Never Be Sick Again (13 page)

• We eat the cells of unhealthy plants and animals, which cannot create healthy cells in our body. Pigs and other livestock are fed toxic diets. Chemicals used during growing, harvesting, processing, transporting and storing diminish nutrients in produce. In no way can such food support our cell chemistry.

• Too little of our food—virtually none for many people—is eaten raw. Cooking damages foods' nutritional values. Some cooking methods, particularly those that use high heat or that char foods, create powerful mutagens and carcinogens.

• Handling and preparation methods—from extended storing of foods in a refrigerator or freezer to chopping and mashing—rob foods of many nutrients such as vitamins and minerals that we believe we are consuming. The average person preparing a meal damages and destroys the power of the food, even food the individual considers to be “fresh.”

• Commercial practices used to supply food from farms to supermarkets are overwhelmingly destructive. Produce is often harvested before it is ripe, stored for long periods of time and subjected to harmful methods to ripen or color it artificially for presentation in the “fresh” produce section of the supermarket. Some of this produce has lost nearly all of certain vitamins and minerals by the time it rolls down the supermarket checkout lines, let alone by the time we eat it.

• The way we eat our foods—even how we chew—often prevents us from realizing the best nutrition, even from good diets. We also eat the wrong combinations of foods, which interfere with effective digestion.

• Most of the vitamin and mineral supplements sold today are of poor quality and not worth what you pay for them. They do not provide us with the nutrients we think we are buying.

Starvation on a Full Stomach

According to the
State of the World 2000
report from the Worldwatch Institute, the world is in the midst of a nutrition crisis. In the developed countries, 1.2 billion people, including most Americans, are now “starving” and undernourished because they are overfed with too much of the wrong foods. The average American diet does not support the biological needs of human cells. We try to achieve the impossible: We try to maintain health while eating a diet that cannot provide health. Although our stomachs may be full (and our bellies are fat), malnutrition is our leading cause of disease.

Ultimately, any level of malnutrition creates susceptibility to disease. However, when we suffer health problems as a result of poor nutrition, almost always we blame our illnesses on aging or on faulty genes rather than on its true cause.

We are, indeed, what we eat. That cliché should guide all choices we make about the foods we consume. The average person, however, is poorly informed and confused about what to eat, how to eat and what to avoid. Misinformation tossed about by food manufacturers and even by physicians overwhelms the consumer. Few people truly understand how food helps or fails to keep them healthy.

Food manufacturers nearly always favor qualities such as shelf life, taste, appearance and marketability over nutrition and health. Physicians, who typically lack nutrition education themselves, usually tell us that a standard diet gives us all the nutrition we need. With such misinformation, we tend to make irrational and harmful decisions. A diet that focuses on anything other than meeting the nutritional needs of cells allows your body to get sick.

The four worst food choices, comprising the bulk of the
average American diet and disastrous to the health of our
population are:

1. sugar

2. white flour

3. processed oils

4. milk products

Consuming these foods, especially as a large part of the diet and over time, is virtually guaranteed to cause disease. They provide little nutrition and are toxic as well. If every American were to stop eating these “foods,” our epidemic of chronic diseases would decline dramatically. Problematic in their own right, the real harm caused by these four food failures comes from the fact that we eat them repeatedly, day by day, meal by meal.

As highly as we might think of ourselves, on a physical level we are nothing more than an organized mass of about 75 trillion cells, all constantly demanding nutrients. If we consistently choose the Big Four—sugar, white flour, processed oils, milk products or foods containing these as ingredients—we cannot hope to meet the needs of our hungry cells. Every single time you choose an organic, fresh, unprocessed food instead of one of the Big Four, you are doing your cells (and yourself) a great service. Let us have a closer look at the Big Four.

Sugar Wreaks Havoc

If you make only one change in your diet, let it be to eliminate or at least reduce your intake of sugar.

