Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (35 page)

Not every meal is going to taste divine or be divine for you. Sometimes you may get stuck having to order something off the menu of a fast food restaurant known for its high-salt, high-sugar, highly processed food that has been factory designed to be addictive. This is the food responsible for the obesity and sickness epidemic all over the world, so do your best to avoid it. However, if you are going to eat food that isn’t of the highest quality because you’re stuck with nothing else to eat, take a moment and imbue the food with Divine Love. When you sit down to unwrap your meal, say to yourself, “Thank you for this food. May it nourish my body.” Then eat it without guilt. Take your time as you chew. Let your body recognize that you’re slowing down and providing it with the nourishment to keep it going. Feel gratitude for the fact that you have a healthy body and food available to you. Give yourself a moment to breathe and feel relaxed. For one thing, if you engage in this ritual, you’ll realize you really don’t want to make a habit of eating lifeless food! Real food filled with life force feels so much better in your body. And a little goes a long way because your body feels satisfied with far less than you might imagine.

If it feels easier to get takeout than to cook for one, start thinking about how cooking simple foods that nourish you might be possible. The key is planning ahead as though you were planning what to serve to guests. You can assemble a meal of protein and vegetables in as little as 15 minutes, and make soup to last you a few days—and swap a few portions with someone else for variety. Prepare and eat meals with others when it’s easy and fun.

THE FAT-SUGAR RELATIONSHIP

We’re born to enjoy fats, and the body and brain need them, but they’ve gotten a bad rap in recent years. Some experts have even recommended consuming as little as 10 percent of calories from fats when we probably need more like 50 to 70 percent.
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Here’s the truth:
you don’t become fat from eating fat.
A 2010
meta-analysis of the research on fats showed
no
significant evidence that eating saturated fats (the kind associated with meat and dairy foods) increases your risk of stroke or heart disease.
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Unfortunately, many women have taken saturated fat out of their diets and reduced their overall fat intake under the impression that this is the way to health. But when you take out the fats, the food isn’t as tasty or satisfying, and you end up eating more sugars and simple carbohydrates like bread and pasta. As low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets have become popular in the U.S., obesity rates have skyrocketed.

Not all fats are alike, so it’s important to understand that fats per se don’t make you fat. It’s the trans fats (hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils), highly processed vegetable oils, sugars, starches, and MSG (in many different forms) that pack on the pounds and lead to all sorts of health hazards. There’s no reason to fear
healthy
dietary fats.

In fact, fats are brain food.
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Your brain is made up of mostly fat, specifically fat called DHA. And your brain, like those of humans who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, will fuel itself on fat unless glucose—sugar—is available. If the brain has sugar to keep its engines running, it will switch to that for energy. Because we have a lot of sugar in our diets, our brains are running on glucose and storing a lot of fat as fat, even as we’re also storing a lot of sugar as fat. We’re also storing toxins within the fat, so our bodies are holding on to pesticides and heavy metals that affect us at a cellular level. Now, this system of storing fuel for lean times worked out beautifully when humans were living in caves and had to live off stored fat when food was scarce. It’s not such a great system now that we lead more sedentary lives and can get low-quality, highly processed carbohydrates everywhere. We can even buy candy and chips in the vending machines at health clubs and hospitals, and get free cookies in bank lobbies. And fast food advertising supports the mainstream media. The commercials are for chips, not carrots.

With all those cheap carbs staring you in the face, you have to pay much more attention to the amount, quality, and types of fat and glucose you eat. Otherwise, you just end up consuming what’s easily available—typically foods that are very bad for your body and your brain. You have to be vigilant so you don’t snack
constantly on cheap carbs when you’re distracted or upset. The more stressed out you are, the more your body will cause you to crave fats laced with sugars, because the primitive part of your brain thinks that what you need are sources of energy to outrun whatever is chasing you! What you really need is to rebalance your brain and body chemistry. When the levels of hormones and neurotransmitters in your body are what they’re supposed to be, you won’t crave the high-carbohydrate comfort foods such as mashed potatoes, French fries with ketchup, cookies, pasta, breads, and sugary cereals. These highly addictive foods boost your mood and energy temporarily but then cause an inevitable crash in energy later, along with a host of other problems I’ll talk about shortly.

