Tag: food

7 Reasons to Break Up with Processed Foods

(DrFrankLipman – Frank Lipman) If I had to find just one good reason to eat processed foods, I’d have an impossible time coming up with one. But when it comes to reasons not to eat processed foods however, well, I could talk your ear off. In short, I don’t eat processed foods because I care too much about sustaining my health to risk it on anything that might jeopardize it. So what do I eat? The same things I advise my patients to eat: healing whole foods that deliver energy, vibrance and wellness. When you apply those three simple criteria to everything that goes in your mouth, eating well becomes a pretty simple exercise. While this approach can be tough at first for those who are trying to turn around a lifetime of poor eating habits, the good news is that in time, with practice, the desire for processed food will fall away and eating well will become second nature. If you are beginning the journey to better health, but finding it challenging, here are a few thoughts to remember as you work to free your body and mind of processed foods:

1. Processed Foods Make Simple Foods Complicated

When referring to “processed foods” we’re talking about foods that aren’t in their original, natural state when you buy them. Foods that come with a label listing more than two or three ingredients are generally considered to be processed. For example, a bag of frozen organic spinach has only one ingredient – spinach – nothing has been added or taken away. A jar of raw almond butter will contain just almonds, so while some processing has taken place, nothing has been added. Then read the label on an average Lean Cuisine. There you’ll find upwards of 50 or more anything-but-natural ingredients listed! Now that’s what I call processed – taking simple food and pumping it full of stuff nobody ever asked for. Among processing’s many sins, the first one is that it complicates food, taking the streamlined, simple and pretty-close-to-perfect, then processing out the nutrients and processing in a boat-load of questionable ingredients.

2. Processed Foods Beat up Your Body

A bigger, more alarming problem with processed foods is what’s going on inside them. Virtually all processed foods are made with man-made ingredients, whose long-term effects are either highly questionable, seriously detrimental or even possibly carcinogenic (i.e., azodicarbonamide, butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), butylated hydrozyttoluene (BHT) and aspartame to name a few) Chemical additives, artificial colors, artificial flavorings, fillers, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oils, trans fats and preservatives abound in processed foods, and the trouble is we don’t fully know the amount of damage they may be inflicting on our bodies. We do know there’s mounting evidence to suggest a link between processed food consumption and our skyrocketing rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease, which if you ask me is reason enough to dump them. With fresh, organic, whole foods however, there’s no need to worry about the long-term health fallout. Whole foods are just as healthy as nature made them, with all their nutrients and health-sustaining properties intact.

3. Like Vampires, Processed Foods can Live Forever, and That’s Not a Plus

The bigger the transformation and the more steps your food passes through to go from raw material to finished “product,” the fewer nutrients survive – they’re literally pounded, pulverized, liquefied, extruded and processed out. Producers are less concerned with preserving nutrients than they are with turning a profit. They do so by producing the maximum amount of product at the lowest cost, and manufacturing it to maximize shelf life – none of which happens without taking chemical liberties, tossing in a few more preservatives and sacrificing nutrients along the way. Problem is, despite industry claims to the contrary, many of the common preservatives and artificial colors in processed foods have been linked to a variety of health problems, including moderate-to-severe allergies, neurologic disorders and even cancer. Not very appetizing, eh? Real, unprocessed or minimally processed foods on the other hand, are far less likely to cause damage or make you sick.  Better yet, they tell you when they’re no longer fresh. They’ll start to wilt or smell, loose their color, start sprouting or grow mold – all to naturally signal that their nutrients are starting to pass their peak, no “sell-by” stamp required.

4. Processed Foods are Designed with Addiction in Mind

Can you make a cheese doodle? A Dorito? An Oreo? Probably not, as few of us possess the lab skills or chemical ingredients needed to create Franken-foods – and that’s just as well. What’s so diabolical about processed foods is that their lack of nutrients, good fats, fiber or protein, and excesses of salt and sugar, wind up encouraging the release of your body’s feel-good chemicals. That release triggers the desire for more sweet or salty crappy foods with no nutritional payoff. If this is happening multiple times a day, it’s easy to see how people wind up trying to fill a belly that’s never satisfied, and it’s weight gain, here you come. For example, most people find it virtually impossible to be satisfied by just one sugar-packed, quickly-digested, fiber and nutrient-free Oreo cookie, so they’ll likely eat a bunch before stopping, and even then, only reluctantly. By contrast, just one whole piece of fruit, like an orange or a serving of blueberries, is usually is enough. Why? Because the fruit will deliver a much larger nutritional payload, including fiber, water and slowly-metabolized carbs, without setting off intense cravings.

