Whole food

Here is an amazing statistic I heard in a podcast — 70% of the dollars spent in the US for healthcare are spent on diseases that are caused by the Standard American Diet. We are talking about type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, fatty liver, polycystic ovarian disease, and the list goes on. These are metabolic diseases, meaning the issue is disorders of our metabolism. Metabolism all comes down to the chemical energy production in the mitochondria in each of our cells. The mitochondria are the little energy factories inside cells that turn the sugar glucose and fat into the energy molecule ATP.  ATP is the gasoline that runs almost everything in the body. If you can’t make enough energy, things don’t work right. That kind of wrongness is called metabolic disease.

Look at that list of diseases. Those are the things that are killing us! Yes, there are accidents and medical errors, but aside from that, metabolic disorders are most likely the thing that will put you in the grave. More specifically, it is your diet that is the most likely cause of your death! So being concerned about eating a healthy diet is not just about looking and feeling good, it is about not dying from disease. It is about not hurting and not being on a laundry list of drugs as you get older. It is about being functional day to day so that you can participate in life.

But what is a healthy diet? Everybody seems to have a different idea about what is the right stuff to eat and what is not. Who do you believe and what should you do? Well here is a big secret, it is not so much what you eat as it is what has been done to what you eat. When you look at the root cause of metabolic disease, you have to look at what helps those mitochondria do their job and what blocks them or poisons them. They are perfectly happy burning carbs to produce energy. They are just as happy burning fats for energy. With a little work, they can even burn proteins for energy. Every diet ever invented ultimately breaks down to various ratios of carbs, fats, and proteins, so really the real key is to avoid the poisons. Beyond that, the best diet is really what works best for you. Everyone is different. Our digestive capacity varies between us. Some of us do much better with carbs, some with proteins, and some with fats. None of us do well eating foods that poison our energy factories.

A big aha happens when you consider that all these metabolic diseases that are out to get us did not even exist 200 years ago for the average person. Only the top 1-2% of the population had sufficient wealth to eat far more than what they needed. Eating too much is one of the poisons that we need to be wary of. This particularly shows up when you combine too much carbohydrate with too much fat in the diet. This alone will block up the cellular metabolism and cause energy disruption due to something called the Randle cycle. In nature high carb foods are low in fat and high fat foods are common in carbs. Carbs and fat are two opposite ways that nature stores energy for later use. Our bodies can use both, but not at the same time.

So what has happened to our food supply over the last 200 years that is causing it to kill us by causing metabolic diseases? The answer is simple — processing. That 200-year number is not quite accurate as technically brewing is a form of processing, and man has been brewing beer for over 5000 years. I guess you could argue that brewing is a natural process as it is bacteria that are doing the conversion of grain carbs into alcohol. And this may be a valid point as many forms of fermenting seem to improve the healthfulness of foods. Something as simple as baking food for dinner is processing. Drying meats, fruits, and vegetables is processing, salt curing, milling, pressing, curdling, churning, and many other manual methods of food preparation are considered processing. So what we are looking at is something called tertiary processing.

The art of food preservation took a huge leap forward way back in 1809 with the development of hermetic bottling of prepared foods for the French soldiers in the field followed a year later with the invention of the first canned foods. These are examples of tertiary processing to extend the shelf life of the food. Primary processing is about acquiring the food from nature and secondary processing is about preparing the food for immediate consumption. Tertiary, or third-stage processing, usually starts with the goal of preserving cooked food over a long time. Here is where the problems start. Over time preserved foods lose flavor, so the food manufacturer starts adding things to the food to make it taste better later. Usually, this means sugar, salt, stable chemical flavors, colors, and preservatives. Here is where our problems arise. These additions are the poisons that shut down our energy factories.

The most prominent additive I want to focus on here is sugar. All the other stuff is bad as well, but I don’t want to write an entire book here, so let’s stick to sugar. Sugar in its natural form, sugar cane or sugar beets, is not much of a problem for us because the sugar is surrounded by tons of fiber. All that fiber allows us to process the little bit of sugar mixed in with our gut very slowly. Try eating an actual sugar beet or stick of sugar cane and you will not see much of a sugar rise in the bloodstream. The fiber slows the digestion of sugar down. But take that fiber away and you have now created a poison. It is like the difference between a small log in a campfire giving off energy as it burns compared to a gallon of gasoline for your campfire. Kaboom, you have damaged your fire pit.

To be more specific, table sugar is made up of two sugar molecules linked together — glucose and fructose. Lots of glucose is a problem in the bloodstream causing damage to blood vessels and nerve endings. But the much bigger problem is the fructose. It is an outright poison. It shuts down our energy factories by killing various enzymes they use to turn food into energy. Our liver can detoxify around 12 grams (3 teaspoons) of fructose per day. Table sugar is half fructose, so that means we can handle up to 6 teaspoons of table sugar a day — not very much. A half liter of Coke has over 12 teaspoons of sugar in it! Orange juice is not any better. Whole oranges would be better because they still have all the natural fiber around them when eaten as fresh fruit. But when you blend up that fruit you have processed it and released that sugar from the fiber. When it comes to sugar as a poison, the main issue is that the fiber that should be bound to and around the sugar is removed thereby releasing the toxic load of sugar into the body.

The orange juice example points us in the direction of how to stop poisoning ourselves and even reverse some of the damage we are creating with these metabolic diseases. FYI. Current estimates are that 90% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, so I am probably talking about most of us. Fructose is probably the biggest driver of metabolic disease and therefore the biggest killer in America today. How do you stop this epidemic? The super simple answer is to not eat foods that have labels. Whole, natural foods don’t have labels. Whole, natural foods don’t have issues with an imbalance of fats and carbs when eaten alone. That means not putting butter or sour cream on your baked potatoes. Fortunately, in the US foods that have been processed have labels on them as well as ingredient lists. So if you pick up a food with a label on it, check that label and see if there are any added sugars. If there are then put it back on the store shelf. If there are no labels then it is probably a good food to eat for a healthy diet. Some processed foods do not have added sugars, like a can of green beans or a bottle of Tabasco sauce. So these should be okay as part of a whole natural food diet.

Whether you enjoy eating a vegetarian diet, a Mediterranean diet, or a carnivore diet, the same advice applies — eat whole foods the way nature provides them. Simple food preparation methods that use as little high heat as possible are best and watch out for that combination of high fat with high carbohydrates in the same meal. These simple rules will give you the leg up you need to overcome metabolic diseases.

Take care,

David