Read 21 Pounds in 21 Days Online
Authors: Roni DeLuz
FACTOID
Processing foods kills the naturally occurring enzymes. Dead enzymes equal dead food. You cannot be energetic, vibrant, and lively if you eat dead food.
This is why people experience more energy when they shift from processed to fresh and/or organic foods.
Why do food companies make groceries with items in them that can literally make us sick? Because making food that lasts longerâincreasing the amount of “shelf life” it has before it spoils and, consequently, throwing fewer foods awayâmeans companies make a lot more money. But an ancient Chiffon margarine commercial warned, “It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!” As it turns out, the joke is on usâthe body doesn't utilize these unnatural nutrients. Of course, that doesn't stop food companies from adding them. Pollan discovered that refining and processing foods allows companies to charge more for the same product. For fun, try to guess what grain comprises the main ingredient of these processed foods?
The answer? Corn. The companies that manufacture these products make more money by charging us higher prices for these processed products than they could ever charge for kernels of corn. I call these and other man-made foods “plastic,” since they bear
no resemblance to the products they're made from. These days, the vast majority of Americans are living on plastic foods.
Pick Your Poison: The 411 on Sugar Substitutes
Among the nation's most common “plastic foods” are the sugar substitutes that sit atop most every table. Every few years, controversy arises over whether these products are healthier than sugar. The answer changes as new research deepens our understanding of the relationship between carbohydrates and insulin.
When we consume overcivilized, refined sugars like white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, glucose (the form of sugar our body uses for energy) surges into our bloodstream. The pancreas then sprints into action as it tries to release the hormone insulin into the bloodstream fast enough for the brain and body to use the glucose for energy. When we eat natural, complex sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, and molasses, glucose still enters our bloodstream but at a much slower pace. This allows the pancreas to release insulin more comfortably. Because it can work at a more reasonable pace, the organ doesn't wear itself out sprinting and hitting the brakes over and over againâor, more accurately, given how much refined sugar most of us eatâby sprinting, then sprinting again and again. All of that revving up exhausts the pancreas, often causing diabetes. Any excess sugar it doesn't move quickly enough to use gets converted to fat. And because the sugar is converted to energy so quickly, it leaves us craving more food soon after.
Many people use artificial sweeteners to stay thin and avoid the cycle of sugar highs and lows. But as many problems as white sugar causes, I believe it is healthier than sugar substitutes, which include aspartame, acesulfame, neutame, sucralose, and alitameâmore commonly known as Nutrasweet and Equal (blue packages), Splenda (yellow package), and Sweet'N Low and saccharin (pink packages). However, neither white sugar nor the synthetic sugar substitutes are as healthy as stevia, a sweetening herb from South America that is available in green packets in select locations. Here's the skinny on the artificial sweeteners many people take to avoid getting fat.
Aspartame
Sold as Nutrasweet and Equal, aspartame produces toxins that can harm the brain and mental functions. It also blocks serotonin production, interfering with users' ability to experience pleasure and contributing to depression in many people. Aspartame also robs the body of chromium, a valuable mineral that helps control blood sugar. And because it's unnatural and therefore doesn't nourish us, aspartame starves our cells of nutrients, causing cravings and weight gain.
Saccharin
The oldest of the artificial sugars, saccharin, used in Sweet'N Low, is derived from a plant imported from China. The FDA describes it as a complex natural sugar, so I find it strange
that the FDA used to require it to sport this warning label: “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.” For some reason, the FDA has recently changed its tune, refuting the cancer claim and allowing the warning label to be removed.
Stevia
If you're looking for a sugar substitute, I suggest using stevia. You don't need much of itâaccording to studies, it's thirty times sweeter than sugar. Yet it does not raise blood sugar levels, causing the pancreas to sprint to produce insulin, or cause rapid-onset cravings the way simple sugars do. A study published in the
Journal of Ethno-Pharmacology
found that stevia dilates the blood vessels and helps to prevent high blood pressure. It helps to regulate the digestive system, encourages the growth of friendly bacteria, and helps us detoxify the body and excrete more urine naturally.
