21 Pounds in 21 Days (5 page)

But there's a darker side to the story. Many experts believe that our elected officials and government agencies have been bought out by big business. Dr. Rogers writes: “Industry relies on people
being too busy, too tired, too sick, and too disinterested in taking responsibility for their health to ever take the time to learn these facts, much less do anything about them.” And let's be honest: if the government were to take on every toxic product, there would be tremendous negative consequences to the economy—and to American jobs!

Food for Thought

Americans' unhealthy relationship with food also causes us to gain weight. First of all, we eat too much. From twenty-four-hour grocery stores to fast-food restaurants at every major intersection, to snack foods at the gas station mini-market, food is at our fingertips, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. At midnight, we can run to the drive-through and order a quarter-pound cheeseburger, super-sized fries, and a sixty-four-ounce soda. During one movie, it's common for a person to down a tub of salty, buttery popcorn that just a few years ago would have been considered large enough to feed a family. We're served a huge bowl of salad, croutons, and dressing and endless garlic-butter bread sticks at the local Italian food chain—and that's before we get to our oversized course of pasta. Because enormous amounts of food are pervasive in our society, we take it for granted that this is how things should be. But travel to another country and you quickly discover not only that things are different there but just how out of line we are. No other society in the history of humankind has been so oversaturated with food. Given the incredible level of excess we experience, it's no wonder that few of us can resist the temptations.

On top of that, what many of us eat is not very good for us. Our supermarkets and takeout, sit-down, and fast-food restaurants are filled with foods that are high in fat, cholesterol, sodium, artificial flavors and colors, hormones, and preservatives. To make groceries last longer on supermarket shelves, manufacturers strip foods of important nutrients and then “enrich” them with man-made vitamins and minerals. But the body cannot process man-made ingredients as effectively as the “real thing.” Because the body
doesn't know what to do with any of these synthetic additives, they accumulate inside us as toxins.

What's more, most of us don't consume enough nutrients. We may not be starving for food like the emaciated people living in famine zones we see on the nightly news, but we are definitely malnourished. Our dietary deficiencies manifest themselves as “thunder thighs,” “beer bellies,” “cottage cheese behind,” “baby weight,” “middle-age spread” and upper arms that keep waving goodbye long after your guests are gone. And let's not forget being “model thin”; you can fit our cultural standard of beauty and still be very unhealthy.

In fact, even though we're often called the “land of plenty,” the average American consumes so few nutrients that they will not be able to live a full life and stay well until they die. Poor nutrition is a major reason that so many of us gain weight, lose energy, and end up on the couch at night in front of the television. It's why we are too tired to ride bikes with our children, take classes at night to change our career, or jog to wave down the bus. Of course, our culture teaches us that losing energy and our physical and mental abilities are natural consequences of aging. Actually, they're very unnatural. If we treat it right, the body is capable of staying healthy into our older years and of dying peacefully as we sleep. Instead, even if we don't have any other harmful lifestyle habits, we are so malnourished that we can be less healthy than someone who eats healthy foods but smokes cigarettes and drinks heavily! Poor nourishment lies at the root of some cancers, diabetes, heart attacks, high cholesterol, hypertension, strokes, and many of the chronic diseases so many of us are suffering and dying from.

Surprisingly, even so-called “superfoods” like broccoli, oatmeal, and soybeans are failing to nourish us adequately. For sure, they're much better for us than highly processed foods; yet research shows that even they have been damaged by “overcivilized practices,” the terminology I use to describe the highly industrialized procedures humans use to tinker with nature so they can make more money off the food they grow—overfarming the soil, using synthetic fertilizers, and raising livestock on feed lots. That, to
me, is a very sad thing: Even when we think we're taking good care of ourselves, in reality we're not doing nearly enough.

University of California–Berkeley professor of science and environmental journalism Michael Pollan describes our overcivilized processes in his
New York Times
bestseller
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
.
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Pollan describes how produce, grains, poultry, and beef travel from three types of farms—industrial (the mass-production processes that have made traditional farming obsolete), large organic farms, and small family farms—to arrive in your supermarket. (He even bought a calf and tracked what happened to it up to the point that it was slaughtered and made into ground beef.) He compared these processes and the foods they create, contrasting today's processes to how food was raised just a generation or two ago when we cultivated and hunted our own meals. According to Pollan, industrial agricultural practices disrupt the balance of nature, setting in motion a chain reaction whose end product is people whose bodies are weak because they eat poor-quality food. For example, the industrial practice of overfarming the land depletes it of vital nutrients, weakening it and essentially making the soil “sick.” Sick soil produces “sick” crops, containing far fewer nutrients than food grown on healthier soil. For over a decade, experts in the wellness industry have cited a statistic that to get the same amount of nutrition out of one cup of spinach grown in 1950, you have to eat between fifteen and twenty cups of spinach today. This dramatic nutritional shortfall exists not just for spinach but for every fruit, vegetable, and grain produced on an industrial farm. Since livestock are fed these grains, they, too, become malnourished. So do humans, who eat not just the impotent crops but the weakened animals raised on them. Sick soil produces sick food, which, in turn, produces sick people.

