Helping You Eat Healthier

Part 2  -  What Do I Look for to Know I am Eating Healthy Food?

With so much being done to our food supply, it is difficult to understand what features differentiate healthier from less healthy foods.  To help patients with this I use a series of filters to look at food through.  Perhaps first we need to look at what is being done to much of our food.  The single greatest factor has been the change from food that was “grown or raised” to that which is manufactured.  Many of the subsequent issues discussed relate to this first factor, the farm to factory transition of food.

Filter #1 – Truly grown or raised, not manufactured

For all of the approximately 6 million years of human existence humans ate naturally produced food which evolved through nature… this is until the past 60 years which only is .0015% of human existence. With time, perhaps about 100,000 years, we could evolve to tolerate the current altered, chemically laden diet we now eat.  So, if there is good news, it is likely not to be realized until about 5000 generations down the road.

It all started with the development in a factory of the K-ration between WWI and WWII to solve the problem of feeding large numbers of deployed troops.

As has happened with many things, the end of WWII left a new industry without need.  This led to the “development” of a new use, standard human consumption.  To make food that can be stable in the Midwest months and years before actual consumption in the East, it must be highly altered.  This alteration may include removing parts that do not store well and adding others that try to compensate for taste and stability alteration.

A major example of this situation is grain processing.  The essential oils in the plant germ are the most susceptible part to spoilage over time.  The grain is milled to knock the germ out.  Three major problems result the first of which is the removal of the essential oils, essential being the key word here.  The oils are one of the three primary taste drives (salt, fat & sugar) that tell us “eat”.  No one enjoys a spoonful of refined flour, hence the need to add some combination of sugar and/or salt. 

The second problem is that the germ is where the essential vitamins and minerals also live. One hundred percent of the 23 nutrients in whole grain are reduced between 50% and 100% of their original levels.  Our protection is that refined grain must be “enriched” which simply means that 4 of the 23 nutrients removed must be added back and that is done with synthetically produced forms.

 

The third problem is that the milling to remove the germ must first remove the outer coating called the ectosperm and hence the fiber.  The natural fiber controls the rate of absorption of the naturally present sugars.  Removing fiber and adding sugar has been a formula for disease being a major contributor to the diabetes epidemic.

Most plant food is further degraded by breaking it down with processing, adding taste manipulators such as sugars and further “enhanced” by the manufactured “nutrients” (chemicals).  A great exercise is to not buy anything without looking at the sugar content and reading each ingredient.  The general conclusion is “that they put sugar in everything” and “20-30% is added chemicals”.

So filter #1 is shop for food that is grown or raised, not manufactured.

Filter #2 - Naturally grown, not commercially grown

Commercial crops are pushed to grow bigger and faster with synthetic fertilizer.  The use of synthetic fertilizer also tends to increase yield allowing greater crop volume per acre. However, growing them faster and in greater density comes at the expense of nutrient content.  The nutrient production in the plant occurs slowly through interaction between the plant, the soil and soil bacteria.  Commercial produce has been compared to organic, naturally grown produce in several studies and typically has a reduction in essential vitamins and minerals of about 30%. 

Phytonutrients, which are a broad group of over 12,000 known components that impart many of the health effects we get from food, have been shown to be reduced about 70% in commercial crops. 

Humans are genetically wired to thrive on the balance in naturally evolved food.  Every part of that process serves a role in the balance that becomes nourishing for humans.  For example, a plant must interact with the natural challenges during growth such as defending itself from environmental stressors such as fungal and other potential pathogens.  It does so by producing phytochemicals called phytoalexins such as the phenol, isoflavonoids. 

As part of the naturally evolved synergy, we benefit from these naturally produced antioxidants whose consumption is a major mechanism in our disease resistance.  When the plant is synthetically assisted to grow quickly and without blemishes, the phytonutrient is diminished by about 70%.  The blemishes are the sign that the apple fought the battles by developing high phytoalexin content which it then can share with us.

When the plant/soil is treated with pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals, the plant has no reason to produce its own protection, the phytonutrients.   This renders the plant incapable of passing this antioxidant protection on to us. 

