Death By Supermarket (6 page)

The simple strategy focused on cutting down on sugar consumption and factory food, and replacing those items with real food. They also
mentioned limiting advertising directed toward children. When the Sugar Association read these suggestions they threatened to use “every avenue available to expose the dubious nature” of the WHO report and pressured members of Congress to get the United States to threaten to withdraw $406 million in contributions to WHO.

Senators Larry Craig (R-ID) and John Breaux (D-LA), cochairmen of the Senate Sweetener Caucus, asked (Bush appointee) Health and Human Services secretary Tommy Thompson to insist that the WHO “cease further promotion” of the report. Trade associations for the sugar, corn-refining, and snack food industries questioned the report’s legitimacy and asked Mr. Thompson to do something about it.
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Rather than support WHO’s simple strategy, which might have actually helped a few people, including children, Thompson had his department issue a line-by-line, twenty-eight-page critique accusing the organization of shoddy sugar research. He demanded that the WHO “cease further promotion” of their report. In short, Thompson didn’t allow the WHO to release the report to the mainstream media so that regular people could read that eating too much sugar is making us fat and sick.

Not long after the WHO report, the CDC issued a report in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
that obesity may soon overtake tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. In response, at a March 12, 2004, news conference, Thompson had the gall to say, “Americans are literally eating themselves to death.”
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He proceeded to write to Dear Abby: “I know you care passionately about individuals taking steps each day to improve the quality of their lives. Please help me spread the word about improving the health of millions of Americans … Please encourage your readers to see for themselves how small steps can lead to big health benefits … eating only half portions of dessert can add up to giant steps on the path to a healthier life …”
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This from a man who sided against the American people so that the sugar industry would not lose profits. (Since the CDC warning, obesity has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death in Australia.)
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The Food and Agriculture Act of 1977 stated, “Congress firmly believes that the maintenance of the family farm system is essential to the social well-being of the Nation and the competitive production of adequate supplies of food and fiber. Congress further believes that any significant expansion of non-family owned, large scale corporate enterprises will be detrimental to the national welfare.” Nonetheless, the government paid out $75,835,175,775 in subsidies to the corn industry between 1995 and 2009.
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Eating sugar is detrimental to our health and supports corporations that harm humans, animals, and the planet, but should we completely give up sugar? As I said, my grandma, Stella, taught me a lot about living and dying. She was a health advocate, but she wasn’t a zealot. Her motto was, “Do your best and don’t worry about the rest.” She would never want to rob her family of life’s pleasures. Eating healthfully means eating real, living food, not living like a monk. A delicious dessert, a glass of wine, or a beer lend pleasure to life, and it’s only making matters worse that we’re made to feel guilty about indulging. It is better to eat a balanced diet of real, living food, and then indulge in moderation on occasion. If you’re going to have dessert, have a real dessert. Sugar from time to time is not going to kill you, but factory dessert products will.

Brown sugar and turbinado are to white sugar what wheat bread is to white bread. But if you decide you want to bake your own desserts, there are a few healthier alternatives to refined white and brown sugar. Old-fashioned sugars like maple sugar and molasses contain minerals and are delicious in traditional recipes such as gingerbread and cookies. Unrefined honey contains healthy enzymes (see
page 147
for more on enzymes) and antioxidants (which neutralize free radicals) and is a healthy addition to a balanced diet—and it can be purchased from family-owned suppliers. Sucanat and Rapadura are dehydrated cane sugar juice; they also contain minerals and are thus superior to refined white sugar.
Stevia rebaudiana
, a South American herb, is a new popular sugar substitute that has the same science-fictiony aftertaste as aspartame but doesn’t kill brain cells. Stevia
is 200 times sweeter than sugar but doesn’t trigger an insulin response or have any calories or carbs. (There are no long-term studies on stevia, so moderation is suggested.)

Dark chocolate is loaded with flavonoids, which are plant compounds that keep cholesterol from clumping in your blood vessels and inhibit other responses that lead to heart attack. Dark chocolate containing 70 percent cocoa contains more flavonoids than any other flavanoid-containing food (green tea, black tea, red wine, or blueberries).

Alcohol is derived from grain and fruit, which are carbs. Alcohol is toxic to cells and increases insulin levels, so drinking excessive amounts of alcohol accelerates aging. But unless you’re a recovering alcoholic or otherwise have a problem with alcohol there’s no reason not to enjoy an occasional beer or glass of wine.

Commercial beers are made with ingredients from genetically modified organisms and city water, and are pasteurized (heated to kill microorganisms), which also kills life-giving enzymes. They have a shelf life of four months. Unpasteurized “live” beer actually provides healthy enzymes (although it’s likely also to be made with city water). Even so, it’s surprisingly nutritious food, as long as you don’t drink a keg of it. Look for micro-breweries that serve fresh, live (raw) beer on tap. You can take it home, and it will last three days in the fridge.

Sooner or later we’ll have more organic wine choices than we currently do. Non-organic wines, especially California wines, which are grown with boron-containing fertilizer, are contaminated with fluoride. However, red wine does contain the highest amount of the polyphenol (a plant compound) resveratrol, which is concentrated in the grape skins and made available by the alcohol in wine. Resveratrol has been found both to be a cancer-preventative agent and to improve cardiovascular health. (Resveratrol is perishable when exposed to light and air, and so dark, corked bottles help preserve it.)
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Of course, you would have to drink twenty bottles a night to get the same antiaging results that lab monkeys got with resveratrol. In my book
Healthy, Sexy, Happy
I go into greater detail about the benefits of added supplementation, including resveratrol. But the point I’m making here about food isn’t to eat 300 oranges to get your vitamin C or a bale of spinach to get your vitamin A. The point is to eat a balanced diet of real, living food, as nature has packaged nutrients together and these packages all work in harmony. For instance, a steak and a baked potato lathered in butter, along with a green salad and a glass of red wine, are satisfying; moreover, the nutrients in this meal work synergistically.

