Death By Supermarket (3 page)

There are current statistics that demonstrate our epidemic of degenerative diseases, but we’ve become numb to numbers on pages. We haven’t become inured to the fear of disease, however. More than fifty years ago, Adelle Davis wrote in
Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit: The Practical Guide to Nutrition Designed to Help You Achieve Good Health Through Proper Diet
(1954), “Statistics can tell so little. The number of new cancer cases discovered each year tells nothing of the fear and dread in the hearts of millions of Americans who already know that some day they themselves will suffer from the disease.”
⁵

The more immediate focus should be why are we experiencing this radical rise in degenerative diseases?

Beginning a hundred years ago, as medical advancements in fighting infectious diseases developed, two factors thwarted our potential for utopia. First, we didn’t take advantage of the perfect opportunity to thrive with fewer infectious diseases by eating real food. As factory food usurped real food in our food chain, more people started dying of degenerative diseases.

Factory food isn’t the only contributing factor to the epidemic of obesity and disease. There are industrial chemicals and solvents, volatile organic compounds, exhaust, radiation, heavy metals, cigarette smoke, and pharmaceuticals, among other toxic insults, as well as genetic predispositions, bacteria, viruses, and other biological causes. But these other factors wouldn’t have the same devastating impact on our health if we were eating an exclusive diet of real food. Eating real, living food—containing protein, fats, cholesterol, vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, and enzymes (catalysts necessary for internal chemical reactions)—fuels cellular processes, imparts energy for the muscles and the brain, supplies the building materials for the ongoing replenishing of cells, tissues, muscle, and bone, and keeps endocrine systems, including our immune system, functioning optimally, to at least give our bodies a fighting chance.

The second factor that thwarted America’s potential for utopia was that Pasteur’s germ theory of disease unfortunately influenced our medical community to drop the pursuit of disease prevention. Beginning in the nineteenth century, chemicals with drug actions were isolated from plants, and increasingly drugs were made by chemical synthesis. Our medical community became convinced that the newly discovered drugs were the most advantageous modality with which to practice medicine (i.e., combat germs and other disease-causing agents). Nutrition as “standard of care”
(accepted modes of medical care), which had been accepted doctrine from the time of Greek physician Hippocrates (the “father of medicine,” 460-377 B.C.), was unilaterally rejected by modern medicine, which has virtually ignored the impact of nutrition on the building up or breaking down of the body and shifted its focus to treating disease after it occurs—primarily with drugs.

The medical community’s dismissal of nutrition as standard of care in favor of a drug approach was the first step in our becoming a nation of factory-food eaters because it encouraged people to abdicate responsibility for their own health and place utter trust in the medical community. As we became a nation of drug takers following the advice of the medical community—which had shunned nutrition—the old wisdoms of food and nutrition were lost. Today few people remember their grandmothers advising them what to eat or drink to prevent or correct illness. That’s because most grandmothers did not learn the simple truths about nutrition from
their
grandmothers.

Our reliance on doctors to tell us what to do and the accompanying acceptance of drugs provided a natural segue for our acceptance of chemical additives to our food supply. Fifty years ago, DuPont sold us on “better living through chemistry,” and many people today do not see a problem with ingesting factory-food products made from ingredients that they can’t pronounce, much less explain what they are. As Americans increasingly adopted a chemicalized diet that was mostly foreign and toxic to our physiology, we also took over-the-counter (OTC) medications and prescription drugs to treat the resulting chronic conditions and diseases. It’s proven to be a bad mix. Yet, because of the marvels of modern medicine, people are living longer—with tubes hanging out of them and beepers going off.

