common seed oils and vegetable oils to avoid