Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty (6 page)

We now know that chemicals are everywhere and that they are insidious. The toxic load they put on the body is awful, but there is another reason they impede weight loss. Here it is: our bodies crave nutrients, yet we eat foods and so-called diet foods that have no real nutritional value. This
leaves us craving more and more of this bad food, and as a result we eat more and more chemicals and more and more preservatives. We ignorantly consume genetically modified foods, not realizing that these foods are void of nutrition and can lead to weight gain and disease.

Why do we keep trying to outthink Mother Nature?

Look at corn and soy. They are some of the top genetically modified crops. You think you’re choosing a healthy alternative, but you’re not. All genetically modified (GM) soy contains fat, which is a great carrier of toxins. A high soy intake has been linked with lower thyroid function, so if you are switching to soy products for health and weight loss, it could actually be working against you.

Before we go further, it might help to know what I mean by genetically modified foods. These are foods that have been genetically altered to withstand spraying with pesticides or to introduce other new characteristics. In modifying the seed, we don’t know what other effects might result. Might the modification produce new toxins? Trigger allergies? Increase antibiotic resistance? In a recent study of rats fed a diet exclusively of genetically modified foods, all the rats developed organ damage, and many died.

In the movie
Food Inc.
, writer Michael Pollan says, “The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous ten thousand. You go into the supermarket and you see pictures of farmers, the picket fence, the silo, the thirties farmhouse, and the green grass. It’s the spinning of this pastoral fantasy. The American supermarket has on average forty-seven thousand products. There are no seasons in the American supermarket. Now there are tomatoes all year round, grown halfway around the world, sprayed with pesticides, picked when they were green, and ripened
with ethylene gas.” It’s the same with strawberries, bananas … and the list goes on and on.

This is just the beginning. Until recently we just didn’t think about things like pesticides and ethylene gas. How are these new chemicals affecting our health? We are now engineering our foods so that they don’t go bad in the refrigerator or become rancid as quickly. But at what price to us?

Corn is the main ingredient in feed for chicken, hogs, and cattle. It’s cheap. In the United States today, 30 percent of our agricultural land base is being planted with corn, largely driven by government policy. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) can be found in virtually everything, and since its introduction in the 1950s, it has been one of the main contributors to the incredible rise in diabetes here.

According to Pollan, “Corn is the great raw material. You get that big fat kernel of starch and break it down and reassemble it.” This is how they make high-fructose corn syrup; it is also where we get maltodextrin, diglycerides, and many of the other unpronounceable ingredients in processed food that we’ve become so used to seeing. They are now part of everyday life. We have to understand how widespread this is to grasp the profound effect chemicals are having on our health and the rise in obesity.

When you go to a supermarket, what looks like a cornucopia of choice is not. There is an illusion of diversity, but actually there are only a few large companies involved, and so much of our industrial food turns out to be clever rearrangements of corn.

Corn has conquered the world in a lot of ways. It is a remarkable plant,
and land that used to produce 20 bushels of corn an acre can now produce 200 bushels an acre, which is an astonishing achievement for breeders (I wouldn’t call them farmers any longer). Chemical fertilizers also deserve credit, as do pesticides.

But again I ask: at what cost to us is this remarkable achievement? Disease and obesity are at all-time highs. A diet of high-fructose corn syrup and refined carbohydrates leads to spikes of insulin and gradually a wearing down of the system by which our body metabolizes sugar.

We’re now even feeding corn to fish. Whether we are eating farmed tilapia or salmon, we’re eating corn. Think about it—we are teaching fish to eat corn, and cattle have been retrained to go against their natural evolutionary inclinations to eat grass. Now we are feeding them corn to fatten them up cheaply. Yes, corn is high in starch and is fattening—
very fattening
—and our protein is being fed a diet of it. Then we are eating that animal, which fattens
us
up. Add to that the numerous products we all have on our pantry shelves loaded with corn derivatives, and you get the picture.

The industrial food system is always looking for greater efficiency, but many new steps in efficiency lead to problems. One result: feed corn to cattle and the dangerous
E. coli
O157:h7 bacterium hits the world stage. How does this happen? It’s their new diet of corn, which is not natural for cattle, giving them infections and making them less healthy (and since they are not getting the proper nutrients, we don’t either). Combine that with the overuse of antibiotics and the filth in feedlots where cattle stand ankle deep in their manure all day long, and it’s a recipe for disaster. When these feces-covered cattle are sent to the slaughterhouse, they are thrown on top of each other, and contaminated meat gets mixed up with noncontaminated meat. That’s how
E. coli
gets into our meat supply. Remember the poor little boy who died from
E. coli
–tainted meat from a Jack in the Box? This is the meat that ends up in fast-food restaurants, the food of choice for the majority of Americans.

Gone are the pastures with cows lazily grazing on natural green grass. Recently I drove up Highway 101 from southern California to Big Sur
for one of my favorite vacations, a stay at the Post Ranch Inn. Along the way I was pleased and delighted to see gently rolling hills covered with beautiful green grass, where brown and white cows were happily grazing. In describing this pastoral scene to a supplier I work with, I proudly pointed out that I had been touched by this beautiful scene. What she said shocked me: “I know it looks perfect, but regrettably, this is not the end stage; this is just a temporary stop on their way to the feedlots. Most all American cows are sent to the feedlots, and once they get there, they are all shoved together with no room to move. Then they are force-fed corn to fatten them up. There’s more money in fat cows. It’s pretty difficult to find grass-fed cows in the United States anymore.”