5. Want to Stay Chubby? Processed Foods Can Help!

As evolved as we may think we are, when it comes to processed foods, many of us are closer to lab monkeys than we’d like to admit, repeatedly hitting the processed-food pleasure bar, having fallen prey to the addictive flavors which have been carefully baked right in. The processed food industry helps keep you fat by devoting countless resources to identifying and developing flavors with appeal. They create sweet, salty, never-fully-satisfying foods, full of the bad fats, that can put you into an almost perpetual state of craving. With your satiety switch suppressed, overeating becomes the norm. The food manufacturers win – and you lose everything but the weight.

6. After Eating a Big Mac and Fries, Nobody Ever Said, “Wow, I Feel Fantastic!”

Processed foods are talking to you, but are you listening? Do you feel great after eating a fast food meal? Do you feel energetic after a few slices of pizza? Didn’t think so. The fact that many people wind up feeling lethargic, sleepy and even depressed after eating processed food is the body’s way of saying this isn’t a good way to eat. Listen to your body. It knows! Eating foods that are unprocessed or minimally processed will deliver actual nourishment, i.e. vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, that will make you feel good and supply the long-lasting energy your body needs to function at its best.

7. Processed Foods: You Loved Them, Now Let Them Go

For some, cold turkey is the simplest the way to release the addictive grip of processed foods, while others succeed by slowly tapering off. However you choose to go about it though, look for foods as close to their fresh, unfettered, original state as possible, to minimize your ingestion of chemicals, additives and artificial flavors. If access to fresh produce is limited, supplement with frozen, which is often just as good as fresh. Look for meat and poultry that’s been raised responsibly, humanely, grass-fed or pasture-raised, without antibiotics, hormones or genetically modified feeds. Let go of food in pouches, boxes and cans. When you get to the point where at least 80% or more of your diet is made up of nutrient-rich, whole foods, you’ll tip the scales in your favor and make a significant positive impact on your health.

For more inspiration to help you kick processed foods, check out Jill Ettinger’s post 101 Reasons to Quit Eating Processed Foods Forever.

Nearly Half the Children Born in the Last Decade are at Risk of Diabetes

(NaturalNews – PF Louis) According to News Daily, a CDC study has determined that two out five people born between 2000 and 2011 are expected to develop diabetes type 2.

This rate is double what it was two decades ago for men, and it’s a 50 percent increase for women. Currently, 29 million people suffer from mostly diabetes type 2, which is acquired over time largely through too much sugar and refined carbohydrate consumption accelerated by lack of exercise

Obesity, which is often an early entry into diabetes, has soared over the last couple of decades as well. What’s changed the most over the last few decades? The amount of added processed sugars in fast foods, processed foods and beverages that have supplanted real food.

The food processing industry and their paid media shills in print, radio and TV advertising are guilty of foisting bad health and disease on the population. You could call these activities crimes against humanity.

Many of them are victims of their own crimes, with refined sugars and high-fructose corn syrup added not only to obvious sweets but also to many other not-so-sweet processed foods as well.

The processed food industry’s dealing with sugar addictions

Some experts claim sugar is addictive as cocaine. So putting more and more in sodas and sweets is conducive for repeat business. And why not add sugar surreptitiously into just about any processed food worthy of attracting repeat customers?

Processed salt is added to sodas to make sure more sugar could be placed into those beverages, making them more addictive. It’s not only obvious sweets like candies, cakes, donuts and sodas that contain large amounts of added sugars.

Other processed foods like breads, fast food French fries, bagels and soups contain added sugars to keep you coming back for more. And those low- or non-fat dairy yogurts and dairy products use added sugar and chemical thickeners to imitate the taste and sensation of the fat that’s been taken out.

The medical myth that fats make you fat was a boon to processed food manufacturers who came up with sugar solutions, just as they have with non-gluten packaged foods now. False evils are replaced with real ones. Healthy fats, even saturated fats, don’t make you fat. But added sugars sure do.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has replaced cane sugars in most sodas and other beverages as well as many other food products. HFCS is sweeter per volume than sugar and is cheaper too. Good for the profit margin. But it’s even worse for one’s health than sugar. HFCS became the new sugar for many products, especially beverages, in the 1970s.