Filter #3 – Eat locally grown/raised as much as is possible

Locally grown food adds another hidden benefit, seasonality.  As little as 75 years ago humans ate seasonally based on the rotating availability of crops locally.  This ensured the exposure to many dozens of different plants throughout the year.  The 12,000 phytonutrients in food all have slightly different properties involved in their health benefits.  Broader exposure to a large number of plants and thus phytonutrients resulted in greater health benefits than the current common practice of habituating a small number of plants.  If we tend to eat our fruit as only apples and bananas, the number of phytonutrients we are exposed to is limited and they are likely to be in storage for long periods and transported long distances introducing chemicals related to those processes.  The method used to do this often increases exposure to the other already discussed issues.

Although not part of this discussion, other very important issues includes the impact on the environmental, social and economic well-being of the local communities related to the loss of seasonality.  These topics are well discussed in other forums but highly related to this discussion.

Filter #4 – Certified organic versus non-organic

Perhaps the greatest added value of organic source food is that there are two layers of protection against pesticide and herbicide residues in or on that food.  The first layer is that it ensures that the crops were not sprayed with these chemicals.  The second layer is that this certification cannot be obtained without soil inspection documenting that there are no residues of these chemicals in the soil.

Food is a major mechanism by which people are exposed to pollutants. Diet is thought to account for up to 90% of a person's PCB and DDT body burden.  Most pesticides are endocrine disrupting chemicals, chemicals that alter normal human hormone activity. Given the immense influence of the human hormonal system on all cells in the body, disrupting this process has broad disease implications most notably in the control of cell growth, reproduction and cell energy and repair.  These effects have been implicated in infertility, thyroid disease, many cancers, degenerative brain disease and in diabetes.

The industry position has been that these chemicals do not persist in the food supply and do no harm.  CDC testing of human blood and urine samples has found that they are universally present in these specimens.  They have become pervasive in our environment including in the fat of animal protein sources being passed through from their consumption of commercial feed crops.

With the current lack of GMO labeling requirements, certified organic serves as protection on that front as this certification cannot be obtained for any GMO source food.  As commercial GMO crops are the dominant human exposure to glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, avoiding GMO through the certified organic filter is the protection against this food exposure.  Prior studies have shown that exposure to commercial grain feed in laboratory animals leads to significantly elevated rates of kidney and liver damage.  New study by these same researchers confirmed that longer term exposure of this chemical at levels far below what is the “accepted safe” level in our food greatly disrupts liver metabolism and was associated with high rates of fatty liver disease.

Other issues related to GMO foods were discussed in the first section of this series 

Filter #5 – Lower carbohydrate content, better carbohydrate source balance

This filter is somewhat dependent on where you eat but is more dependent on personal behavior.  The human diet for greater than 99% of human existence contained only about 20-25% carbohydrate energy.  The rest came from lean proteins and healthy fats.  Our genetic adaptation to our environment became adapted to efficient metabolic processing in this dietary environment.

The current Western diet has disproportionately increased in carbohydrate energy to 55-60%.  This is further complicated by a shift to greater high glycemic load sources of carbohydrate such as simple sugars and grains.  Glycemic load is the stress a particular carbohydrate places on metabolic processing.  Just 100 years ago the Western diet contained more vegetable servings (very low glycemic load) than grain servings.  The current diet contains 4-6 times greater grain than vegetable servings.  As a typical grain has a glycemic load of 8-10 times greater than a typical vegetable the overall glycemic load in our diet has increased about 10-fold in just 4-5 generations.  This is further complicated by the fact that grain products are a major source of added simple sugars.

Whether we shop to eat at home or are eating away from home, these filters should guide the process for healthy eating.  Often it will be unlikely that all 5 can be found together but that may not be totally necessary.  For example, many local growers practice organic farming and yet they are not certified organic.  Often the process is difficult and expensive to go through and in the end it is an imperfect process.  Natural, nonchemical farming is more important than certification from a health standpoint.

All that said, look for grown or raised (not manufactured), naturally grown, local, organic and lower carbohydrate.  The health rewards are many.  In the next post in this series we will review the first restaurant that follows these healthy eating guidelines.  This should be an informative and healthy journey.