Sucralose
Sucralose contains chlorine, a toxin research shows causes cancer. A little bit of chlorine stays in the body with each packet of Splenda we use. Sucralose also shrinks the thymus gland and enlarges the liver and kidney in rodents. In humans, scientists know that it causes our cells to mutate slowly, eventually causing cancer. Some people experience more immediate side effects, including dizziness, numbness, panic-like agitation, and intestinal cramping.
Gluttons for Punishment?
Not only do Americans eat harmful food, we eat way too much of it. In fact, we eat so much food that Pollan believes we have a “national eating disorder.” I agree. Only one generation ago, people ate three square meals a day and perhaps a snack. They drank milk, water, and maybe some orange juice for breakfast or an occasional soda for a treat. Folks socialized and had fun without food's being involved. Today, eating is the focus of almost everything. There's a good chance we'll be chowing down whether we're exercising (sports drinks, flavored waters, energy bars), at our child's basketball game (soda, hot dogs, candy), socializing (chips, beer,
soda, ice cream), dating (dinner dates), watching TV (chips, beer, soda, hot wings, pizza), meeting clients (power lunches, drinks, business dinners), or picking up the kids from soccer practice (fast food). Turn on the TV and what do you see? Food, food, food! And let's not forget beverages. The average American teenager drinks twenty-two ounces of soft drinks and fruit drinks (13 percent of their calories) each day compared to just nine ounces of milk, according to
Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks Are Harming Americans' Health
, a report published by consumer watchdogs Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).
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Soda pop has bumped milk off the top of the list of beverages young people drink most. Americans literally eat and drink all day longâand we don't see anything wrong with it.
How did an entire society's eating habits change so quickly? According to one of the nation's leading nutritionists, Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, professor and former chair of the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, Americans are experiencing the flip side of what she calls the “paradox of plenty.” During most of human history, the food supply has been erratic. Our bodies literally adapted to survive in either “feast or famine,” primarily famine since food has usually not been plentiful. But we've advanced so quickly technologically that American industry now produces an overabundance of food, particularly corn and soybeans. In fact, if you add up the number of calories each person living in America needs to maintain a healthy weight and compare that to the number of calories food companies produce, you'd find there's twice as much food available as we need to be healthy. Not surprisingly, food producers want to sell as much of this food as profitably as they can. Their strategies range from inventing innovative (read: overcivilized) products and making them look sumptuous in television ads to lobbying government officials to buying out experts to advertising to children, who don't know that they're being manipulated. It does not matter to them if selling more food occurs at the expense of public
health, Dr. Nestle writes in her book
Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.
“The leading [health] conditions related to dietâcoronary heart disease, cancers at certain sites, diabetes, stroke, and liver cirrhosis, for exampleâcould be reduced in prevalence or delayed until later in life if people ate less of the dietary components that increase disease risk. Advice to eat less, however, runs counter to the interest of food producers.
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In an interview on Amazon.com's streaming video show
Amazon Fishbowl
, Pollan charges that Americans are “deliberately confused by an industry that spends $36 billion a year on marketing messages precisely to persuade us to eat more, and eat at different times, eat in the car, eat in front of television, and eat highly processed foods, because that's where the money is.” Dr. Nestle says the food industry intentionally keeps us confused about whether foods like chocolate, coffee, and eggs are good or bad for us and whether food labels like “low fat,” “low calorie” and “natural” really mean as much as they imply. Though I am not an expert on food industry economics, recently I witnessed an example of food-marketing hype firsthand. I saw packages of carrots that were labeled low fat. A low-fat label on a carrot? What nonsense! Of course they're low fatâthey're carrots!
Food manufacturers do so much marketingâand very effectivelyâthat they have changed the meaning of food from something we use to nourish ourselves, which is how we thought of it only one generation ago, to something we consume whenever we want to celebrate something, nourish, reward, comfort, or rev ourselves up. No wonder so many of us now live to eat rather than eat to live.