People in our society eat an enormous amount of sugar— probably far more than you realize. As is often the case, our perspective is the real problem; we are so familiar with sugar that we do not think of it as a serious health threat. Furthermore, because in one form or another sugar is contained in an enormous number of processed foods, it is almost impossible to avoid.

Sugar even in small amounts is detrimental. Just two teaspoons of sugar (far less than a typical soft drink or bowl of breakfast cereal) has a significant hormonal and nutritional impact for several hours, throwing the body out of balance and into a state of biochemical chaos. If you eat sugar morning, noon and night (as many people do), your body remains in chaos all day, every day. In this state of chaos your body constantly tries to restore its balance but never quite succeeds. Sugar is so damaging to body chemistry that, in his 2000 book,
Fit for Life: A New Beginning,
Harvey Diamond calls refined sugar “a deadly, virulent poison.”

During many thousands of years of human evolution, our ancestors survived fine without any sugar other than sugars naturally occurring in wild fruits and berries. Refined sugar is a comparatively recent invention, and only very recently has it become a dietary staple. In 1750, when it was first introduced to North America, sugar was a rare and expensive commodity, and even in 1900 the average person ate only 10 pounds of sugar per year. By 1985, sugar consumption had risen to 124 pounds per year, and by the year 2000 the average American ate a whopping 160 pounds of sugar per year! Most of us cannot comprehend eating this much sugar because we fail to realize that it is in almost every type of processed food. The average American now consumes about one quarter of his or her calories from sugar, and many children receive almost half of their calories from sugar.

All the calories from sugar are empty calories, containing virtually none of the nutrients that your cells need so desperately. Furthermore, sugar is an antinutrient;
eating sugar
drains nutrients from your body.
Certain nutrients (which are present in raw sugarcane but not in refined sugar) are needed for you to metabolize the sugar. Your body must obtain these nutrients from somewhere, and because they are not in the sugar they are robbed from your own tissues—thereby depleting your health.

Sugar consumption contributes not only to the more obvious health problems such as diabetes and tooth decay, but also to heart disease, osteoporosis and immune dysfunction. If you want to avoid colds or if someone in your family is “coming down with a cold,” eliminate sugar.

Our society constantly worries about the relationship between high-cholesterol animal products and heart disease, yet sugar is a more serious cause. A study by A. M. Cohen, M.D., published in a 1961 issue of the medical journal
Lancet,
reports that Jews from Yemen were noted to have very little heart disease, even though the diet in Yemen is typically high in animal fat. When these Jews moved to Israel, where a lot of sugar is common in the diet, rates of heart disease increased dramatically.

Being an antinutrient, sugar also causes calcium to be lost in the urine, forcing the body to remove calcium from the bones in order to keep the blood calcium levels within normal limits. By taking the calcium out of your bones, eating sugar contributes to osteoporosis. People concerned about or already suffering from osteoporosis should eliminate sugar from their diet.

Eating sugar causes deficiencies of a number of minerals, including calcium, chromium, magnesium and zinc. When you do not have enough minerals, your body has difficulty producing sufficient digestive enzymes needed for good digestion. Undigested food particles can enter into your bloodstream, creating serious problems such as allergies and immune-deficiency diseases. This is why foods consumed with sugar (such as wheat, corn, milk and eggs) become the most common allergens. If you enjoy your foods and do not want to become allergic to them, learn to avoid combining them with sugar.

In this modern age of AIDS, autoimmune and other immune system diseases, sugar creates special problems. Sugar damages the cells of our immune system, creating susceptibility to colds, flu and other immune-related diseases. Sugar also plays a crucial role in the development of diabetes. The mechanisms for controlling blood sugar become faulty when high levels of sugar are present in the diet. Sugar also causes a calcium/phosphorous imbalance, which makes the body less capable of breaking proteins down into the amino acids that are required to make essential body chemicals. Even traditional doctors acknowledge that sugar causes tooth decay. Historically, natives who had little exposure to the civilized world and refined sugar had almost no tooth decay.