Are you surprised by the news about fats and sugars? There’s been an incredible amount of confusion about the pros and cons of low-fat/high-carb diets and moderate-fat/low-carb diets. Let me explain why you don’t need to worry about healthy fats and why it’s best to consume healthy sugars and whole grains only in moderation, if that. I’ll talk about fats first, and then sugars and grains.

HEALTHY FATS

Fats from plants, such as avocados and raw seeds and nuts, aren’t a problem. And minimally processed oils from organic plant sources—extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, almond oil, sesame oil, flaxseed oil, hemp oil, and so on—aren’t a problem either. Be aware that heating some oils changes their chemistry and makes them less healthy, so cook with olive or coconut oil. You can also use clarified butter, known as ghee, a staple food in India, for cooking or flavoring food. Don’t use canola oil, which is highly processed and derived from seeds likely to be genetically modified. Avoid any oils or spreads that contain trans fats, which contribute to type 2 diabetes. If you are of the generation that gave up butter for margarine, let go of that old habit and go back to healthier, more natural fats.

Animal protein is fine, even though meat, fish, and poultry have saturated fats. If you’re not a vegetarian or vegan, go ahead
and eat wild fish—not farmed—and beef, chicken, pork, or other meats from animals who moved freely in a natural environment and ate their natural food (grass-fed beef from cows raised on a small farm, for example). If you eat dairy foods such as yogurts and cheeses, the ones made from raw milk are the best, but know your sources and the laws in your area; raw milk products are illegal in many places because of fears of foodborne illnesses. If you can’t find or aren’t comfortable with raw milk products, choose milk from cows raised by organic farmers who don’t add hormones such as rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone) to the animals’ feed. Usually, it’s the processing involved with dairy foods that makes them hard to digest, although you might be intolerant of lactose (the sugar in milk) or casein (a milk protein). Listen to your body. If you feel good eating clean, organic meat or cheese in small quantities, use those as protein sources.

You’ve probably been told for years to cut out saturated fat, but that advice could not be more wrong! Avoiding fish, meats, healthy dairy foods and oils, and nuts and seeds is likely to lower your so-called “bad” cholesterol (your LDL) on a standard, obsolete lipid profile, but as I explained in
Chapter 4
, you have to think about cholesterol very differently. LDL is
not
inherently bad. It’s not even cholesterol. LDL transports much-needed cholesterol to cells, while HDL, so-called “good cholesterol,” transports unneeded extra cholesterol away from cells to where it can be processed and recycled by the body. Think of your LDL as your delivery trucks and your HDL as your garbage trucks. When you avoid healthy fats, such as fats from fish and coconut oil and nuts, all you do is reduce the
good
LDL—the less-dense particles that do a great job of getting much-needed cholesterol into the cells and are not easily oxidized. When you cut sugars and include healthy fats in your diet, you won’t have as much
bad
LDL, the delivery trucks that have been battered by too much sugar in your system. The bad LDL particles are indicators of progression toward insulin resistance. Your good HDL can transport away extra cholesterol, but not if you don’t have enough of it (and you can increase HDL through meditation and regular exercise). Please don’t worry so much about HDL and LDL and cholesterol. I’ll fill you in a bit later on accurate tests for
cholesterol and HDL and LDL levels, but for now, just remember that the old advice is obsolete.

Having healthy fats in your diet means you’ll be more likely to fuel your brain on fat—the superior brain food. Plus, you won’t get into the habit of experiencing low blood sugar and cravings and reaching for a sugary food to spike your blood sugar. Remember, when I say healthy fats, I’m talking about the natural, saturated fats in foods such as coconut oil, grass-fed beef, wild-caught salmon, and eggs from free-range chickens that eat organic foods. “Free-range” chickens can walk around and eat plants, their natural foods, which makes their eggs higher in omega-3 fatty acids. “Cage-free” chickens typically have little room to move around and don’t eat foods high in omega-3 fatty acids, which means their eggs are lower in this essential fatty acid that is very important for optimal brain health. Remember, what animals eat affects their flesh, milk, and eggs!
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What you really have to think about eliminating from your diet for health reasons isn’t meat and dairy but sugar and grains. Again, commit this to memory: fat, including saturated fat, is
not
a problem. It’s crucial for health!

