Modern medicine has swooped in attempting to remedy the metabolic disorders of obesity, heart disease, stroke and diabetes that plague us. But that is a broken, failing system. Medicine should be preventative and start with what we eat.
There is confusion surrounding what constitutes a “healthy” diet. Advice abounds from pretty much everywhere. but there are three basic rules to keep our bodies working well and avoid metabolic disease.
Everything we put in our mouths gets broken up into microscopic components exposing our interior to its chemical makeup. Food is the one thing we expose the miles of internal bodily tissues and microflora to multiple times a day. You are what you eat. There is no doubt that the chemical make-up of our food governs how well our bodies work.
Food, as Hippocrates said, really is our medicine.
This choice of what we consume keeps us sick or keeps us healthy both mentally and physically. More compelling data is coming out about the gut-brain axis and how what we eat can affect our behavior. (1)
We can bring components into our bodies we’ve evolved over thousands of years to use for vital tasks like DNA repair (rooting out precancer), mitochondria efficiency (giving us good energy), toxin and waste elimination (liver health), immune system wellness (avoiding illness and autoimmune disease), and hormone balancing as we go through puberty and age (avoiding acne, menstrual irregularities, weight gain, and mood swings). Or we can constantly wash our cells in a destructive milieu of man-made toxins that are foreign to what we were designed to eat, thereby confusing our cells and causing dysfunction on a systemic level. It seems like an easy choice.
When you dive deep into this controversial issue, for many, it is not a choice. We have created a norm of overconsumption of hyper-palatable industrial food-like substances. We have been undereducated and tricked by the food and pharmaceutical industries. Our government has not been adequately proactive in creating clear and succinct nutritional guidelines.
Doctors are terribly undereducated on nutrition, receiving on average less than 20 hours of nutrition education in their 8 years of schooling. (2) While doctors want to address nutrition, most doctors feel unprepared for giving diet advice. (3)
Also, they are bound by a system that rewards writing prescriptions - they are evaluated and compensated on the number of prescriptions they write, not how many patients are actually staying healthy. Our doctors know our system is broken. One primary care provider described to me how she gets “dinged” for not writing prescriptions for things such as high blood sugar, high blood pressure or high cholesterol when the patient wishes to use diet and exercise as a means to improve them without medication. Too many “dings” and you get in trouble with the medical board.
Shouldn't our healthcare system be based on preventing disease and keeping folks healthy rather than how many prescriptions they can write in a day?
And then there is this poignant quote from my father:
“No one really knows what to eat. They keep changing their minds, so I’m just going to keep eating whatever I want.”
This common sentiment is prolific because the declarations of seemingly expert opinions change like the wind when it comes to nutrition. Let's think for ourselves though: Who are “they”?
The cumulative authorities that create and disseminate our nutritional guidelines are in two close-knit camps: the government organizations paid for by your and my tax dollars, and large private organizations. Government organizations include the National Institute of Health (NIH), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Examples of private organizations include the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American Diabetes Association (ADA) to name a few. All of these groups should have our best interests at heart, literally in the case of the AHA. However, when we get to what influences society at large these days, we find that it is the almighty dollar to be gained by industry. Who is funding the “theys” that we Americans trust for guidance?
As it turns out, pharmaceutical companies, fast-food and junk food companies are shelling out billions of dollars to grease the wheels on the big machine. They fund the studies, so they decide which ones are published. They staff lobbyists to influence government decisions. They provide kickbacks for how many patients get put on long-term drugs. They provide food to schools, paid for by our taxes, from their junk food companies. They make trade deals to get their product labeled by the ADA or as "heart healthy" for better marketing when it unequivocally is not.
Coca-Cola and PepsiCo funded at least 96 American health groups from the American Heart Association to the American Diabetic Association. (4)
Cadbury, of the famed Cadbury Easter candy, brokered a $1.5 million dollar deal with the American Diabetes Association that allowed them to use the ADA logo on some of their products including Snapple. (5)
Seeing how this is an obvious conflict of interest, organizations have become more careful. Big companies have been more discreet about how they offer funding, creating groups like American Beverage Association to funnel money more discretely. (6)
The American Heart Association took in over 45 million dollars of disclosed funding from big pharma and medical device companies. (7)
Those are the real "theys" - the fast food, junk food and pharmaceutical industries. That is who we are letting guide our health.
