Death By Supermarket (28 page)

Stimulants keep your body in a state of sympathetic dominance by mimicking and magnifying the actions of adrenaline, which revs cellular functions. You think faster. Your heart beats faster. But the human body isn’t meant to be in a state of sympathetic overdrive. Stimulant users will eventually begin to feel agitated. Although most people do not enjoy the
pounding heart and jittery nerves, they get hooked on stimulants by the initial good feelings and keep going back for more. People in later stages of burnout reach for stimulants in a vain attempt to recreate that initial boost of energy and momentary lift in mood. (The stimulant rush is caused by the same outpouring of insulin and the resultant dump of feel-good neurotransmitters in your brain that you get from eating sugar, which we reviewed on
page 20
.)

After the FDA ruling against the use of ephedra, TrimSpa was reformulated. A daily dose of TrimSpa now packs 1,050 milligrams of caffeine.

In America we have a skewed definition of “drug users.” Since the passage of the Harrison Act in December 1914 that banned nonmedical use of cocaine (which previously provided Coca Cola with its “medicinal benefits”), our judicial system has come down hard on reprobate users of illegal drugs. Thousands of dopers rot in prisons at taxpayers’ expense. After 9/11, John Ashcroft instigated marijuana raids on “drug users” who incidentally happened to be dying from AIDS and cancer. You may not think of yourself as a drug user. Like a friend of mine said, “I’ve never tried drugs.” Really? Well, try going without your coffee tomorrow, then let me know if you want to issue a revised statement.

People are unaware of how much caffeine they ingest daily since caffeine is the only drug that’s widely added to the food supply and manufacturers can add caffeine to any food or beverage without disclosing the dosage. The majority of Americans are frothing at the mouth from dehydration and we seek to slake this thirst by drinking dehydrating caffeinated drinks like Starbucks Breakfast Blend, which packs 327 milligrams of caffeine, Diet Coke at 47 milligrams of caffeine per can, and other newly introduced caffeinated drinks like Shock, which boasts “Sleep is overrated” and contains 200 milligrams of caffeine.

When you jump-start your heart with caffeine, the odorless, slightly bitter alkaloid substance is rapidly absorbed in the digestive tract and diffuses into nearly all of your tissues. Using caffeine keeps your body in a heightened state of sympathetic dominance with your adrenals
overproducing stress hormones so that your body cannot rest. Like all drugs, caffeine provokes the desire to consume more and more as your addiction drags on.

Ultimately your adrenals will become fatigued and that is why many people who used to be able to “diet” by drinking coffee eventually find themselves fatigued, unable to get the same jolt from more and more coffee, and worse, now they are overweight and riddled with chronic conditions. Caffeine does so many bad things that space here does not allow your basic A-to-Z list. Suffice it to say, caffeine use is linked to heart disease, cancer, ulcers, heartburn/GERD, and urinary and prostate problems in men; accelerated aging, infertility, fetal loss, and spontaneous abortion in women; and to fetal growth retardation, anxiety, sleeplessness, addiction, and withdrawal symptoms in children, among other problems.
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I understand that my stance on caffeine may alienate some readers. Maybe you can keep your coffee intake to one eight-ounce cup a day. But if caffeine is controlling you and destroying your health, and you want to cut down or quit, it’s important to note that that quitting cold turkey halts the demand on your adrenals too suddenly and you’ll experience withdrawal symptoms that can include headache, fatigue, lethargy, muscle pain, and an overall nasty mood.
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It’s best to wean slowly. Decaffeinated coffee still contains significant amounts of caffeine, and all but Swiss water-processed decaffeinated coffee is decaffeinated with methylene chloride, a carcinogen, which you then ingest with your decreased caffeine.
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(The best drink of course is purified water. The human body is 75 percent water. Optimal is one half of your body weight in ounces.)