Since then, it has increased exponentially to become the sugar of choice in most sodas and other beverages. By the way, it can also be called “corn syrup” on those labels. Too many have caught on to how bad HFCS is, so that industry is doing what they can to conceal it from consumers and sneak it into their guts to cause a plethora of problems.

The fructose in fruit is not problematic because of fruit’s fiber and other compounds that compensate the fructose, ensuring a metabolic transition that doesn’t harm the liver. Normal processed cane or beet sugar (sucrose) is one part glucose and one part fructose.

So there is some metabolic damage from sucrose with the fructose part, while the glucose is readily metabolized for that energy rush that sugar addicts enjoy. Some sucrose does get stored as fat throughout the body to be used as energy later. But later doesn’t come, as long as one keeps eating processed foods, and the fat remains.

But high-fructose corn syrup is extremely concentrated fructose that goes straight to the liver instead of the gut from where sucrose sugars are taken into the bloodstream to create usable energy. The liver doesn’t know exactly what to do with those sudden surges of fructose, so it gets stored as fat, which can lead to fatty liver disease and eventually cirrhosis and possibly cancer.

HFCS also has less impact on hunger sensations than sucrose, which goes through the digestive tract to create energy and allow a sensation of satisfaction. This way, HFCS leads to eating or drinking more than one can tolerate, raising one’s serum triglyceride levels and making one susceptible to cardiovascular disease.

The process of manufacturing HFCS produces toxins and leaves residues of mercury. The for-profit medical monopoly and Big Pharma should be grateful to the processed food industry for the increased business that it sends them.

Sources for this article include:
http://newsdaily.com
http://www.lef.org
http://www.naturalhealth365.com
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com
http://www.cnn.com
http://science.naturalnews.com
http://science.naturalnews.com

Food Allergy versus Food Sensitivity: What You Need to Know

(DrFrankLipman – Roybn O’Brien) It’s Food Allergy Awareness Week this week.  In the early years of this work, when we first began speaking about food allergies, people used to look at you like you were making it up.  How could a child be allergic to food?  And since when?  As kids, we ate PB&Js and had cartons of milk for lunch at school. They weren’t loaded weapons on a lunchroom table.  What’s changed?  And why has it changed so fast?

According to UCLA Health System, “The occurrence of allergic disease is skyrocketing, and some estimates are that as many as one-in-five Americans have an allergic condition.”

You don’t have to tell that to parents.

Today, a food allergic reaction sends someone to the emergency room once every three minutes.  One in ten children struggle with asthma, and one in four are affected by allergies. The incidence of allergy has increased significantly over the past two decades, and allergy to peanuts more than doubled from 1997 to 2002. The National Association of Nurses now says 19% of school age children have a food allergy.

In the last twenty years, there has been a 400% increase in the rates of allergies in children and a 300% increase in the rates of asthma, with at least a 56% increase in the number of asthma-related deaths.

Approximately 30 million children – more than 1/3 of our kids – are affected by one of the four new childhood epidemics – allergies, asthma, ADHD and autism, earning our children the title of “Generation Rx” and these condition the title “the 4As.”

This is not something we can just accept nor can we afford to ignore.

And it’s not just affecting children.

The official statistic holds that allergies affect millions of Americans, including about 6-8 percent of children below the age of three. That information comes courtesy of U.S. Food and Drug Administration Deputy Commissioner Lester M. Crawford, J., D.V.M., Ph.D., speaking before the Consumer Federation of America on April 22, 2002.  It is over ten years old.

Since then, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report in 2008 that said that there has been a 265% increase in the rate of hospitalizations related to food allergic reactions.

Since when did a PB&J and a carton of milk become so dangerous?

This Begs Explanation

An allergy is basically an overreaction by your immune system to a protein that it perceives as a threat—for example, the proteins in particular types of food, the dust mite protein, or pollen. For people without allergies, these proteins are harmless. But if you’ve got an allergy, your immune system sees these proteins as dangerous invaders.

To drive the invader out, your immune system mobilizes all its resources: mucous, to flush out the intruder; vomiting, to force it out; diarrhea, to expel it quickly. Such conditions may make you feel sick, but they’re actually evidence of your body’s attempts to get well.