Sugar is bad enough by itself, but also it is a dangerous partner. You should especially avoid combining sugar with protein (such as a sweet dessert after a steak dinner, or orange juice with eggs in the morning). In combination, they react and form damaging compounds called AGEs (advanced glycation end products). AGEs may even form within your foods before you eat them, if sugar and protein are cooked together (such as baked goods containing eggs and sugar, or a ham baked with brown sugar on top). These AGEs are known to promote heart disease, high blood pressure, cataracts and arthritis.

Eating refined sugar is destructive to human health because it causes vitamins, minerals and hormones to become imbalanced, which throws the body into biochemical chaos for several hours. The body, desperately scrambling to right itself, depletes itself of vital nutrients. The most important and universal dietary recommendation I can make to everyone is to cut as much sugar (and foods made with sugar) from their diet as possible. Those children who are consuming up to half their calories as sugar become sitting ducks for infections and future problems such as diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer, arthritis and heart disease. Eating sugar is death by installment.

White Flour: Quick, Inexpensive and Destructive

Almost all bread, pasta and baked goods are made of white flour—an easy-to-use, easy-to-store, highly processed derivative of what was once a wheat grain. Wheat is a good and nutritious food, but by the time wheat gets ground up and processed into white flour, it bears little resemblance (physically or nutritionally) to wheat. White flour contains little nutrition, is toxic and is an antinutrient (like sugar). Yet the average American consumes more than two hundred pounds of white flour every year.

Almost all of the nutrients once contained in wheat are lost in the process of creating white flour (including 60 percent of the calcium, 77 percent of the magnesium, 78 percent of the zinc, 89 percent of the cobalt, 98 percent of the vitamin E, 80 percent of vitamins B
₁
and B
₃
, and 75 percent of the folic acid). Also lost are the essential fatty acids and fiber. Worse still, many nutrients are needed in order for your body to metabolize the flour for energy. Because the flour does not contain those nutrients, your body is robbed of the nutrients, similar to what happens when you eat sugar.

In 1941, severe nutritional problems prompted our government to pass legislation requiring that certain nutrients be added back to the flour. “Enriched flour” was born. White flour has lost more than twenty-five known nutrients, a handful are added back, yet we still call flour “enriched” (instead of, perhaps, “impoverished”).

We did not have nutritional deficiency in mind when we started making white flour. We made it because it does not spoil; it keeps practically forever, which makes white flour an ideal food to feed people in big cities. However, the malnutrition problem with flour is serious—our bellies are filled in the form of “hearty” pastas and breads, but all those empty calories do not even come close to fulfilling our needs for nutrients, thus contributing to deficiency.

Worse, flour also contributes to the other cause of disease, toxicity. White flour contains almost no fiber, which is essential for proper bowel movements and toxin removal. Eating too much flour (and not enough fiber) is associated with constipation, hemorrhoids, colitis and rectal cancer.

Avoiding white flour is not easy because it is in virtually all breads, pastas, cakes, cookies, crackers, breakfast cereals, pizzas and pastries. But when you realize that flour causes disease, cutting down on the refined flour products you consume is worth the effort. A plate of pasta with vegetables can no longer be considered a good meal. The vegetables are good, but the pasta is not; choose whole grains or beans instead.

The real health threat from white flour comes not from any single meal, but because we eat so much of it—one or more meals a day, every day. We also need to keep in mind that many other grains frequently are refined (such as those in “multi-grain” breads and cereals) and are reduced to little more than empty calories. Any grain that is finely ground and “stripped” of fiber and other nutrients is a poor nutritional choice because essential nutrients have been lost, which most people do not realize. I cannot tell you how many times I have talked to people who proudly describe their “healthy, whole-grain diets”—diets made of whole-wheat bread, rolled oats, granola, multigrain cereals. All of these are processed, make-believe foods.
Eating
processed foods of any kind is fundamentally different from and
nutritionally inferior to eating whole, unprocessed foods.