Growing and roaming food does not include flour or cereals. Primitive man could not pick wheat and chew it; he/she only ate food that could be eaten raw or cooked speared over an open fire, so cereals were naturally excluded since people 10,000 years ago did not have ovens or mills. Cereals and potatoes are actually toxic in their raw state and dangerous to eat uncooked with the exception of oats, which can be eaten unprocessed and uncooked. You may not want to eat raw eggs or raw meat because they do not seem very palatable, but if you were stranded somewhere and that was the only food available you could eat them and your body would digest them.
Recognisable food means that when you are walking down the aisles of a supermarket you can recognise what the item is made from, for example tuna fish whether fresh, frozen or canned is instantly recognisable. You can recognise eggs, pears, peas, chicken and raw nuts. When you get to bagels, pretzels, cakes, biscuits and packets of Twiglets, cheesy curls, chocolate and jelly beans you can’t tell just from looking at them what the raw ingredients are.
When I work with overweight children we do what I call ‘warrior shopping’, we go down the aisles and imagine what warriors ate and pick similar food and avoid the rest, we only buy recognisable food. Recognisable food does not look very different from its natural state, for instance go for chicken but not chicken roll which is full of cereal and lactose fillers, and buy cut ham rather than ham loaf or processed sliced ham or an even more processed form such as bologna. Eat fillets of fish and shellfish but not fish sticks or ocean sticks or shrimpies, which are full of garbage and bound together with milk protein, fat and sugar. Eat raw unsalted nuts but not tacos, crisps or potato chips as they are full of sugar and bad fats. Eat fresh fruit but not fruit roll ups since they are so full of sugar that they are actually as unhealthy as chocolate bars. Frozen yogurt might sound healthier than ice cream because it’s lower in fat, but it is still milk, fat and sugar. Yogurt covered raisins are just fat and sugar-covered raisins.
Food in its most natural state is digestible. Food that grows and roams and does not look too different once it has been prepared and placed on your plate is digestible and in harmony with your body. If you can still recognise it as food you can eat it. Processed cheese doesn’t look like food. Cheesy puffs, potato twirls and cheese curls are nothing like food, neither are crisps, sweets and doughnuts. A good rule of thumb is that the more ingredients there are listed on a label the worse the food is and the more indigestible it is. Look for simple ingredients and only about five listings in the ingredients. Natural foods have short ingredient lists; processed foods have long ingredient lists and many chemical names.
Wheat and other cereals in their most basic form are cattle feed – they exist on this planet to feed cattle. The Cereal Board has a lot to answer for in convincing humans to eat cattle fodder, persuading us to eat as if we were cows or sheep. Cereals are promoted and heavily advertised entirely because of the high profit margins involved: cereals are the cheapest food in the world. We have been misled by marketing men into thinking it’s a health food. In truth the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet makes people fat because refining removes the fibre and all the good nutrients from rice, wheat and other cereals. What we are left with is empty calories that promote overeating instead of fullness.
Although unrefined cereals are okay, for example unrefined oats are very healthy, most cereals are loaded with preservatives, pesticides and chemicals. Studies have shown that many stored cereals are contaminated with mycotoxins. How else could you keep them in your food cupboard for months where they don’t go mouldy or stale? Even bread has such a long shelf life nowadays that it doesn’t go mouldy for weeks. Eating all those chemicals punishes your body. If you want to be slim and healthy disregard forever the food pyramid. Avoid refined foods and white foods such as white rice, white bread or white flour and limit your intake of unrefined cereals. Almost all the overweight people I have worked with have a problem with cereals, after all they are not designed for human consumption. It is only a hundred years since foods became refined and we started to eat foods that dramatically raise our blood sugar levels leaving us hungrier and craving more of the same thing within hours of eating.