A key aspect of the immune response is known as inflammation, characterized by one or more of four classic symptoms: redness, heat, swelling, and pain. Inflammation doesn’t occur only in allergic reactions; it flares up whenever your body feels threatened, in response to a bruise, cut, bacteria, or virus as well as to otherwise harmless pollen, dust, or food. Scientists now believe that much of our immune system is found in our digestive tracts, where many of these inflammatory reactions occur in the form of stomachaches, cramping, nausea, bloating, and vomiting.

Ironically, the immune system’s inflammatory reaction—meant to heal and protect the body—often causes more problems than the initial “invader” in the cases when allergic reactions become life-threatening.

Common Symptoms of Food Allergy: Immediate Reactions

  • rash or hives
  • nausea
  • stomach pain
  • diarrhea
  • itchy skin
  • eczema
  • shortness of breath
  • chest pain
  • swelling of the airways to the lungs
  • anaphylaxis

Food Allergies and Food Sensitivity: Our Immune System Overreacts Again

At first glance, the distinction between “allergies” and “sensitivity” may seem like a meaningless word game. But understanding the relationship between these two conditions is crucial to grasping the true nature of the allergy epidemic—and to seeing how even the supposedly healthy foods in our kitchens may be harmful to our health.

As we’ve seen, allergies are an overreaction of our immune system, a kind of exaggerated response to a perceived danger. When a child comes in contact with these proteins (peanut, egg, wheat, etc.) her immune system “recognizes” the protein as dangerous, just as it would have seen the danger in the bacterium that causes pneumonia or the virus that causes mumps. In response, her immune system creates special “fighter” proteins called antibodies designed to identify and neutralize the “invader.”

These fighter proteins are known as immunoglobulin E, or IgE for short. When they’re released into the bloodstream, their purpose is to “seek and destroy” the invader, which they do by creating one or more of the classic food allergy symptoms, such as the hives, or the diarrhea with which other children respond, or, in more extreme cases, the anaphylactic shock that can kill a child within minutes.

The classic IgE response occurs within minutes or even seconds, because IgE proteins are some of the most aggressive antibodies we know. That immediate IgE response is the defining characteristic of an allergic reaction.

Food sensitivities start out in a similar way. If a “sensitive” child is exposed to a protein that his system perceives as a threat, he’ll manufacture another type of fighter protein, known as Immunglobulin G, or IgG. Although IgE and IgG antibodies play similar roles, they produce somewhat different—though often overlapping—symptoms.

A crucial difference between the two, though, is their reaction time. The less aggressive IgG antibodies typically produce a delayed response that might not appear for hours or even days after the child has consumed the offending food.

So even though food sensitivities and food allergies both produce painful, inflammatory, and potentially dangerous responses, this delayed reaction time has led many doctors to give food sensitivities second-class status. Partly that’s because they don’t present an immediate and obvious threat to children’s lives: only the IgE proteins trigger anaphylactic shock, for example, and in that sense, only the IgE proteins can kill (though the IgG reaction can have serious long-term consequences). Unfortunately, some doctors tend to downplay the importance of nutrition, frequently dismissing the idea that such symptoms as earache, eczema, crankiness, brain fog, and sleep problems might be related to a child’s diet.

However, an article in The Lancet, Britain’s most respected medical journal, casts another light on the subject. The article referred to doctors who use elimination diets—diets that begin with a very limited, “safe” array of food choices and then add potentially problematic foods back into the diet, one by one.

The reason to do an elimination diet is to identify which foods in your diet might be triggering symptoms like skin rashes, fatigue, or stomach ache. Often, some foods affect us without our realizing it and we live with the symptoms, taking medicine to alleviate the suffering. But if you eliminate these foods from your diet, you may find that your symptoms disappear. What becomes even more interesting is that when you reintroduce the offending food, you may suddenly suffer drastic symptoms which make it clear that the food was indeed triggering one or more problems. An elimination diet can sometimes reveal with dramatic speed that a particular food you’ve always believed was harmless is actually causing such chronic symptoms as headache, digestive problems, and even more serious complaints. Masked by your daily diet and by the slowness of the food-sensitivity reaction, the offending food does its dirty work without ever realizing that it is the culprit behind your—or your child’s—disorders.