SWEET TREATS AND BLOOD SUGAR

From an evolutionary standpoint, a sweet tooth was a good adaptation we humans made to our environment. We are born preferring sweet tastes, and fruits and vegetables at the height of their ripeness and sweetness are packed with the highest amount of nutrients. Mother Nature puts plenty of sweetness in pumpkins and strawberries. Foods like these that are naturally high in sugar also have fiber, which slows your body’s absorption of their sugars. They’re not going to spike your blood sugar levels the way refined sugars will—and by refined, I mean any sugars that have been extracted from the fibrous fruit or vegetable. And chances are you’re probably not overeating pumpkins. You can have small amounts of real maple syrup and honey, but don’t go overboard on those.

If you do want a little bit of sweetener in your food, at least take the processed sugars off the table. You can use a bit of stevia, which is natural and very sweet so a little goes a long way. Avoid the sweeteners you can find in little packets at a diner: refined sugar (white packet), aspartame (blue packet), saccharin (pink packet), and sucralose (yellow packet). And absolutely avoid high fructose corn syrup, which manufacturers have put into all sorts of foods. Read all labels, and look for the sugar content. You’ll be appalled at how much sugar is added to just about everything processed. I read the label of some organic squash soup sold at a health food store recently and the amount of sugar in it shocked me. Sugar is as addictive as crack cocaine, so the compulsion to overeat it in any form is almost impossible to resist—and that includes so-called “healthy” foods like granola and trail mix.

The meal I described at the beginning of the chapter had plenty of sweetness—the honeycrisp apples (an especially sweet variety) and sweet potatoes—without added sugars. Even that amount of sugar, though, will cause unhealthy blood sugar fluctuations in those who are no longer sensitive to their own insulin from years of unhealthy eating. If that’s the case for you, remove
all
sugars and sugar-producing foods from your diet for seven to ten days. One day every week or two, you can eat them. Reducing your consumption of these foods to this degree generally resets the insulin receptors, preventing type 2 diabetes and sometimes even reversing it. If you have an exhausted pancreas from the overproduction of insulin, you will probably find that getting rid of the sugars, breads, and pastas—and getting enough protein—will support your pancreas in keeping your blood sugars more stable. Maintaining stable blood sugar levels also prevents complications of diabetes such as neuropathy. And believe it or not, if you already have complications, it’s never too late to start improving your health with dietary change.

Even if you show no signs of diabetes, one of the most important things you can do to remain ageless is to keep your blood sugar levels from going haywire all day long. That requires avoiding sugars unless they’re in whole fruits or vegetables. If your levels are fluctuating wildly during the day, you’ll have
high energy at some points and very low energy, and difficulty concentrating, at other points. You’ll also tend to crave cookies and candy, and if you make a habit of giving in and eating them, you’ll only worsen the situation. Over time, uneven blood sugar levels and high sugar consumption cause cellular inflammation and insulin resistance, and those lead to diabetes, cancer, dementia, and heart disease. In fact, sugar is more strongly associated with the development of type 2 diabetes than any other type of food—and it’s even more strongly associated with it than a sedentary lifestyle is. Eating lower glycemic foods is associated with lower rates of diabetes whether or not you’re sedentary or obese.
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If you’re experiencing strong dips and peaks in your levels of energy and focus most days, or if you already know you have a prediabetic condition, you must start paying attention to your blood sugar and what you’re eating. Ideally, you want a fasting blood sugar of about 70 to 85 mg/dl and it shouldn’t spike more than 40 points after you eat. In other words, it should stay at 120 mg/dl or below in the two hours after eating. For years, 100 mg/dl after fasting has been considered the high end of normal, but that’s too high given that the PATH Through Life project study (PATH stands for Personality and Total Health), released in 2011, showed that the higher your fasting blood sugar, the greater the damage to the hippocampus in your brain (hippocampal damage is associated with dementia).
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Research shows a very strong connection between diabetes and dementia. In fact, Alzheimer’s disease may be thought of as type 3 diabetes.