We Americans spend less on food and more on health care than any other industrialized country in the world. Most experts agree that our love affair with refined, processed foods may be why Americans rank the highest in diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer, heart disease and obesity despite having the most advanced health care system in the world. Our diets have left us overfed and undernourished. We have created the Paradox of Plenty.
We live in an age where the natural, organic world, in which our ancestors evolved for thousands of years, is in competition with the world were over 6ooo chemicals are used to process food. We live in age that has undertaken a giant experiment of toxic ingestion. 90% of the typical American food budget is spent on easy to cook and easy to eat processed convenience foods.
The food industry aims at making products that look and taste appealing without any thought given to the products nutritional value. Much commercial food is so processed that it resembles building materials more than it resembles natural food. The ingredients list on a Twinkie reads more like rocket fuel than food for human consumption. Many gas stations make more money selling food than gasoline. They have become, as Michael Pollen says, "Processed corn stations; ethanol outside for your car and high fructose corn syrup inside of you."
Scientific evidence has proven that a diet based on refined, chemically laced food won't offer what our trillions of cells need on a daily basis. Scientists have discovered most of the food elements that are essential to health. The evidence, epidemiological, experimental and clinical supports a whole food, plant based diet which uses meat sparingly as condiment, for longevity and optimal fitness.
Whole, live foods are not processed and they have only one ingredient, themselves. Whole foods are easy to visualize. Its easy to picture a wheat field , a cherry orchard or an apple tree. It's much harder to visualize a field of marsh mellows. Whole foods are not refined, stripped, bleached, injected, hydrogenated, chemically treated, irradiated and gassed! Whole foods have the highest satiety factor and are lowest in calories than highly processed foods which literally have the life taken out of them.
To insure that you get plenty of "live" foods try having cut up vegetables handy on a plate with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, salsa, or hummus. Munch on them while making dinner instead of reaching for the cheese and dip. Add vegetables to pasta and pizza. Add tomatoes and onions, cucumber, bell pepper, grated carrots, and dark green lettuce to sandwiches. Recent studies at the Center for Science in the Public Interest have found sweet potatoes to be the healthiest of all vegetables followed by carrots, collard greens, red peppers, kale, dandelion greens, spinach and broccoli. Eat more of these live foods and your cells will love you even more.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Don't Waste Your Money
GHC is a hormone found in the urine of pregnant women. More than 50 years ago Dr. Albert Simeons, a British physician, claimed that GHC injections would allow overweight people to tolerate a 500 calories a day diets without any of the discomfort and overwhelming hunger usually associated with a severe calorie-restricted diet. Dr. Simeons claim was that small daily doses "rendered" fat deposits readily available for making up the deficit of a calorically inadequate diet and the process is accomplished by a rapid breakdown of adipose tissue.
Current knowledge of the regulation of appetite and hunger [ notice that they are not the same. Hunger is physical while appetite is emotional. ] is extremely complex and involves the emotions, hypothalamus, gastrointestinal physiology, energy requirements and possibly genetically determined metabolic pathways. Sorry! Still no magic bullets.
Noted physician Dr. Andrew Weil says about GHC injections or sub-lingual applications," They don't work. Don't waste your money." The Mayo Clinic stance is that, " Taking GHC doesn't appear to be particularly unsafe, but there is no scientific proof that it does any good." This is the view also upheld in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
In 2007, the infamous snake oil salesman Kevin Trudeau wrote a book entitled, The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About. The following year FTC cited Trudeau for misrepresenting the contents of his book in infomercials and he was fined $37 million dollars. He was extolling the virtue of the GHC method and accused the pharmaceutical companies and government of trying to eliminate the competition for weight loss therapies.
The FTC stance was that," There is no substantial evidence that GHC increases weight loss beyond that resulting from caloric restriction [ italics are mine ] or that it decreases the hunger and discomfort associated with calorie restricted diets." Think about it for a minute. If you are consuming 1500 calories each day and you cut down to 500 each day, you are consuming 1000 calories less each day, which I feel is dangerous [ unless you are morbidly obese and under the supervision of a doctor ]. That's 1000 X 7 = 7000 calories less in a week. That's 7000 divided by 3500 [calories in a pound of energy ] = 2 pounds per week lost.
Here is how we are engineered. If you are consuming 1500 calories each day and your weight doesn't fluctuate much, your cost of living [metabolism] and exercise energy requirements are about right. If you maintain your level of physical activity, the only adjustment will be the speed of your metabolism which drops as you age. If you have and are gaining weight, some form of calorie restriction should work depending on the quality of food you consume. Dr. Barbara Rolls in her best selling book The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan, teaches how to feel full on fewer calories. But, theoretically, if you consume 250 calories less each day [ equivalent to a pound lost every two weeks], the calories needed to keep your 1500 a day level will come from your energy storage depot i.e. your fat deposits.
Current knowledge of the regulation of appetite and hunger [ notice that they are not the same. Hunger is physical while appetite is emotional. ] is extremely complex and involves the emotions, hypothalamus, gastrointestinal physiology, energy requirements and possibly genetically determined metabolic pathways. Sorry! Still no magic bullets.