The rise in overweight Westerners is linked to the rise in our consumption of bad carbohydrates. The gluten in wheat and other cereals is a big problem as it’s hard to digest and can cause allergies, fatigue, bloating, weight gain and Coeliac disease. Modern wheat is modified to contain even more gluten and so genetically tampered with it is indigestible for many people. Digestive problems occur when we are overloaded with wheat by having cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, pasta for dinner and crackers and biscuits as snacks. There is also a lot of hidden wheat in foods like sausages, burgers, mustard and many sauces. When you eat this way you are consuming a diet of glue all day long. Glue for breakfast, glue for lunch and more glue for dinner and snacks. The word glutinous means sticky and is an adjective derived from gluten. Could you fill up a bowl with flour, oil, pesticides and preservatives, mix it up until it looked like wallpaper paste, like raw pizza dough, and then eat it? No, of course not but that is what you are eating. It may be baked, fried, covered in sauce. It may taste and smell delicious but it is still glue. When your baguette or pizza is broken down in your body it goes back to glue and coats your intestines with a sticky residue so that hours later if you eat some fresh berries or vegetables they will stick to this glue-like matter, this pap coating your gut, and ferment instead of being digested. As a consequence your body is crying out for nutrients not calories. You are full of food but still hungry because your body cannot get enough nutrition from the indigestible food you have put in it.
When we eat digestible food we feel full more quickly and for much longer than when we eat glue. Cows have four stomachs to break down wheat – they need a different digestive tract to deal with wheat. Humans, by comparison, have a much shorter digestive tract and a small stomach. You and I don’t have four stomachs but if you eat a wheat-based diet you will begin to look as if you do by the end of each day as your stomach will be bloated and distended. When I ate a lot of bread and cheese my stomach was always very round by the end of each day. It was only flat when I woke up in the morning before eating. It’s sad but true that if you eat like a cow you may end up looking like one with a body that has a very big stomach and full of gas with little energy from eating cereal-based products all day. I noticed that my most overweight clients had very large trunks but often normal-sized arms and legs. (Fat stored around the middle is linked to eating too many bad carbohydrates). These patients told me they grazed on food all day and were constantly hungry and lacked energy for any sustainable period of time. They often reported that they had an unnatural amount of gas.
Cows give off more gas that any other animal on the planet. New Zealand actually has a ‘fart tax’ based on the emissions from each cow on each farm because these emissions are methane which is a greenhouse gas and affects the ozone layer. I am not pointing this out to offend you – I had many of the above symptoms for years so I can identify with it – but because I do believe that if you see cereal as cattle feed it will help you to choose not to eat it very often. One of my clients wrote to me to say, ‘I hated you when I left your office but I did remember what you said about not eating like a cow. It stuck in my mind. I have shed four stone and dropped four dress sizes. Guess what I don’t hate you anymore. Thank you for making me see sense.’
Think about it – cows, horses and sheep are predominantly all stomach. They graze constantly whereas cats only eat once a day. A lion will kill its prey, which is pure protein, and will leave it when he has eaten enough and he won’t eat again for many hours or kill again until he’s hungry, even if he is around other prey. Cats will not eat carbohydrates – they are far too smart. They know their bodies cannot digest it so they go hungry instead, because to them going hungry is no worse than actually eating carbohydrates. We need to be as smart and selective about what we eat and focus on the following: cattle eat carbohydrates, cats eat protein. Would you rather be like a cat or a cow? Are you feline or bovine?
Felines are sleek, smart, graceful, lean and fast. Bovines are large, cumbersome and slow. We are like big cats not cows. We have the teeth of carnivores and herbivores because our carnivores teeth are for biting through meat while our herbivore teeth are for chewing vegetables, fruits and nuts. They are not for chewing cud. Have you ever noticed how long cows spend chewing? In addition, cows make between 100 and 150 litres of saliva a day to help break down wheat, whereas humans make about six cups of saliva a day. You need to eat like a celebrity not like a cow. The celebrities I work with avoid wheat and flour as it makes them tired, bloated and gassy.
An Asian diet is more akin to the diet we were meant to eat: they eat rice but no wheat or potatoes. Pizza was invented in Italy as a food for starving peasants and in Italy the poorer the region the thicker the pizza base. In Naples pizza was a very thick doughy base with a very simple tomato and cheese topping, it was a portable food for peasants working in the fields. Pizza was literally a plate made of dough on which to transport a worker’s lunch. In Venice, where many wealthy Italians lived, the pizza base was very thin with much more elaborate meat and fish toppings.
