It has been several years now since I wrote about the basic things to avoid to support a healthy diet.  This is not the obvious list of poisonous chemicals that should also be avoided.  For those, if you can't pronounce it or find it growing in somebody's garden, then don't put it in your mouth.  It does not belong in your food supply.  Most of these offenders are there for the convenience of the retail store so they can leave stuff on the shelves a long time and fool you into thinking these foods are fresh and wholesome.  Others are there so the manufacturer can process the food in their equipment easily.  So all those preservatives, additives, extenders, flowing agents, mold inhibitors, artificial coloring agents, plasticizers, and so on that are not real food, we can do without.

The stuff I am talking about are the natural foods that simply are not healthy for us.  These are foods that disrupt our gut lining, microbiome, blood, immune system, brain, and everything else in our body.

1.  The top of the list of bad food choices are the vegetable oils and seed oils.  Fruit oils like avocado, olive, and coconut oils are just fine.  Nut oils in small quantities also seem to be okay.  But the vegetable oils are terrible except in very tiny quantities, and then only when cold pressed and kept away from light, heat, and air.  These oils are basically the omega 6 oils that feed the inflammatory pathways in our body.  As I said, tiny amounts are useful to the body in their virginal form, but once you get over about a teaspoon a day you start to mess the body up.  Beyond the metabolic inflammatory effects of too much of this oil is the even greater negative impact of this oil once is goes rancid.

Most of us know not to eat rancid food – it smells bad and tastes bad, so it lets us know.  But modern food science has found ways to disguise the rancid taste and smell that happens when vegetable oils go rancid.  This was vital to marketing these oils because they start going rancid even as they are processes and put into bottles.  As soon as they are exposed to any heat, light, or oxygen during the processing they become rancid.  Once you get them home and open the bottle you are exposing them to more air, so more rancidity.  And once you cook with them there is nothing left but rancid oil.  Never eat anything that has been fried in vegetable oil.  That means never eat chips, doughnuts, or anything deep fried.  How many parts of your diet does this hit?  That means no fritters, onion rings, tempura, fish sticks, the list goes on.  And no, it does not matter if you air bake these types of food as the “air” leads to more rancidity. Vegetable oils are found in every tub of margarine and bottle of mayonnaise (except 100% avocado or olive oil mayo).

What oils am I talking about?
Canola
Corn
Soybean
Sunflower
Safflower
Cottonseed
Peanut

Those are the major cooking oils we want to avoid.  There are lots of seed oils that are used for flavoring, medical, and cosmetic purposes that are beyond the scope of this article, so we will ignore those for the present.  Someone is bound to ask about palm oil and frankly I am unsure about it. I have read many conflicting things about palm oil – some good and some bad.

2.  Number two on the list of foods to avoid is sugar in all its forms including its derivative alcohol.  Sugar feeds the bad bacteria in our gut turning our happy neighborhood of 500 or so different bacteria into a ghetto of just a small number of nasty characters that promote inflammation and immune dysregulation.  Alcohol punches holes in the gut lining allowing foods and bacteria parts entry into the blood stream which makes our immune system crazy and triggers autoimmune disease and brain degeneration.  The fructose in white sugar, high fructose corn syrup, agave, and fruit juice is especially bad for the liver triggering fatty liver disease and inflammatory uric acid levels that create gout.  All of this is without considering the issue of type 2 diabetes, which is created by sugar and simple carbs.  Speaking of simple carbs like flour, just a few minutes of saliva action turns these into sugar.  I have lots of patients that like to fool themselves into thinking they don't eat sugar, but instead they eat lots of flour products like bread that simply turn into sugar in about 10 minutes after being put into your mouth. 

3.  Number three on my list has changed recently.  The world of agriculture has gotten ugly over the last 50 years.  It has become chemiculture and pharmaculture.  Once natural healthy food is now filled with herbicides like Roundup (glyphosate) and the fish and animals are so filled with growth hormones and antibiotics that just eating them destroys the healthy gut microbiome we should have to protect our health.  I have avoided this move forever, but now I have to say that it is imperative that we eat organically raised food.  It has now been demonstrated to actually be more nutritious.  But most importantly it is our only shield against poisoning ourselves down at the food production level.  The increasing population burden has promoted the use of high density farming and mono-crop methods that require the use of these chemicals to counteract the disease problems that naturally result from crowded growing conditions with a lack of natural protective diversity.  Industrial processing/harvesting equipment also demands monoculture farming and the use of herbicides as drying agents so harvesting can be done on schedule.  Natural growing methods can be just as productive and often much more productive, but these methods are very labor intensive which drives the prices up.  Unfortunately today, cheap food is poisonous crap food.
 
These are the big three that apply to everybody.  Beyond this the list gets much more individualized.  For instance, as we get older the levels of protective immune proteins (SIgA) secreted in our saliva that bind to natural plant poisons (called lectins) decreases.  Many foods we could eat when young now bother us and create inflammation in our bodies.  I have written previously about eating a low lectin diet.  Other people are sensitive to various foods due to their particular immune system.  Gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, and corn are the most common sensitivities.  Research currently has concluded that glutenous grains damage the gut lining of everybody, so maybe they should be included in the big three.  But certain traditional cooking methods seem to be able to bypass this for some people.  Industrial contaminates getting into our water supply is also becoming a problem as demonstrated with the current issue with arsenic in most available rice on the market.  

Another ridiculous example is the massive amounts of pharmaceuticals entering our rivers and streams from human sewage processing.  We are peeing out enough pharmaceutical poisons to contaminate our water supply.  What is not peed out gets turned into “organic” fertilizer to be put on crops.  Glyphosate levels are so high now globally that it is showing up in rain water.  It is such a small molecule that it gets pulled up into the atmosphere with the water as it evaporates.  Nowhere is safe from this poison.  Seriously, we are poisoning our food supply and therefore ourselves with our modern lifestyle.

I don't have any answers for the large scale issues here.  But on the small scale personal level we have to take individual responsibility to protect our health.  Big brother is not doing this for us.  We can not assume that our food is safe any more.  We have to be diligent and shop carefully.  Eating out is becoming a roll of the dice.  Eating fast food is a guaranteed dose of poison.  How healthy do you want to be?  Or maybe the relevant question is how much painful disease do you want to eat yourself into?

Take care,

David    

 
Ellen update:    

A couple years ago I tried to set Ellen up with an Amazon account of her own, but for some reason it just refused to function.  Well finally last week I set my account up on her computer so she could use it.  My computer is down a couple steps so she is not able to get to it in her wheelchair.  Well now she is once again able to engage in that most empowering of human activities - shopping!