Happy Healthy Gut (14 page)

To make matters worse, if you are eating meat or consuming dairy, then you are getting a double, triple, or maybe even a quadruple dosage of these antibiotics, depending on where you buy your meat. Factory farming is a breeding ground for disease largely due to overcrowding and fecal contamination. That means that antibiotics are routinely being pumped into cows, chickens, and pigs in every feed, in order to keep them alive to either be productive, or until they get mature enough to slaughter. In fact, farmers routinely treat these animals
before
they get sick, because they know that their animals’ chances of contracting disease is extremely high given the conditions in which they are forced to live.

“In the United States, about 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock . . . ”
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—Jonathan Safran Foer,
Eating Animals

By adopting a plant-based diet, you will cut down on your own need for antibiotics, because your healthy, high-fiber, light way of eating will ensure a proper digestive process, including regular elimination. You will also cut down your consumption of these overused drugs by not ingesting them through animal products. This will keep that gut flora in check and your digestive system happy and healthy. It’s a win-win situation. As of July 2013, I have not had the need for antibiotics since cutting most animal products out of my diet. Not even once.

If you do need to take antibiotics, then make sure that you use them correctly. If you feel better after taking half of it, and stop taking them, then you are inadvertently leaving your body prone to bigger, better bugs because chances are, not all of those bugs were killed off. The army resurges! Take the entire prescription. Also, when you are done, please treat yourself to a twice-daily dose of
probiotics for a week, to help build up the good bacteria again. The good stuff is important!

It is becoming more common than not to consume foods that have been irradiated, genetically modified, and laced with loads of antibiotics. By being more diligent about our food purchases, we have the power to avoid consuming such filthy food. These food practices just sound like bad ideas designed to make life easier for those getting rich on feeding our country sub-standard, shady food.

Question:
If you knew that your food was irradiated, genetically modified, or pumped full of antibiotics, would you still purchase them?

As a child, I always had a sensitive stomach. My diet did not include a great variety of fruit, raw vegetables, or healthy fiber choices. As I became a teenager, the situation grew more severe. The scope of my food intake became even smaller as I started to experience extreme stomach pain, often causing me to sit out from sports and miss school. The situation continued to get worse, and I began to seek the advice from doctors and specialists. This culminated with emergency visits to the hospital, and then eventually I was admitted to Vancouver Children’s Hospital for surgery. There, I underwent many tests emerging with the official diagnosis of Crohn’s disease.

After being released from the hospital, I was placed on a complex series of medications and the situation became less severe with the bouts of discomfort being less intense.
I continued to suffer moderately through my teen years and into early adulthood, and it was not until I was in my late twenties that the effects of a proper diet really began to become obvious.

I continued to notice a change as I eliminated more and more processed foods, with my attention turning to vegetarian and raw choices. Because of this change in both my diet and my attitude towards food in general, I am happy to say that I have been problem and medication free now for many, many years.

T
he definition of food: “material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy; something that nourishes, sustains, or supplies.”
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Notice how the definition emphasizes the food’s ability to sustain growth, repair, furnish energy, and nourish? Now think of fast food, processed food, and all the chemicals tossed into the mix of what’s being eaten on a daily basis by the majority of North America.

A significant amount of people are not eating food. They’re just eating.

Reductionism is the act of removing targeted nutrients from the whole of one food (extracting calcium from broccoli, for example), and isolating it in order to either market this nutrient by itself in the form of a calcium supplement, or to add it to an existing preparation in order to make it more attractive to the consumer, such as “calcium fortified” orange juice.

The argument for reductionism sounds well intentioned: by adding a nutrient to orange juice that it does not naturally possess, the consumer can take advantage of ingesting that nutrient without having to eat broccoli. Win-win! Except . . .