In poor countries within their jails and mental institutions the diet is based around cereals purely because they are so cheap. It is (I know I keep repeating it because I want you to get it) cattle feed. Cereals are used to fatten cattle and when humans eat it, it fattens them too. Why would you eat cattle feed as your staple diet when you are free not to, when you have a choice? One of my clients who was in a mental hospital for months said that when he came out he could not look at bread and cereal ever again, because it reminded him of the bland hospital fare. I was in hospital briefly a few years ago and having had nothing at all to eat for twenty-four hours I was looking forward to some fruit or eggs for breakfast. I was offered only cereal, white toast and jam, they did not have any alternative so I chose to go without until I could have something that was more beneficial. When John McCarthy was freed from Lebanon he described his diet of pitta bread and cheese throughout his captivity. You have a choice to eat fish, fresh vegetables and salads with delicious dressing, grilled chicken and all kinds of fruits. Why are you eating like a pauper, a peasant, a prisoner when you have so many options? Even if you are very limited financially you can still eat well. In the long term it is cheaper to eat healthy fresh food than processed cereals.
If we think back to the diet of our ancestors, our grandparents did eat cereals but they were not refined or processed and they ate them alongside protein not instead of protein. They ate stews with vegetables and dumplings or meat with vegetables and potatoes. Most importantly they did not snack on convenience foods. Snack foods have been growing in popularity since the sixties and we have been growing fatter at an alarming rate as we eat them. Many of our grandparents were also expending a huge amount of physical energy as many jobs were more manual and consequently they were slimmer because of the sheer amount of energy used in manual labour. That is not the case anymore. Pasties were designed for miners to take down mines and sustain them throughout a long gruelling work shift, as were pies. I can understand a ploughman eating a ploughman’s lunch to sustain him during a long farming day, but you and I do not need a huge hunk of glue stuffed with a huge hunk of mucus for the sedentary lifestyles we have nowadays.
Scotsmen would take dried porridge cut into squares or rolled into balls for a working lunch when they spent twelve hours in the fields. American farmers took hard-boiled eggs and dried grits (cold sliced porridge made of corn) to sustain them all day. They had a very bland diet with little variety and they ate much less in terms of amount than we do. This happens naturally when you limit the variety of food you eat. By limiting the variety of their meals our ancestors coped with food that is hard to digest. Also it was not full of pesticides, chemicals and preservatives.
The Western population has got bigger and fatter in direct proportion to the increase in cereal products being eaten as meals instead of accompaniments to meals and the addition of additives and convenience foods. A hundred years ago people ate much more healthy foods, they had less variety of food at each meal, they did more manual work and lived in homes without central heating which made them burn off more calories. Years ago we might have had some bread with a meal or a cake for afternoon tea, whereas now instead of having carbohydrates in addition to a meal the carbohydrates are the meal. Our grandparents and great grandparents did not eat rice, pasta, pizza, noodles, couscous, burritos, tacos, crisps, nachos, corn chips and pretzels. Sugar-laden breakfast cereals and cans of fizzy drink did not exist for them but now in addition to eating these things we also eat a full carbohydrate meal instead of anything else. This is linked to a staggering rise in weight. In some parts of the Western world over 70 per cent of the population are overweight.
Our bodies are designed to digest raw food, real food such as vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. These foods are easy to digest leaving our energy free to repair our bodies and eliminate toxins which are stored in fat cells. Eating dead, inert, processed and refined foods takes up so much valuable energy that our bodies have none left for other important tasks. Blood is diverted from our brain and organs to digest food and we fall asleep as a consequence. If you always fall asleep or feel sleepy after eating that is a sign you are eating the wrong food. If your stomach is flatter in the morning and distended by evening that is another sign, so is passing gas soon after eating. Your stomach is above your navel your intestines are below it. It is your intestines, your gut that swells due to distension. Your body does a good job of telling you what it doesn’t like by reacting with heartburn, gas, skin eruptions, headaches, fatigue and bloating. If you listen to your body and work with it, listen to the messages your body is sending you and act on them, then you will begin looking and feeling different.