When you take a break from eating that problem food, however, and then add it back into your diet, you see how powerful its effects are and how responsible it may be for a seemingly unrelated problem. Foods that you thought were safe for you turn out to be highly problematic, indicating the presence of a previous undiagnosed food sensitivity. As a result, the authors of the Lancetarticle conclude that the prevalence of food sensitivity (referred to in the article as “food intolerance”) has been seriously underestimated.

Certainly, food allergies are far more dramatic. Whenever you read about a kid who died within minutes of eating at a fast-food joint or after breathing in the peanut dust from a friend’s candy wrapper, that’s an “IgE-mediated” food allergy. They’re fast, they can be deadly, and need the attention they deserve.

But we should be looking at delayed reactions, too, the “IgG-mediated” responses to food sensitivities. And some doctors do look seriously at both. Most conventional doctors, though, tend to focus on IgE immediate reactions. There are lots of reasons why they should view the two types of reactions as part of a larger, single problem.

First, both reactions have the same ultimate cause: the immune system’s overreaction to apparently harmless food. According to internationally acclaimed author and physician Kenneth Bock, M.D., there’s also quite a bit of overlap between IgE and IgG symptoms. Both can contribute to inflammatory responses in multiple body systems.

True, the delayed IgG reactions are less likely to cause hives and are more likely to produce a host of apparently vague symptoms, such as headache, brain fog, sleep problems, joint pain, fatigue, and muscle aches. But both the immediate and the delayed responses are immune system problems triggered by a supposedly “harmless” food.

Conventional doctors’ tendency to separate “IgE-mediated” food allergies and “IgG-mediated” food sensitivities into two separate problems has the effect of minimizing the allergy epidemic. Remember, IgE allergies, IgG sensitivities, and asthma—three similar ways that our immune systems can overreact—are all on the rise. It makes sense to find a doctor who is willing to address all three as symptoms of a greater underlying issue.

Common Symptoms of Food Sensitivity: Delayed Reactions

  • fatigue
  • gastrointestinal problems, including bloating and gas
  • itchy skin and skin rashes like eczema
  • brain fog
  • irritability, behavioral issues
  • muscle or joint aches
  • headache
  • sleeplessness and sleep disorders
  • chronic rhinitis (runny nose), congestion, and post-nasal drip

Four Take-Aways:

1. Even if your kids can’t talk, their skin speaks volumes! Did you know that the skin is a person’s largest organ? Even when your child is too young to tell you how he feels or too used to her symptoms to identify them (when kids hurt all the time, they don’t know they hurt!), you can often read your child’s condition in his or her skin.

Does your child have eczema? Does he get rashes around the mouth, especially after he eats a certain food or swallows a certain beverage? Rashes around the knees, elbows, or armpits? Does he have “allergic shiners”—that is, dark circles under the eyes?

These are all inflammatory reactions, signs that the body is trying to rid itself of what it perceives as “toxic invader.” In your child’s case, that “toxic invader” might be an apparently harmless food, to which your kid is either allergic or “sensitive.” Keeping that invader away from your kid may bring relief from symptoms—and it may clear up other problems, such as brain fog, crankiness, sleep problems, inattention, acne, and mood swings.

2. The toilet bowl has a lot to tell you. Your kids’ bowel movements, not to be too delicate here, also speak volumes. Runny poops are a sign that a person isn’t properly digesting his food. And indeed, as we got the allergens out of some children’s diets, poops tend to firm up.

3. Chronic ear infections are often a sign of dairy allergies. In some cases, milk may have ill effects like eczema, upset stomachs or chronic ear infections for children who are allergic or sensitive to it.

4. Find a doctor who is willing to work with you, test for both IgE and IgG allergies and sensitivities and to address the important role that elimination diets can play in managing allergic symptoms like eczema, ear infections and chronic mucous.

AllergyKids turned eight this weekend over Mother’s Day. In these first eight years, we’ve met too many parents who have lost children to an allergic reaction. We’ve spent so much time with a dad who lost his 13 year old daughter to a food allergic reaction eight years ago. He was one of the first emails we ever received at the AllergyKids Foundation.

His daughter had eaten what they considered a “safe food.” Something she had eaten dozens of times before. For some inexplicable reason that day, it proved deadly.

We can not afford to lose our children, they are our country’s greatest resource.