Eating sick food makes us pile on pounds. Many of us stay hungry and crave certain foods no matter how much we eat. But it's not because the body desperately requires, say, Oreos or
sour-cream-and-onion potato chips; instead, it is seeking missing nutrients. The body craves those foods we've trained it to know it usually obtains certain nutrients from—no matter whether the foods are good for us or not. If we've taught our body that it gets calcium from ice cream, as opposed to yogurt, broccoli, or kale, when it's short on calcium, we will crave cookies 'n' cream rather than greens.

In addition to having a food supply that literally leaves us starved for nourishment, Americans now live in what many experts call a “hostile” food environment—so called because it's easier to find meals that are high in fat, sugar, and salt than it is to get your hands on the fresh, natural, organic foods that Mother Nature intended us to ingest. Most unhealthy foods are also “spiked” with toxins like artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones. Organic foods, in addition to being more difficult to obtain, costs on average 50 percent more than these overcivilized foods, according to
Consumer Reports
. Who can possibly prepare a homemade dinner for the cost of a “99-cent meal deal”? No matter where you get your food—at the fast-food restaurant, the supermarket, or takeout—chances are that if it tastes good and you can get it quickly and inexpensively, it's not very healthy for you.

Thousands of artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics are approved for use in America's food. To know which the body considers noxious, you only need to look at the ingredient label. If you recognize the contents—chicken, vinegar, cayenne pepper, garlic, egg—that ingredient is probably not toxic. But if it contains some chemical or substance you don't recognize, it has the potential to injure you. For fun, check out the ingredient label of some hot dogs, a can of pork and beans, frozen French fries, ketchup, or salad dressing, items containing lots of additives and preservatives. You'll see a couple of familiar ingredients—pork, beans, tomatoes—but the list of chemicals and preservatives is usually longer. You'll see substances like high-fructose corn syrup, monosodium glutamate (MSG), modified food starch, maltodextrine, (artificial) flavor, dextrose, sodium benzoate, xanthan gum, calcium disodium EDTA, caramel color—the
list goes on and on. Eaten individually, none of these ingredients will kill you or make you sick. But the average American eats over two hundred synthetic chemicals daily. On top of that, we're exposed to a hundred nonfood toxins. If nature doesn't make it, the body cannot use it effectively. Still, roughly a thousand man-made chemicals are added to America's food supply annually—from artificial “grill flavor” to the preservative I'm sure some scientist somewhere is developing that will keep ice cream from melting in the hot summer sun.

The Dead Zone

Adding insult to injury, in the name of convenience many of the foods we eat have been processed so much that they no longer resemble the product they came from. We eat fruit that has been pressed into portable “roll-ups,” processed into frozen dinners in plastic trays, canned so we don't have to shop as often, or knocked off into cheese-foods and other pseudo sauces that make other processed foods taste better. Granted, refined foods are convenient and help us keep up with our fast-paced lives. But when food is boiled and treated with preservatives so it can be canned, it is stripped of nutrients, then enriched so it can be packaged, or is frozen to keep it “fresh” longer, this processing kills the enzymes that help us digest it and phytonutrients (also called phytochemicals), the compounds within the plant that help us protect our health.

Enzymes are the body's workhorses. Found from the top to the bottom of the body, they catalyze all of the chemical reactions that happen inside us—from those that help us blink our eyes to
those that allow us to snap our fingers or tap our toes when we're enjoying good music. They also make every organ function. Without them, the body would stop working and we would die. Digestive enzymes, those found in our digestive system, break large molecules of food into smaller particles that can be transported by the blood to the cells. There are four main types of digestive enzymes:
protease
breaks protein down into its building blocks, amino acids;
amylase
dismantles starchy carbs into simple sugars;
lipase
melts fats into essential fatty acids and smaller chains of fatty acids like triglycerides, which many people monitor to prevent heart disease; and
cellulase
dissects fiber. Together, they help the body use food's vitamins and minerals to grow and repair our cells. But as our bodies become more toxic, we become less able to produce these essential enzymes. This problem is compounded when we eat processed or devitalized food that is also short on enzymes. When this happens, the body requires an unnaturally high amount of energy to digest our food, and we get tired after eating. Over time, enzyme shortages weaken our immune system and cause us to fall ill.

Enzymes are so important to our well-being that many nutritional experts label foods whose enzymes have been killed by processing “dead.” Natural foods that man hasn't altered are considered to be “alive,” even after they've been harvested or slaughtered, because at least some of their enzymes are still living. Those enzymes will diminish and die over the coming days or weeks, depending upon whether they're left out in the sun, on your kitchen counter, or in the refrigerator. Foods whose enzymes are active look, feel, smell, and taste like they're alive; once the enzymes die, the foods look wilted and lifeless.

This fun experiment will help you understand enzymes better: Compare a piece of fresh produce to one that's gotten lost in your refrigerator crisper and has wilted or started to turn color. Now contrast that fresh ingredient to either its frozen or canned counterpart. There's a big difference—the fresher the bean, the more lively it looks and the more snap it has when you bend and break it. The frozen bean's enzymes are dead; however, some of its vitamins and minerals are still living and it's been treated with fewer
if any) preservatives, so it will appear healthier than its canned counterpart. Since it is more alive and less toxic than the canned bean, it will look and taste more fresh. Canned foods not only contain chemical preservatives and no enzymes, but few vitamins and minerals remain in them, and toxins from the can may leach into the food. No wonder canned food looks drab and lifeless and needs artificial colors and flavors added to it! Living foods produce vibrant people. Wilted and tired-looking foods produce wilted and tired people. And dead foods, over time, kill us.