How else did we get to a place where the National Institute of Health (NIH) publishes a study that says a bowl of Lucky Charms is healthier than eggs? (8)
How else did we get to a world where free school breakfast consists of powdered donuts, and lunch is strawberry-flavored (corn syrup laden) milk and a “walking taco.” In case you don’t know, a walking taco is an open a bag of Doritos with a scoop of greasy ground mystery meat on top, and that’s a “healthy” lunch. I have three kids in public school. This is a real-life example here in case you think I may be exaggerating. We shouldn't wonder why nearly a quarter of all American children are obese and why type II diabetes among kids, once a rare condition, is on the rise.
What about the $75 million of our tax dollars each year than lines Big Soda's pockets through our SNAP program? When objections to keeping soda on the food stamp list arose, the soda lobbyists won. (9)
An estimated nearly 70% of the calories consumed in America are from highly processed foods. Most of which contain additives that are not tested or unknown to the FDA since additives are not regulated and testing is voluntary. (10)
There is a direct causation between the increase in the rise of industrial food giants, highly processed food consumption and poor health, particularly the rates of metabolic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. Cancer and auto-immune diseases have also greatly increased as our consumption of highly processed foods has gone up.
The BMJ published a study that shows a 62% increase in risk of dying from, well, anything when you consume 4 or more servings of highly processed food each day. And with each additional serving, that risk goes up by another 18% per serving. (11)
This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the likes of doctors such as Colin Campbell, Ph.D., Mark Hyman, M.D., Casey Means, M.D., and author Michael Pollen (see recommended reading at the end of this post). But deep pockets rule the system here in America. Keeping the status quo (ever-increasing sales for the junk food and pharmaceutical industries) the norm, while overall as a country, we get sicker and sicker.
Remember the big cigarette companies in the ‘90’s? They lost lawsuits and were fined $206 billion over what their lobbyists, chemists and marketers did: creating a chemically designed product that was increasingly addictive, hiding the known health detriments they caused, and using heavy lobbyist pressure to skew the government guidelines in their favor. That was not only morally wrong, but illegal.
Dr. Morris Fishbein, the esteemed editor of one of the most prestigous medical journals, JAMA, was paid over $100,000 by Lorrilard in the 1950's to write tobacco-friendly articles geared towards medical doctors. (12)
This persisted for decades, until whistleblowers came forward and there was an undeniable mountain of evidence clearly showing the dangers of cigarette smoking. People experienced first-hand the health problems and loss of loved ones.
The playbook was already written for the mess we now have from the junk-food and fast-food industries. There are chemists and researchers whose sole job is to find the hyper-palatable “bliss point” in food - that perfect combination of salty, sweet and fat that makes it taste great, but it doesn’t actually satisfy you. You keep wanting one more bite. This largely contributes not just to over-consumption, but food addiction. (13)
And just like doctors were paid to be in cigarette ads claiming it was good for your lungs to smoke; the marketing experts have used false health claims to lure consumers into thinking their products are healthy. (14)
It is up to us to break free from the current system, educate ourselves, and take our diets and our health into our own hands and mouths. Forget all the measuring and counting, there are just three main guidelines, going back to a time before industry existed, that profoundly affect health:
Eat mostly whole plant foods, and eat only pasture raised meat, dairy and eggs sparingly.
Don’t overeat: Eat 3 meals at regular times, no snacks.
Avoid all added fats and oils.
Eat mostly whole plant foods, eat only pasture raised meat, dairy and eggs sparingly.
Eating mostly whole plant food is what our bodies are best designed to do, there is no doubt. We require a high amount of fiber to help our liver to detoxify. You see the liver’s job is to remove toxins, waste, used up bits and pieces, imbalances in hormones like estrogen and progesterone, process all of this into bile, and get rid of it via our digestive system. If we aren’t consuming a high fiber diet, we are clogging our system with the liver’s trash and the whole system gets backed up as that trash is then reabsorbed as it sits in our bodies. About 85% of what we eat should be plants: vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, seeds and whole grains.