All stimulants stress your body and lead to adrenal disaster both by causing the release of adrenaline and by mimicking and exaggerating the actions of adrenaline. This eventually results in depleting your adrenal reserve, which will lead to anxiety, mood roller coaster, and insomnia. In addition to damaging your adrenals, using stimulants also taxes and depletes your body’s balancing and calming neurotransmitters, which creates the potential for panic attacks—something that is not very pretty,
if pretty is what you’re after. However, if you would rather be dead than fat, you can always buy Emagrece Sim, better known as the Brazilian Diet Pill, online; it contains the extremely dangerous cocktail of Fenproporex (a stimulant that is converted in the body to amphetamine), Librium (a sedating hypnotic drug to counteract the jitters), and Prozac (to make you feel better about ruining your health).

Many Americans are willing to saddle up a wild horse and relinquish the reins when it comes to using stimulants to lose weight. Never was George Bernard Shaw so correct in saying, “Youth is wasted on the young” as when it comes to young people resorting to extreme diet measures in an attempt to lose or maintain extremely low body weight. Because such measures—taking natural stimulants, guzzling coffee and diet drinks, and taking “metabolism enhancers,” fat burners, appetite suppressants, carb blockers, fat blockers, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, taking laxatives, or using steroids, human growth hormone, and thyroid replacement outside of the care of a physician—erodes the beauty or good looks with which a person is born.

The diet industry focuses solely on thinness. But there are many thin people walking around who are disasters on the inside, whose bodies do not have adequate building materials to replenish existing cellular structures or make new ones. Without the necessary building blocks of nutrition, bones weaken, endocrine systems falter, brain neurotransmitters become off-kilter, and ultimately, organ function begins to flag. Outward manifestations of internal disaster can be seen in dull and thinning hair, brittle nails, dry skin, wrinkles and skin disorders, and an overall lackluster appearance—all of which the beauty industry capitalizes on with a myriad of preparations to apply to the outside.

Americans idealize youth and beauty, but the fact is that many if not most Americans are on an accelerated aging path. Imagine the forces of nature young American men and women would be if they stopped eating all factory food, never used stimulants or other diet products, and ate balanced diets of real, living food. Right now, there are not many forces
of nature walking around. Instead, and ironically, the drive to be beautiful in this country has caused people to inflict disaster upon themselves. It begins with young girls tossing back diet pills with their diet drinks and if they can keep up with the extreme dieting measures necessary to remain bone-thin, it ends with chronically ill, middle-aged, emaciated, hormone-depleted insomniacs sucking up coffee and cigarettes (or, if they are “health-minded,” hot water with lemon peel) to dampen their hunger pains so they don’t have to eat. Then there are the “failures”—the majority of people who indulge in chronic dieting using diet aids—those who are overweight/obese due to the factors we talked about earlier.

Stimulants are not the only scams in a bottle. Another current diet pill favorite is acai berry, a Brazilian berry sold in concentrated form that is said to have such startling colon-cleansing and detoxifying effects that it causes your body to shed a pound of fat a day. Common sense tells us if this were true that it would be the subject of numerous double-blind, placebo-controlled studies reported above the fold of the
New York Times, Wall Street Journal
, the
Economist
, the
Huffington Post
, and so on. Another diet is the HCG diet featuring a hormone that is made by the placenta during pregnancy and that is required to mobilize nutrition for the fetus (men also make a small amount of HCG). This hormone is either taken sublingually (under the tongue) or injected, along with a 500 calories per day diet. We’ve already looked at low calorie dieting, and as far as hormones go, the entire goal of eating a balanced diet of real, living food is to balance your hormones. Taking a hormone that you don’t need doesn’t lend to that plan since all hormones work in an interconnected fashion, and one imbalance creates another until there is a slippery slope of hormonal imbalances.

Then there are the diet supplements that fall into the category of “let’s just make up science as we go along.” The Shape Up! supplements that went along with the HFCS candy bars discussed on
page 27
provide an example of exploitation of fat people. These supplements were supposedly formulated for two body types: Apple bodies notoriously carry fat as paunches, while pear bodies pack fat around the hips, butt, and thighs.
One of the specially designed Shape Up! supplements supposedly helped Apples “metabolize carbohydrates,” whatever that meant, and another purportedly promoted fat metabolism and increased the pear body’s ability to burn calories. Adding the “Intensifier” was promoted to take weight management efforts to the next level. Taking either apple or pear versions along with the Intensifier cost consumers $120 per month.