The fact that medicine abandoned the research, teaching, and employment of nutrition as a medical modality was an important factor in the rise to power of the factory-food industry. As our food culture shifted from the real foods produced by Thomas Jefferson’s ideal small family farm to factory foods emblematized by Dee Dee’s “Dehydroficated” Mason Dixon
Southern Fried Chicken Dinner, American brains have actually mutated from healthy brains constructed of cells made out of healthy biochemicals to abnormal brains made out of molecularly damaged fats. These unhealthy brains are also neurotransmitter-imbalanced, which results in unnatural appetites. The World Health Organization (WHO) politely referred to our bingeing as “excess intake” and linked mass gorging to our epidemic of obesity and degenerative diseases of aging. What WHO called the “malnutrition of excess” created a market for the diet and drug industries to flourish.
³⁸

Heroin, cocaine, caffeine, refined white flour, and sugar are all white, powdery, highly addictive substances. Sugar happens to be a socially acceptable addiction, and it’s one ingredient that keeps us eating factory-food products.

PART TWO
Unnatural Hunger

IN 1984, RIGHT AFTER
the release of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
Terminator
, my childhood friend Mary Jane took her two-year-old daughter, Rosemary, to the dentist. To M.J.’s horror, Rosie was diagnosed with “bottle mouth,” which in simple terms meant that her baby teeth were rotting out as a result of too much sucking on bottles of juice. In order to save her permanent teeth from the damage that would ensue if her teeth were left to decay any further, under anesthesia Rosie had her front teeth ground down to nubs and capped in silver. After the trauma of the ordeal began to wear off, I taught Rosie how to say “terminator baby.”

Like my friend M.J., millions of Americans think they are doing the healthy thing by handing their babies bottles of juice. Families say grace over breakfasts of Count Chocula, Ho Hos, and Kellogg’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Pop-Tarts because it’s socially acceptable to be addicted to sugar.

Sugar is a white, crystalline stimulant that offers zero nutritional value. Since refined white sugar is devoid of the vitamins and minerals necessary to digest and metabolize itself, your body ends up depleting vitamins and minerals from your diet or from internal stores in order to digest it. A short explanation of macronutrients and micronutrients might help explain why depleting vitamins and minerals is a bad thing.

Macronutrients (proteins, fats, and carbs) provide energy and are the materials that are used in the breaking down and building up metabolic processes that go on continually within your body.

Micronutrients (vitamins A, B, C, D, E, and K; minerals, such as calcium and phosphorous; and trace elements, such as iron, zinc, and manganese) are the essential cofactors for metabolism to function. In other words, your body cannot properly utilize macronutrients without micronutrients.

The vitamins A, D, E, and K are classified as fat soluble because they dissolve in fat before being absorbed in the bloodstream. Fat-soluble vitamins that are not immediately used are stored in the liver, and because they can be stored for a rainy day, they do not need to be consumed daily. B complex and vitamin C are water-soluble vitamins and are easily washed out of the body through urination, and so they must be consumed every day. The vitamins A, C, D, E, and K are antioxidants that neutralize free radicals in your body. (See
page 50
for more on free radicals.)

If you eat a lot of sugar and don’t eat a lot of foods containing, say, B vitamins every day (meats, whole grains, legumes, green leafy veggies, dairy, citrus, and so on), you’ll become depleted of B vitamins and can ultimately suffer from a burning sensation on your tongue, wrinkles surrounding your lips, exhaustion, gastrointestinal problems, thinning, graying hair, and depression. These are only some of the problems that occur as a result of the vitamin and mineral depletion caused by overconsuming sugar.

Eating sugar also depletes your body of antibodies, which roam your body, fighting every cold and flu that goes around. Sugar is cancer fuel and fertilizer, causes type 2 diabetes, causes plaque to accumulate in the coronary arteries, and fuels unnatural hunger.

Unnatural hunger is the result of neurotransmitter imbalances, and these imbalances can begin at conception.

Our brains are 60 percent fat. From conception to birth human beings need essential fatty acids for proper brain formation.
⁶
(Essentially fatty acids are discussed on
page 112
.) Also imperative for proper brain formation from conception to birth is cholesterol.
⁷
(Cholesterol is covered starting on
page 101
.) Equally crucial for brain formation and development are amino acids, which are the chemical building blocks used to make cell membranes, tissues, enzymes, antibodies, hormones, and
neurotransmitters.
⁸
There are twenty amino acids that are important for human metabolism. Ten of these can be produced within the body and are called nonessential. Two are conditionally essential, which basically means that age, stress, geography, and any number of factors can determine whether or not your body can make these or make them in the correct proportions. Eight essential amino acids are required for life but not made in the body. Amino acids are obtained by eating protein such as eggs, dairy, fish, poultry, and meat.