Recent studies have shown that by removing the nutrient from its original whole food, it does not work as well, if at all.
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Scientists are beginning to understand that the complexity of that particular nutrient needs the environment of that whole food in order to activate the benefits. For example, perhaps there is an element to the food that helps that nutrient be absorbed when eaten, and without that element, it just won’t happen. This could be an “ah-ha moment” for all those who have hailed reductionism as the next best thing since (iron fortified) sliced bread. The result is this: the whole food will always be more nutritious, in every way, than the sum of its parts. For anyone experiencing digestive unease, you already know that we could all definitely benefit from better nutrient absorption.

Let’s be real. Processed food, fast food, refined sugar, bleached flour, and not enough healthy drinking water equals major constipation. Realistically, this is the diet of the average North American. We are all, literally, full of shit. You might think you’re having good bowel movements, but unless you are regularly moving your bowels without effort, in some significant way, at least once a day, then you are constipated, my friend. Chronic constipation is strongly correlated with IBS, diverticulitis, and colon cancer, and a symptom synonymous with obesity and heart disease. We need to take care of our tummies
and
our tushies! A vegetarian diet that is high in fiber is extremely effective in moving excess stool. All those fresh, raw vegetables and whole grains work their magic and provide some major relief on the bowel-busting front.

Major things to avoid are foods that are not actually . . . food. Anything that comes in a bag or a box is probably not very nutritionally dense. Also, packages that claim to be low in some ingredients and high in nutrients are probably good to avoid. Good food does not need to sell itself. Eggplant does not come with warning labels or stickers that rave about the nutritional value of it.
It doesn’t need to, because its eggplant. As in, ingredients: eggplant. That’s what it means to be a whole food.

In his very successful book,
In Defense of Food
, Michael Pollan observes that we are currently living in an age of “nutritionism.”
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In other words, our western diet is completely caught up in defining foods by their nutrients, and skipping over the bigger picture—the whole food itself. We all know that eating an apple is better for us than drinking fortified apple juice, and yet we still feel pretty good about ourselves when we pick up that juice, even though its completely devoid of fiber (among other things), which is essential to digestion and only available when you eat the actual apple.

This totally bizarre way of looking at food has been going on for decades, ever since it was deemed more profitable to market the nutrients of food, instead of the actual whole food. (Back to the apple.) I myself am completely guilty of buying into that concept without even thinking twice about it.

“Consumed mostly for convenience sake, processed and refined foods have led to a decline in health and to elevated medical costs.”
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—Brendan Brazier,
The Thrive Diet

The problem with nutrients being separated or isolated from the whole food (as Michael Pollan points out), is that we don’t even
know if they work outside of the original confines of nature. That is, you can mimic a nutrient (such as an antioxidant) and place it in something like a capsule, advertising it as an easy-to-consume, daily dose of antioxidants. However, we don’t even know if that nutrient has any health benefits once removed from its original source. Maybe that nutrient is supposed to work in conjunction with other nutrients from the whole food, and once isolated, has no benefit anymore. These are the kind of questions we need to be asking ourselves. An advertisement that comes to mind right now is a current television commercial advertising a leading brand of margarine. The message is that plant sterols are good for you, and they have been added to this margarine, so you should buy and use this product.

Hold up: can’t we just eat a plant?

We need to get back to basics, and remember that we all know a lot more about food than we think we do. When we choose a food to consume, we should always ask ourselves whether or not we would feed it to a small child. From a very young age, we were taught that fruits and vegetables were good. We were fed oatmeal as toddlers. Our mothers hydrated us with water in the summertime. Would you let a two-year-old drink a can of soda, or eat a bag of potato chips? I sure hope not! Let’s give ourselves the same respect and care that we would give to a two-year-old. Small children aren’t the only people that require optimum nourishment; we all do, every single day for our entire lives.