The supplement labels claimed, “These products contain scientifically researched levels of ingredients that can help you change your behavior to take control of your weight.” But there were no scientific studies to back up the claim that apple and pear bodies need different nutrients to lose body fat. Jules Hirsch, M.D., a nutrition and obesity researcher and professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, called the claims “gibberish.” Another leading expert in nutrition policy referred to the supplements as “a recipe for making money.”
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It was a great marketing ploy until a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation and a class-action suit brought on by dissatisfied customers compelled the company to stop marketing the products.
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(The Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency of the government that provides consumer protection from harmful business practices.)

It doesn’t look like anyone is going to be called to the carpet any time soon, at least not by the FDA, until after the fact. With Americans spending $40 billion per year on diet products, the makers of miracles in a bottle rake in so much money that they can’t be stopped by consumer class-action lawsuits, warning letters from the FDA, or legal action by the FTC. With the astronomical success of CortiSlim, the sales of diet pills have reached a feverish pitch on TV, targeting everyone from testosteronized teenage boys to matronphobic menopausal women by trotting out remarkable before and after testimonials, attractively no-nonsense Ivy League doctor-spokespitchers, and incredible free offers for products that can be summed up as X-TREMEBS4U. And if you’re so inert that you can’t even get off the couch to walk your dog, you can now give him/her Slentrol, the FDA-approved diet pill for dogs approved in early 2007.

Diet pills are not the only pills that are being foisted on the American public eager to see magical weight-loss results, as one diet pill’s marketing campaign claimed, “by doing nothing” but “taking a pill.” Because fat is not our only problem.

AMERICANS LIVE ON
science-fiction food and are sugar-, caffeine-, cigarette-, and alcohol-dependant. We buy the latest and greatest mattresses hoping against hope that we’ll get a good night’s sleep. Instead of eating vitamin-B-rich real foods that foster healthy, shiny, thick hair growth, men turn to Avacor, which, according to the ads, grows hair like a Chia pet. We gobble cocktails of OTC medications and prescription drugs to treat our obesity, hemorrhoids, heartburn, gas, constipation, diarrhea, sinus infections, asthma, allergies, migraines, chronic inflammation, arthritis and allover body pain, zero sex drive, chronic colds and flu, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so on.

Because Americans eat a diet that lacks life-sustaining nutrients, and many of the ingredients in this diet are foreign and toxic to human physiology, and because we exacerbate this nutrient drain by dieting and popping diet pills, we’re falling apart from the inside out. All you have to do is turn on the TV to understand that Americans do not look or feel as well as they could. Now we have an awareness of supplements, and with our pill-popping mentality a lot of people think they can take supplements the same way that they take drugs—that they can continue unhealthy eating and lifestyle behaviors and fix any problems that arise as a result by taking supplements.

In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which classified botanical and herbal supplements as
food. For that reason, manufacturers of dietary supplements don’t have to demonstrate that their products are safe, nor are they required to report adverse affects to the FDA. They do not even have to demonstrate that their products are effective. They can insinuate on labeling that their product improves or supports or gives balance to or any number of quasi-claims as long as they don’t say “cures.”

That said, and all evidence to the contrary, the FDA does regulate the manufacturing of nutraceuticals and dietary supplements. They regulate what ingredients can be included or not included, the potency, the accuracy of labeling, and the standards for manufacturing. The FDA also monitors compliance to some degree by stopping by manufacturers periodically.
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This regulation falls down because there is a dire lack of funding, organization, and education within the FDA regarding nutraceuticals and dietary supplements. And furthermore, the FDA is highly regulated by corporate lobbyists.

Because a natural substance cannot be patented, pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to research the benefits of vitamins, minerals, and herbs. If a company were to spend millions of dollars researching natural substances and find that certain natural supplements were superior to drugs, companies could not recoup their research costs in the spectacular fashion they have become accustomed to with drugs.