Enjoying small amounts of sugar in the form of desserts, wine, and live beer in an otherwise balanced diet of real food is not going to kill anyone, but eating HFCS and white sugar on a regular basis will. Unfortunately, HFCS and white sugar aren’t the only poisonous additives in our food supply. Monosodium glutamate (MSG) has virtually permeated our food chain, and millions of Americans are unaware that they are eating this brain-damaging flavor enhancer every day.

PART THREE
Science-Fiction Food Additives

WHO HASN’T BITTERLY COMPLAINED
about the obnoxiousness of TV ads? Even though we hate commercials—and it’s safe to say that no one really believes advertisers have our best interests in mind—we continue to consume their products. That’s because factory food is addicting.

Factory foods, which are extolled as tasting good and being satisfying, affordable, and convenient, are in nearly every kitchen pantry, refrigerator, freezer, desk drawer, locker, purse, briefcase, backpack, and glove compartment in America. What does it mean to be satiated? To many it means tasting a yummy flavor and experiencing instant gratification. But factory-food is designed to make you want to eat more. And wanting to eat more is the polar opposite of being satisfied. How does the factory-food industry get you to want to eat more? The primary addicting ingredient is sugar, but the deal clincher is the flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG).

MSG, made from the seaweed
kombu
(sea tangle), has been used for thousands of years by Japanese cooks to enhance the taste of foods. After World War II, military officials heard through the grapevine that American GIs were raving that Japanese military rations were truly edible, even delicious. The military, interested in learning how to improve the palatability of military K-rations, met in 1948 with factory-food executives to discuss the flavor enhancer MSG. At this meeting, they learned that this additive enhances any flavor it’s added to. If you want a cheeseburger to be more beefy and cheesier, add MSG. If you want ice cream to be creamier,
add MSG. If you want chicken broth to be richer, add MSG. And so the light bulbs went on. Food execs understood that they could boil spaghetti noodles to mush, add some crummy sauce made from nutrient-deficient, tasteless tomatoes, and let their concoctions languish for months in a tin can if they added some handy-dandy MSG to spark up the flavor. Since that watershed meeting, the food industry has continually increased the quantity of MSG added to factory fare so that today it permeates our food chain.

But right after military and food bigwigs met in 1948, scientists began to note freaky experiments that should have halted the addition of MSG to our food supply. In one of the original experiments, conducted by a Japanese scientist in 1950, MSG was repeatedly injected into a dog’s brain. Each time, the dog fell down convulsing uncontrollably. The conclusion: The amino acid glutamate caused the dog’s neural cells to become overexcited, firing out of control.

John W. Olney, M.D., is a neuroscientist and researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine, where he is researching the potential role of excitotoxicity in chronic neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.
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Thirty-five years ago, Olney conducted experiments on glutamate and aspartate (aspartame) and dubbed these amino acids “excitatory amino acids” or “excitotoxins” because they excited neural (brain) cells to death.

After the food industry glommed onto MSG as the panacea for their bland fare back in 1948, they started adding it to baby food. More and more studies appeared showing the alarming health hazards of MSG and aspartame, Olney took notice. His own studies on MSG repeatedly confirmed that MSG caused severe damage to the neurons of the retina of the eye as well as massive destruction of neurons in the brain, including the hypothalamus, which regulates most endocrine glands and numerous systems that determine growth, the onset of puberty, and our circadian rhythms.

“I testified [before Congress] on many occasions,” Dr. Olney emailed me. “Thirty-five years ago when [food companies] were dumping large
amounts of MSG into baby foods that were ingested by babies throughout the world. Babies are vastly more sensitive to the neurotoxic effects of MSG than are adults, so it was a matter of urgency to get them to stop adding MSG to baby foods.”
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Dr. Olney’s testimony before Congress resulted in MSG being removed from baby foods in 1969. Still, nothing was done to remove MSG from the rest of our food supply, so pregnant women have continued ingesting it—despite Dr. Olney’s repeated experiments that demonstrated brain damage in the offspring of pregnant monkeys who were fed MSG.

Russell Blaylock, M.D., a board-certified neurosurgeon, made use of more than 500 scientific references to illustrate how MSG and aspartame cause serious neurological damage in his book
Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills
. I asked Dr. Blaylock, “What made you pursue the subject of excitotoxins, which is outside the realm of conventional medicine?”

Dr. Blaylock replied, “Actually excitotoxins are within the realm of conventional medicine. Excitotoxins are considered the central mechanism for most neurological diseases, and are covered in all texts of neuroscience. It has just taken physicians so long to catch up, and most still have never heard of excitotoxins. Physicians are not known to keep up with new discoveries outside their field of expertise.”
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I emailed Dr. Blaylock, “But if neuroscientists understand the damaging effects of MSG why did MSG receive FDA approval in 1959?”

Dr. Blaylock explained, “One of the reasons it is so difficult to convince skeptics and the FDA about the toxic effects of MSG and other food-borne excitotoxins is that the effects can be subtle and major damage may take years or even decades to manifest. Long periods of accumulative damage by excitotoxins are generally necessary to produce observable clinical effects on behavior, memory, and learning. We now know that in the case of the infant brain some of the injuries can be immediate, and some may not appear until later developmental milestones are scheduled to appear.”
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