There are many people who feel uncomfortable about what they are eating, but our western diet is just so mainstream, that real food is portrayed as “health food,” and that phrase has a funny connotation attached to it. It’s dumbfounding just how so many people can stare at someone eating a beet and endive salad or a bowl of steamed soybeans, and say something like “I’m not eating that . . . that’s health food!” To this I would reply, “No, it’s food . . . as in, whole vegetables and real, unprocessed ingredients. That bag of chips you’re holding, now that’s not food. You can’t even pronounce what the ingredients are!” Which brings me to my next bit here . . .

First of all, if you don’t know what an ingredient is, or can’t pronounce it, then I seriously recommend that you don’t eat it. Some of these things are known to be composed of carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals that can wreak havoc on your body. Others have not been thoroughly tested, and should make us nervous for what we might find out about them in the future. None of these items need to be included in a healthy diet.

In Your Food

The following list of additives is not conclusive. Processed food is loaded with these ingredients, which help with the preservation, taste,
appearance, and overall marketability of crappy, fake food. I dare you to pull a few items out of your pantry and compare this list to the listed ingredients on their boxes. If you are absorbing these chemicals by eating them, then obviously they are going straight to your digestive system, right? They do damage there! We are discovering more and more that these additives are either not tested, “generally recognized as safe”
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(still so confused about the safety of that title), sort of safe in very small quantities, used to not be labelled as safe but now are, or fully known to be derived of a cancer causing substance. I’m not joking. A recent news story to sweep the United States in 2012 has been the decision to suspend Coke and Pepsi’s current recipe of caramel coloring, which has been identified as carcinogenic:

“Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. are changing the way they make the caramel coloring used in their sodas as a result of a California law that mandates drinks containing a certain level of carcinogens come with a cancer warning label.”
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Are we serious, here? Why are we knowingly poisoning each other?! The following is a list of items to avoid:

1. Artificial Colors. Artificial colors were originally derived from coal-tar dyes and petrochemicals. Coal-tar dyes are known cancer-causing agents, and over the last few decades, many of these dyes have been banned because of the fact that they have been deemed as such. “Today, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) only allows ten colors in foods, four of which are restricted to specific uses.”
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   This restriction definitely suggests that some risks remain, and in my personal opinion, we should all be wary. If you can buy food that has not been colored in any way, I would definitely suggest doing so. Better yet, make your own!
   
2. Artificial Flavors. The term “artificial flavors” refers to countless laboratory-created chemicals which have been designed to mimic the natural flavors found in nature.
   A single artificial flavoring can be created from tons of individual chemical compounds, making it extremely difficult to narrow down a single harmful ingredient. New studies have suggested that artificial flavors can cause changes in an individual’s behavior.
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   In fact, children who have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and autism have been found to be capable of much different behavior once additives, including artificial flavors, have been eliminated from their diets. Makes you wonder how many more needless prescriptions are out there . . .
   
3. Aspartame. This well-known sugar substitute is sold commercially under such names as Equal and NutraSweet. It’s not recommended for pregnant women or children,
   ¹⁷⁹
   which really makes you think that no one should probably consume it, right? If you can’t ingest it in a sensitive state for fear it could cause health concerns, then perhaps we should all be avoiding it.
   
4. Astaxanthin. Because close to 90% of salmon sold in grocery stores today come from fish farms and not an actual river, farmers add this chemical to the salmon to give it its desired pink color. Astaxanthin is produced from coal tar, the same carcinogen that food dyes are derived from.
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   Your farmed salmon is essentially being colored for you, with the added benefit of maybe contributing to your impending cancer. Salmon soufflé, anyone?
   
5. Benzoic Acid/Sodium Benzoate. These preservatives are often added to meat and meat-like products. They are used in many foods, including drinks, low-fat or low-sugar products, breakfast cereals and processed meats. Both of them are known to impair the normal functioning of digestive enzymes (not good news for digestive sufferers), and can cause migraine “headaches, stomach upset, asthma
   attacks and hyperactivity in children.”
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   (Yikes!) For anyone with a digestive issue, this one is definitely one to give up.
   
6. Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) and Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT). These antioxidants are petroleum-based chemicals that are added to foods to prevent those foods from going bad. They are mostly found in snack food like crackers and potato chips, and meat products, such as sausages and dehydrated meats. The World Health Organization recognizes BHA a “possible human carcinogen.”
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   Lovely.
   
7. Canthaxanthin. Egg producers use this chemical pigment to make egg yolks more yellow-colored. Although only teensy amounts are generally used, research has shown that this chemical has the ability to potentially cause damage to the retina of the eyes.
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   Yucky. This one may not affect digestion, but you kind of need your eyes, too . . . just sayin’.
   
8. Emulsifiers. These mixtures are used to extend the shelf life of bread products and allow liquids that wouldn’t normally mix well to combine more smoothly. (Think of oil and water.) “Emulsifying agents used in foods include agar, albumin, alginates, casein, egg yolk, glycerol monostearate, xanthan gums, Irish moss, lecithin, and soaps.”
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   Many of the ingredients just listed are very prevalent in processed foods. Just extra stuff that can cause allergic reactions that we do not need in our bodies.
   
9. High Fructose Corn Syrup. This super inexpensive sweetener helps maintain moisture while preserving freshness. The sheer quantity of this sweetener, used primarily in processed foods, is completely outstanding. Because it’s a cheap way to get addictive sugar into cheap foods, it is everywhere. Consumption of this product in large quantities has been named a major factor in coronary heart disease (shocker!), which is the leading cause of death among men and women
   both in Canada and the United States. It also raises cholesterol levels, while making blood cells more prone to clotting and greatly accelerating the aging process.
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   Stay away from this! It’s gross, and almost always genetically modified.
   
10. Methylcyclopropene. This is a gas that is used to help preserve apples and pears (the more kid-friendly fruits), for around a year, and bananas for up to a month. Sulphur dioxide does the same thing when sprayed on grapes.
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    How many of you have bought apples in February and wondered how they look so good still? Ugghhh . . .
    
11. Monosodium Glutamate. (MSG) We all know this one, because of our awareness of it being commonly added to Chinese food to enhance flavor. MSG can be found in tons of processed products, not just chicken chow mien. MSG has been known to cause allergic responses, such as “tightening in the chest, headaches and a burning sensation in the neck and forearms.”
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    (Getting something for nothing from something good for nothing . . . )
    
12. Olestra. You know it’s bad when the FDA requires a warning label on foods containing this, right? But who ever sees the label? This totally fake fat was approved for use in snack foods several years ago, despite objections from dozens of researchers in food science. Olestra inhibits our ability to absorb good nutrients, and has also been known to cause “anal leakage” (ummm . . . hello!) and other gastrointestinal issues.
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    Wow. Talk about a bum deal.
    
13. Hydrogenated (or even “partially” hydrogenated) Oils. Hydrogenation occurs when oils are heated so that they become solids, and partial hydrogenation occurs when they become semi-solid, like butter. Examples are shortening and margarine. These oils are incredibly bad for you, because they become a denser form of fat than they were originally. They can be addictive, and definitely are known to lead to weight
    problems, a slowed metabolism, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
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    Seriously, if you are using margarine, throw it out. (Not that it will ever break down; it’s also really bad for the environment, too.) Instead, if you really feel you must find a replacement, use Earth Balance Buttery Spread for a vegan option or old-school butter if you don’t plan on giving up dairy.
    
14. Sodium Nitrite and Nitrate. These chemicals have been around for a long time, working to preserve meat. They are known to cause allergic reactions, and exacerbate cancer cell growth. These beauties are found in deli meats, hotdogs, bacon, breakfast sausages,
    etc.
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    In Kris Carr’s bestselling book,
    Crazy, Sexy, Diet
    , she calls these meats “L&A” meats—meats that are made from lips and assholes.
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    Hungry? Remember: organic produce is made from water, sunshine, and love. A far cry from L&A. (Shudder . . . )