Thanks everyone for all the positive feedback you have been giving me at the office...and as many of you have asked, yes, please feel free to forward this email to anyone you feel might be interested.
In this newsletter we are going to discuss the vital process of eating right. This is a huge subject with hundreds of books written every year about diet and food issues. Most of these are self-help books written by people with lots of enthusiasm but little or no understanding of physiology or scientific anything. Some pretend to be scientific, but are primarily just conjecture based on some recent finding that has not been well studied yet. Nutrition knowledge has expanded a thousand-fold in the last 40 years, but very little of that knowledge ever makes it to the public for a variety of reasons.
I have always had to try everything on myself, sometimes to my detriment, to see how each new piece of information stacks up in the real world. One thing I have definitely learned is that there is very little anyone can say about nutrition that is true for even the majority of people. This is due to something I call "The Average Man Myth". Scientific investigation has a fundamental flaw at its center. Science believes that there is such a thing as normal and we all want to be normal. Scientists use statistics to analyze the data they get from their studies and statistics look for the average result. Analysis is based on comparing averages. The problem is that people are not average. We are not the same and everything you do to us will affect each of us differently. Scientists can't study that so they invent this fiction called the Average Man (or Woman). With this they can publish papers with nice statistical graphs and numbers showing the result of the effect of whatever they were studying on this mythical creature - the Average Man. That doesn't help us real people much at all. We are each unique and we must depend on our own experience with our own bodies to find what works for us rather than what some study says should work or not work.
That being said, I wish to share some general information that I have picked up over the years that seems to apply to most of the patients I have known.
How to eat right:
First of all, don't eat poisons. I know that sounds obvious. Most of us are tuned in to not eating lead, or mercury, or pesticides. They kill us or make us very sick in obvious ways. So don't eat those. But those kinds of poisons are not the biggest causes of ill health and deadly disease in this country. I will consider these types of poisons as secondary concerns and will address them shortly. First lets look at the really big diseases - Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke. Aside from prescription drugs and medical error, these diseases are the biggest killers in our culture. All of them have diet either partially or completely causing them. The cause of these diseases lies in our favorite poisons, the ones we deny and ignore.
1. Refined carbohydrates
2. Seed oils
3. Convenience poisons
4. Overeating
5. Drugs
These five items are the cause of most of the illness in our country today. Why? Because we do them everyday, usually several times each day. The cumulative impact on our physiology is simply overwhelming. But we can deny the poisonous reality of these five killers because in isolation and as singular events they are fairly innocuous. But these don't happen just once in a great while, they are constant. They are like paper cuts to your health. One little cut now and then and you are ok. Thousands of these cuts and you bleed to death.
Poison number one: refined carbohydrates. What are refined carbohydrates? On a practical level we are talking primarily about sugar and flour. Carbohydrates are starches and sugars. If something you eat is not a protein or a fat, then it is a carbohydrate. Vegetables are carbohydrates. Fruits are carbohydrates. Beans and nuts are mostly carbohydrates. All grains are carbohydrates. Roots, flowers, seeds, even tree limbs are carbohydrates. In their natural state and in proper proportions they are fine, but refine them and they become the slow poison that destroys civilizations. Does that sound a bit melodramatic? Unfortunately it is very real. Anthropologists studying the skeletons of people all through time consistently find that once a civilization begins cultivating and refining grains all the modern diseases start showing up. The skeletons shrink and deform, dental caries develop, osteoporosis, hardening of the arteries, cancer, the lot. The civilization weakens and in short order a more nomadic tribe that is stronger because it still eats what it hunts and gathers naturally conquers it. This has happened repeatedly all over the world throughout history.
There is a lot of hormone physiology and toxicology behind why refined carbohydrates are so bad for us and we can go into that discussion at a later date. For right now, know that they are a slow inevitable poison. So basic rule number one: don't eat refined carbohydrates.
I can hear someone in the background crying out "what about whole grains?" I can pretty much guarantee that most of you have never eaten a whole grain other than rice. Your digestive system can't handle whole grains - you don't have gizzards to break them down with. If you sprout them you can eat them, but I only know a couple of you that go to that much trouble. Once you mill the grain into flour it isn't a whole grain anymore. In fact milled whole-wheat flour is more toxic than white flour because the wheat germ oil goes rancid almost immediately in whole-wheat flour. The germ and oil is removed from white flour.