Noted physician Dr. Andrew Weil says about GHC injections or sub-lingual applications," They don't work. Don't waste your money." The Mayo Clinic stance is that, " Taking GHC doesn't appear to be particularly unsafe, but there is no scientific proof that it does any good." This is the view also upheld in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
In 2007, the infamous snake oil salesman Kevin Trudeau wrote a book entitled, The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About. The following year FTC cited Trudeau for misrepresenting the contents of his book in infomercials and he was fined $37 million dollars. He was extolling the virtue of the GHC method and accused the pharmaceutical companies and government of trying to eliminate the competition for weight loss therapies.
The FTC stance was that," There is no substantial evidence that GHC increases weight loss beyond that resulting from caloric restriction [ italics are mine ] or that it decreases the hunger and discomfort associated with calorie restricted diets." Think about it for a minute. If you are consuming 1500 calories each day and you cut down to 500 each day, you are consuming 1000 calories less each day, which I feel is dangerous [ unless you are morbidly obese and under the supervision of a doctor ]. That's 1000 X 7 = 7000 calories less in a week. That's 7000 divided by 3500 [calories in a pound of energy ] = 2 pounds per week lost.
Here is how we are engineered. If you are consuming 1500 calories each day and your weight doesn't fluctuate much, your cost of living [metabolism] and exercise energy requirements are about right. If you maintain your level of physical activity, the only adjustment will be the speed of your metabolism which drops as you age. If you have and are gaining weight, some form of calorie restriction should work depending on the quality of food you consume. Dr. Barbara Rolls in her best selling book The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan, teaches how to feel full on fewer calories. But, theoretically, if you consume 250 calories less each day [ equivalent to a pound lost every two weeks], the calories needed to keep your 1500 a day level will come from your energy storage depot i.e. your fat deposits.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Where's the Beef?
According the Nutrition Action Healthletter, ground beef would be a strong contender as the single food most likely to inflict damage on the American diet. They say that Americans stuff themselves with tacos, meatloaf, lasagna and the ubiquitous hamburger without a second thought as to the consequences.
The average American consumes about 30 pounds of ground beef each year. That's equivalent to a Quarter Pounder every three days. Hamburgers and cheese-burgers account for more than 76 percent of the beef sold in restaurants compared to just 5 percent for steak. Untrimmable ground beef products account for roughly 45 percent of the beef we eat and, unlike steak, the fat in ground beef can't be trimmed away. In fact, the health letter contends that many supermarkets "adjust" the fat content of their ground beef by adding ground-up beef fat. By law, no nutrition labels are required on ground beef packages. The medical community is very specific about limiting the amount of saturated fat in your diet. Ground beef is the third largest source of saturated fat in the average American diet after cheese and milk.
Much has been written about the disadvantages of commercial beef versus natural grass fed varieties. Commercial farmers have been using powerful synthetic fattening chemicals for a long time to enhance animal weight gain. It makes economic sense. More animal weight for less food [cost ]. the farmer makes more income. But, when the animals are sold, we eat them, chemicals and all. The end result is that our metabolism appears to be affected by a massive range of synthetic chemicals including those intended to fatten animals.
Because of policies started by the Nixon administrations USDA, we have amassed a hugh mountain of cheap corn to be used as cattle feed. The advantage to farmers is that corn fed cows get fat quickly and their flesh also marbles [fat layers ] well. But a growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn feed beef as well as the synthetic chemicals used. Ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn. In the same way, humans may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn.
The average American consumes about 30 pounds of ground beef each year. That's equivalent to a Quarter Pounder every three days. Hamburgers and cheese-burgers account for more than 76 percent of the beef sold in restaurants compared to just 5 percent for steak. Untrimmable ground beef products account for roughly 45 percent of the beef we eat and, unlike steak, the fat in ground beef can't be trimmed away. In fact, the health letter contends that many supermarkets "adjust" the fat content of their ground beef by adding ground-up beef fat. By law, no nutrition labels are required on ground beef packages. The medical community is very specific about limiting the amount of saturated fat in your diet. Ground beef is the third largest source of saturated fat in the average American diet after cheese and milk.
Much has been written about the disadvantages of commercial beef versus natural grass fed varieties. Commercial farmers have been using powerful synthetic fattening chemicals for a long time to enhance animal weight gain. It makes economic sense. More animal weight for less food [cost ]. the farmer makes more income. But, when the animals are sold, we eat them, chemicals and all. The end result is that our metabolism appears to be affected by a massive range of synthetic chemicals including those intended to fatten animals.
Because of policies started by the Nixon administrations USDA, we have amassed a hugh mountain of cheap corn to be used as cattle feed. The advantage to farmers is that corn fed cows get fat quickly and their flesh also marbles [fat layers ] well. But a growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn feed beef as well as the synthetic chemicals used. Ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn. In the same way, humans may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn.
Michael Pollan, in his best selling book The Omnivore's Dilemma, tasting a hamburger from a steer raised in a CAFO, " I could not taste the feed corn, or the petroleum, or the antibiotics, or the hormones, or the feed lot manure. Nutrition facts don't enumerate the fact of what has gone into the making of the hamburger. You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feed lot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.
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