Healthy neurotransmitters are crucial for happiness. Here’s how they work: Your endocrine system generates hormones, which comprise the chemical communication system that controls every function in your body. Your nervous system is actually an endocrine gland that generates impulses (chemical messages) and conveys these messages by jumping from neuron to neuron. Synapses are gaps between neurons, which are jumped by the chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. This jumping of the gaps is known as the “firing” of a synapse, a process through which your brain choreographs the complex orchestra of speech, hearing, sight, emotions, and trillions of metabolic functions that comprise human physiology. A healthy brain will have a healthy supply of the neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, which acts as a stimulant (you feel energized); endorphins, which are your brain’s pain-killer and pleasure chemicals (the pains of life are diminished and you instead feel a sense of joy); serotonin, which is responsible for a sense of well-being (you feel high on life); and gamma amino butyric acid (GABA), which promotes a sense of calm (you feel calmly in control).

If a pregnant woman eats a high sugar, chemicalized diet of factory-food products instead of eating a diet of real, living food that includes essential fatty acids, cholesterol, and amino acids, her baby’s brain won’t get the building materials it needs, and that baby isn’t likely to be born with a healthy brain.
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In addition to having a brain made out of unhealthy building materials, the baby’s brain will not be flooded with happy neurotransmitters.

Breastfeeding is the next step in the process of brain development and neurotransmitter production. Breast milk is real, living food for babies. But most Americans aren’t breastfed, or are only briefly. And if breastfed by malnourished factory-food eating mothers, these babies are receiving the same poor-quality nutrition. Most are fed factory formula. Instead of being raised on a diet of real food, most American kids are fed substances that are permeated with sugar. From conception on, the majority of Americans’ brains don’t get the essential fatty acids, cholesterol, and amino acids necessary to build healthy brain cells and make neurotransmitters. So we are set up for lifelong brain neurotransmitter imbalances.

When brain neurotransmitters are in short supply, you’re more prone to suffer from all the neurological problems we reviewed on
page 7
. Accompanying these symptoms are addictions to sugar, drugs, and stimulants like caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine. The reason we have these addictions is because we learn very quickly that consuming those substances makes us feel better temporarily.

Every visit to a restaurant or market is an anthropological research expedition for me as I observe what people eat. In a university cafeteria, I sat down to a lunch of steak, potatoes, and vegetables. An obese woman next to me was eating her lunch, which consisted of a small bowl of fruit salad and a Rice Crispy square. Fruit, while healthy, is all sugar, and so, obviously, is a Rice Crispy square. I couldn’t help imagining the binge that woman was destined to go on later in the afternoon.

This is what happened inside that woman’s body after she consumed that all-sugar lunch: Eating sugar triggers the pancreas to secrete the “nutrient-storing” hormone insulin. The secretion of insulin stimulates an excessive “rush” of stored neurotransmitters in the brain.
¹⁰
Thus the woman experienced the infamous sugar high. But also, since excess sugar damages cells, insulin’s primary directive is to stow all that sugar away into cells. Now there was not enough sugar in her bloodstream to satisfy her brain’s need for an ongoing drip of sugar, so her brain demanded more sugar. At the same time, her neurotransmitter rush ended, and unless she
had superhuman self-control she was guaranteed to binge, as the craving for more sugar was intense. Meanwhile, all this stress alerted her adrenals to release the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. These chemical messengers mobilized sugar into her bloodstream to be utilized by her body and brain during this time of stress: Adrenaline released glycogen, sugar that is stored in her liver and muscles for immediate fuel needs, and cortisol began breaking down her lean muscle mass (muscle and bones) to convert it into sugar. All this internally generated sugar, along with the sugar she most likely binged on after lunch, propelled her back into her sugar high. But this dangerous influx of sugar into her bloodstream again triggered the secretion of insulin, which immediately stored this new sugar away into cells. The woman’s blood sugar crashed again.