Four Foods That Are Making You Sick- Part 1
There is so much noise out there in the world of health; so many theories, so much dogma. I decided to do a four part post to make things simpler. By identifying the four foods that are causing the most harm, I hope to make it easier for you to live a healthy life, in a way that is as simple as possible.
I’ll skip to the final takeaway now. The four foods that I’ll cover are the pillars of the processed food industry. You can lose yourself in the micromanagement of avoidance, or you can find ways to eat more whole foods. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with cooking and whole foods, go through these four culprits and slowly learn ways to shift away from them.
Now, on to the main feature!
Harmful food #1: Sugar
You knew that was coming, right?
Sugar is probably causing more harm to Americans than any other substance. It has been shown to be related to heart disease[1]. There is a growing body of evidence connecting it to cancer[2]. These are the two leading causes of death in the United States. Making things worse is sugar’s well known connection to diabetes, which is fast becoming the biggest epidemic in western cultures[3]. Over the past 200 years, the average American has increased their sugar intake from five pounds per year to more than a hundred. Your body doesn’t have the genes to deal with this; there hasn’t been enough time for your body to learn from its ancestors.
I’ll briefly explain the issues with sugar here, with an eye toward helping you make sense of the problem and possible alternatives. If you’d like to do a deep dive into the science behind sugar and health damage, I’d recommend looking into the work of Dr. Robert Lustig. For a simple explanation, let’s use table sugar (sucrose) as an example. Sucrose is two molecules, glucose and fructose, held together by a single bond. Glucose is essential for a healthy body, and fructose will be changed into glucose in the liver. So what’s the problem then? Throughout evolutionary history, glucose and fructose were present only in natural forms. These natural forms always included fiber, which slows down the delivery of glucose into the bloodstream. When it is delivered into your bloodstream at that slower rate, it isn’t a problem. Your body already knows how to deal with it. The issue is that humans learned to refine the sugar, to separate out the fiber. Without the fiber, both glucose and fructose hit your bloodstream all at once. Whether the sucrose comes from sugar cane, beets, corn, grapes, apples or brown rice. None of these plants is a problem when eaten whole. When you remove everything but the sweet in the plants, it becomes a problem. The different sweeteners from these plants (and others) will be slightly different, but their effects are mostly the same.
High levels of glucose in your bloodstream wreaks havoc. The glucose molecule is inflammatory. The insulin, which the body releases in response to the high levels of glucose in the blood is also inflammatory. The standard American diet leads to a situation where blood glucose levels steadily climb over time, as do insulin levels. This causes inflammation throughout your body, which can lead to any number of diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, kidney disease, depression, and fatty liver disease. Beyond that, inflammation can cause day-to-day problems like weight gain, fatigue, pain, and mental fog.
There is a growing body of evidence that fructose is equally problematic. When you eat fructose, it is converted into glucose by the liver. If the fructose is released slowly, your system can keep up. If it’s released too quickly, the liver can’t keep up, and some of the fructose will be converted to fat. This can lead to weight gain and/or fatty liver disease. Additionally, fructose seems to interfere with your body’s ability to recognize whether it’s full[4]. When you drink something with a good deal of fructose, your body doesn’t recognize that you’ve taken in calories.
When you combine the effects of glucose and fructose, you get something that causes inflammation, weight gain and increased hunger. Small wonder it makes us so sick.
Table sugar isn’t much different than most of the natural sugar alternatives out there. Sucrose is 50/50 glucose/fructose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55/45. Honey, maple syrup and the rest of the common sweeteners are in that general neighborhood. They may have some other nutrients, but on the whole they should be an occasional indulgence. When you’re having those occasional indulgences, I’d recommend the best of the bunch: coconut sugar, honey or maple syrup. Still, this is splitting hairs, the most important step is reducing your consumption.
Artificial sweeteners are equally linked to weight gain as natural sugars. How this happens isn’t well understood, though there are some solid guesses. For the purpose of this post, let’s stick to the overall theme: natural is almost always better. That isn’t a battle cry for sugar, which is inherently unnatural. It is a warning that chemical sweeteners created in a lab will always have some sort of chemical affect on your body. Since your body’s natural state is one of health and balance, you can assume that any random effect will probably be harmful. There are exceptions, but this is a reasonable assumption to start with.
The solution here is simple; eat whole, natural foods, even ones high in natural “sugars”. They won’t hit your dopamine receptors in the same way, so they won’t give you the same high feeling that sugar will, but they won’t react in your system with the same drug-like effects that occur when things have been added or taken away from them. Your body has systems in place to handle these natural foods when they’re in their natural form. When you start eating less sugar, you’ll notice your taste buds changing. You’ll like fruit more and things like very dark chocolate (which is low in sugar) will taste delicious. Over time, you may find yourself making your own salad dressings, ketchup, BBQ sauce and other sweet sauces from scratch, using whole foods to do it. When you take your time exploring these options, you’ll find that the changes in your body’s chemistry move at the same pace as your explorations. There won’t be the same difficulty and sense of missing out that comes from quitting cold turkey.
Coming soon, harmful food #2. Sugar being #1 can’t have been too much of a surprise, but #2 might be. It’s something I see in most “healthy” foods in the supermarket.
[1] Yang, Q. (2014, April 01). Sugar Intake and Cardiovascular Diseases Mortality. Retrieved from https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1819573?__hstc=3584879.54b5f524eb53b5a4d4f27df27a078630.1523145601981.1523145601982.1523145601983.1&__hssc=3584879.1.1523145601984&__hsfp=1773666937
[2] Michaud, S.Liu, D., Simin, Giovannucci, Edward, Willett, . . . S., C. (2002, September 04). Dietary Sugar, Glycemic Load, and Pancreatic Cancer Risk in a Prospective Study. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/94/17/1293/2519872
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068646/
[4] Sugary Drinks. (2018, March 15). Retrieved from https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-drinks/sugary-drinks/