Where does the government stand on all of this? Some experts charge that the FDA experiences a conflict of interest inherent in its mission statement: that it must choose between promoting foods American farmers grow and directing consumers not to eat too much. “No government agency has the funds to promote dietary recommendations in competition with food advertising,”
Dr. Nestle writes. As a result, she claims, “The major sources of nutrition advice for most people are the media and the public relations efforts of the food industry itself.” In his 2004 testimony before Congress in hearings to evaluate the government's role in curbing obesity, Bruce Silverglade, legal affairs director for CSPI, explained to congressional panel members that food company marketing budgets alone dwarf those of the government's healthy-eating campaignâ$7
billion
to $4 to $5 million. It's no surprise, then, that the message that Americans should eat less doesn't get emphasized.
How Being Too Toxic Makes You Fat
If you look under a microscope at somebody's blood right after they've eaten, you can see how the food they've eaten is affecting their body. During my studies, we used to do an experiment where we would ask people to eat a typical American convenience mealâsay, fast food or pizzaâthen we'd draw their blood and examine it. If their diet was at all healthy, when we'd look at their blood cells before they ate, we'd see circular cells with space between them. But after a fast-food meal, the space between the blood cells was gone. Instead, they would be crowded next to and stacked on top of one another. We would show these “before and after” pictures to the volunteers. They'd be shocked to witness in their blood cells proof of why they felt sluggish and tired. Next, we'd ask them to consume five to ten digestive enzymes, whose job it is to eat up all the crud, allowing cells to swim in oxygenated blood. In less than an hour, the person would feel better and become more energetic. When we looked at their cells under the microscope, we could see that the cells were less crowded and able to breathe.
On a molecular level, when toxins enter the body in our food, the body tries to digest them. Once it realizes it's dealing with something unnatural, it mobilizes more and more enzymes as it tries (unsuccessfully) to break down the synthetic ingredients. When we feel ourselves becoming tired, bloated, gassy; experiencing heartburn, GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), or an upset
stomach; getting diarrhea; or even becoming constipated, this is often the reason why. It's also the reason 20 percent of Americans have digestive problems, and digestive aids like Tums, Milk of Magnesia, Pepcid, Prilosec, Zantac, Gas-X, and Imodium AD are among the best-selling over-the-counter and prescription medications. Eventually, the body realizes these substances are indigestible (hmmâ¦that's awfully similar to the word
indigestion
). At that point, it moves them out of the stomach to the colon, one of the body's major trash cans. But even the colon doesn't know what to do with them. After sitting there for a whileâconstipating us, causing gas, body odor, and other problems as it tries to figure out what to doâthey migrate into the lymphatic system, the body's drainage network. When the lymph system doesn't know how to deal with them, it dumps these toxins into our fat cells, whose primary job is to cushion and insulate our organs, but whose side gig is to store trash.
Over the course of our lifetime, as more toxins are shoved into our fat cellsâon top of the fatâthe cells get crowded and congested. When they get congested, we feel congested. We also develop cellulite, which is merely garbage stored in our fat cells that isn't supposed to be there. As our fat cells are stuffed fuller and fuller, we bloat, we get heavier, our clothes get tight. Over time, our cells become crowded so closely together that they can't get enough oxygen. In an effort to find someplace to put the junk we pile into it, our body creates more fat cells. They, too, get crammed full of crap until they can't take it anymore. They begin to wither, become misshapen and their growth becomes retarded. Eventually, they literally suffocate. Making matters worse, these overcivilized foods turn the colon, kidneys, and liverâorgans whose job it is to filter harmful items out of the bloodstream and remove them from the bodyâinto toxic cesspools. Over time, they become overloaded and unable to function, literally leaving us sick and tired. We are able to feel that something's not right with us, but because the problem exists at a microscopic level, only the most knowledgeable people are aware of exactly what's going on. The rest of us wonder why we feel symptoms like fatigue, sluggishness, foggy thinking, confusion, headaches, allergies, and
body aches. This toxicity manifests itself in more noticeable ways, including symptoms like wrinkles, age spots, skin that is overly dry or oily, acne, allergies, and body odor.