The ultimate refined carbohydrates are sugar and corn syrup. Americans currently consume an average of 156 pounds of sugar each year, most of it hidden in foods we eat. In my opinion sugar handling problems are the first and most important health issues to deal with in most people. Nothing else you do for your health can overcome or compensate the devastating effects of unbalanced blood sugar problems. That being said, here is where we must remember the Average Man Myth. There are some people who have no real problem with excess carbs in their diet. Based on my observations, about 15% of the US population can do just fine on a dominantly carbohydrate diet. At the other end of the spectrum there is another 15% that can not handle any carbohydrate at all. These people are called diabetics. Diabetes is simply carbohydrate intolerance disease. The rest of us fall somewhere in-between.
So where do you fall, more toward the carb intolerant end or more toward the "just fine" with carbs end? Simple clues tell us if we have a problem with carbs.
Are you more than 10 lbs overweight?
Do you have difficulty losing weight?
Do you get light headed if you miss meals?
Do you crave sweets?
Does eating sweets not make the craving go away?
Do you get drowsy after meals?
Do you bloat or retain water when you eat carbs?
Do you need caffeine to get you going in the morning?
Do you get light headed if you miss a meal?
Do you feel shaky, jittery, or get tremors?
Do you have memory problems?
Do you get blurry vision at times?
Does eating relieve your fatigue?
Is your waist girth larger than your hip girth?
Do you have increased thirst or appetite?
Are you tired or don't have all the energy you should have?
Have you been tested high blood sugar or low blood sugar?
Do you have high triglycerides on your blood tests?
Any of these are a sign of a carbohydrate intolerance problem. We can do urine sugar tests in the office to be sure, or even blood tests. Any chronic health issues usually have a sugar problem involved. Many emotional instabilities and addictive patterns are also sugar caused. Basically, if you are not healthy in any way, blood sugar should be considered as a part of the problem.
Poison number two: seed oils. The next health poison is a more recently added hazard to our health - seed oils. Through out human history we have eaten animal fat, butter, and the oils from palm, olive, and coconut. This has been going on for thousands and thousands of years and has promoted excellent health. Our country was not well suited to growing the tropical oils so we had to make do with lard and butter from cows. But as our population grew we needed new concentrated fat sources. We didn't like being dependent on foreign sources for our food oil so we invented the mass production of seed oils - corn, soy, sunflower, safflower, canola, etc. Unfortunately our bodies are not designed to handle the omega 6 chemical structure of these oils except in small quantities. Our hormones, brain, nerves, and cell walls are made of an even mix of omega 6 and omega 3 oils - the mix found naturally in vegetables and grasses. Seeds and grains contain mostly omega 6 oils which "burn too hot" for our systems. They are designed to be burned by creatures like birds that have a much higher metabolism than we have. Consequently it causes inflammation in us. Inflammation is the basis of most disease.
The second problem with seed oils is that any time you heat these oils they go rancid - which is very poisonous. And if you cook any starch or protein in seed oil, it causes the formation of trans-fats, another poison. (Any bag of potato chips that says it is trans-fat free is lying because the cooking of a potato in oil creates trans-fats). Trans-fats are a serious problem for the basic structure of the body. Your body uses fats to make the cell walls of all the cells in your body as well as manufacture hormones. Trans-fats look like normal fats except that they are bent funny. Your body tries to use these bent fats to make walls and hormones but the end result does not work right. Imagine you were putting a new shingle roof on your house and half the load of shingles they delivered to you were bent 90 degrees in the middle. Your roof would be full of holes because the shingles could not lay down flat. This same thing happens with your cells. Their outer walls end up leaky if there are trans-fats being used. Could our body handle this toxin once or twice a year...fairly easily. Can it handle a daily barrage of toxic seed oils and trans-fats - no way.
So health rule number two: don't eat seed oils. Don't eat things made from seed oils like margarine or shortening (the way these become solid is by adding hydrogen the liquid oils which turns half of them into trans-fats). Don't cook in seed oils (that means nothing fried in oil). Don't cook with seed oils (use coconut or olive). Small amounts, cold pressed, used on salads (as salad dressings) are ok if they are balanced with sufficient omega 3 oils from fresh cold water fish and similar sources.
Next time we will continue with convenience poisons, how overeating acts as a poison, and the wonderful world of drugs as poisons.
Good Journey,
David