Pasture raised meat, dairy and eggs cannot exist in the quantities of the more industrial conventionally farmed confined animal operations. We were not meant to eat the ridiculous amount of animal products that we consume today. Eating these sparingly, as in not every day, but on special occasions, makes more sense from financial, practical, and health standpoints. Animals raised and fed as they were designed creates food that is more nutritious, more balanced with omega-3 fats, and more sustainable for the environment.
Most highly processed food is keeping us sick because it contains so many preservatives. Food companies need their products to be able to sit on a truck, in a warehouse, on a shelf for years without rotting or molding. So, they are packed with preservatives. Things that destroy and prevent the growth of funguses and bacteria. The problem is that is exactly what our gut microbiome is comprised of: a delicate balance of funguses and bacteria. When we consume preservatives, we are killing and preventing the growth of our own gut microflora.
Don’t overeat: Eat 3 meals at regular times, no snacks.
We have all heard about fasting and time-restricted eating. What if we just ate normally? I’m talking 3 meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner, with out in between and late-night snacks. Our bodies need to do other things than process food constantly. That takes up a lot of energy, and, especially at night, it needs to go into a deep-cleaning mode while we sleep. It cannot do this if it is busy figuring out what to do with excess food. We need spaces in between meals to allow our bodies to fully process our food. No one ever died of hunger between breakfast and lunchtime. Honor your body by giving it time to use the nutrients you are providing.
Avoid all added fats and oils.
Vegetable oil, shortening, sesame seed oil, peanut oil, olive oil, avocado oil, sunflower oil, and any other nut or seed oil in particular are highly refined, have been changed chemically from the whole food they were derived from, and our bodies were never meant to encounter them in this form. They are high in omega-6 fats which most of us have too much of due to consuming highly processed foods. Eat the olive, not the olive oil. Eat the avocado, not the avocado oil. Dairy fat is particularly high in saturated fat. Read all the labels on all the things. Don’t eat them if they have any of these harmful chemicals.
You don't need to splash a copious amount of olive oil or pat of butter in your pan every time you sauté an onion. Using water, or for added flavor tomato sauce will keep things from sticking. Find oil-free salad dressing recipes or use just plain balsamic vinegar or Bragg's Liquid Aminos to dress your salad.
Educate yourself, educate others, never stop learning, don’t accept the status quo.
Here are a few books I have enjoyed learning from. While they have different ideas and different topics, they all support the general guidelines of eating unprocessed (real) food from different perspectives. Send me any of your must-reads!
Recommended reading in no particular order (with Amazon affiliate links): some may be free on audible.
Good Energy by Casey Means, MD
The China Study by T. Colin Cambell, Ph.D.
The Blood Sugar Solution by Mark Hyman, MD
Bright Line Eating by Susan Thompson, Ph.D.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss
Folks, This Ain't Normal by Joel Salatin
Source links:
Is Our Modern Diet Behind Our Mental Health Crisis? – Mark Hyman, MD
Why Medical Schools Need to Focus More on Nutrition | School of Medicine | Stanford Medicine
Poll: Most Doctors Want To Discuss Nutrition With Patients but Feel Unprepared
Big Soda Sponsored 96 Health Groups Over a 5-Year Period
and
Coca-Cola and Pepsi Fund 96 Health Groups In the U.S. | TIME
American Diabetes Association Makes Sweet Deal with Cadbury Schweppes | PR Watch
American Beverage Association - key facts - U.S. Right to Know
FY 21-22 Pharma Disclosure for Website 3.9.23 v4(excluding Insurance)
Eggs vs. Lucky Charms: Unveiling Nutritional Truths » Cell Health News
Should We Continue To Subsidize Sugar In The Food Stamps Program? : The Salt : NPR
Processed foods make up 70 percent of the U.S. diet - Marketplace
FDA sinks Cheerios health claims; calls cereal an ‘unapproved drug'
Disclaimer:
I am in no way offering medical advice. While I am a registered nurse, there is no patient - provider relationship established by reading my blog. This is in no way intended to replace the advice of your healthcare provider.
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