Yet according to Michael Pollan, if you take cattle off their corn diet, within five days they will shed 80 percent of the dangerous strain of
E. coli
in their gut. But does the cattle industry do this? No. Instead they use ammonium hydroxide to try to kill it. Ammonia kills bacteria, but it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The end result is more chemicals for us—plus the added bonus of more disease and more obesity.

Imagine.

We need nutrients for survival. To be healthy and thin, we need real food that has not been sprayed with poison or had its genes tinkered with. Unfortunately, genetically modified foods are not labeled as such in the United States. That is why organic food is the healthy choice—truly, the only real
food
choice.

Harmful foods have invaded our pantries without most of us ever realizing that by consuming them
we
are playing a huge part in contributing
to the epidemic of obesity and poor health. Think about the craziness of this. The world is on a low-fat craze, yet obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are at an all-time high! Obviously what we have been doing isn’t working. Low-fat foods, diet foods, and foods laden with chemicals are not the answer.

The body operates on nutrients. They are essential to life and health. You can’t be healthy if you are not getting the proper nutrients, which includes healthy oils. But things have gone so wrong in today’s world, and these changes are tragic for us.

Food is nowhere near as nutritious and nutrient-dense as it used to be. For instance, take apples. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, apples today have fewer minerals than apples grown in 1990. That means you have to eat more apples to get the same nutritional value your grandparents received from eating just one! This is only one example. Our fruits and vegetables are now largely grown in mineral-depleted soil, so the nutrient content is dramatically reduced compared to before. Because of this, our bodies now require proper supplementation to get the needed minerals and vitamins.

Essential nutrients play a big role in everything about your health, including your ability to burn stored body fat and maintain a healthy weight. If you don’t get enough of the essential vitamins and minerals to enable your organs and glands to function properly, your health will suffer. Weight gain and degenerative disease are connected; a lack of nutrients combined with the slowdown of our metabolisms creates hormonal imbalance and sets our bodies up for disease. Unfortunately, not much attention is paid to mineral deficiency in orthodox medicine. Yet replacement helps to speed up the weight loss process, with the bonus of better health.

Ever wonder why people who walk around all day drinking diet sodas are not thin? The average diet soda addict drinks anywhere from a six-pack to a case of diet soda
daily
. Because diet sodas are made from chemicals, there are no nutrients for the body to extract, and this confuses the brain, whose job it is to look at all food as building blocks. When you drink diet soda, the brain finds nothing recognizable as nutrition to make healthy cells; as a result, the brain tries again and again to get fed, triggering cravings for more. When you are depleted because of toxicity, you tend to go for sugars and carbohydrates … or more diet sodas. This results in more and more chemicals and further activates cravings for foods that make you fat.

I was appalled when the makers of soft drinks decided to oblige the First Lady’s campaign to end childhood obesity by banning sugared soft drinks from vending machines in schools. Why? Surely it’s great to get rid of the soda … except the sugared versions are being replaced by diet sodas! The chemicals in diet sodas have been directly linked to the worst kinds of brain tumors and are major contributors to obesity.

According to Dr. Russell Blaylock, “There is powerful evidence that MSG and other excitotoxic chemical food additives [such as the artificial
sweetener aspartame] induce extreme obesity that lasts a lifetime (it’s related to a loss of leptin receptors in the hypothalamus). Recent studies have also shown that aspartame induces obesity in a number of people, probably for the same reason. The rise in childhood obesity is accompanied by a rise in metabolic syndrome, which is also produced by early life exposure to MSG and probably aspartame. Often forgotten is that soy contains high levels of glutamate and can trigger similar reactions as MSG. Because so many children have been exposed to high levels of MSG, as they age we see a large number of people from fifty on with uncontrollable obesity. The characteristic of this form of obesity is that it is very difficult to remove with dieting and is quite resistant to exercise. The astronomical rise in type 2 diabetes is in large part secondary to early MSG exposure, and when combined with the massive intake of HFCS [high-fructose corn syrup] and simple sugars, the rates go up even higher. Stopping the excitotoxin exposure is vital for ending obesity and for the sake of health for all people.”

According to J. J. Virgin in
Six Weeks to Sleeveless and Sexy
, “In a recent study, rats were given sugar water and then rat food. They ate what they needed to maintain their weight. Then the same rats were given artificially sweetened water, and again they ate what they needed to maintain their weight. The problem arose when the rats went back to drinking the sugar water, as they could no longer correlate the degree of sweetness with the amount of calories, so they overate.” When you eat sweet, you crave sweet. As this author points out, “If you are trying to retrain your taste buds to perceive a blueberry or an apple as delicious and sweet, it will be impossible to do so if you keep confusing your taste buds to think that artificially supersweetened jam is the level of sweetness that sets the bar.” Again, not to worry. I will provide several natural sweetening solutions in the coming chapters.

At this point in your life, your body is weighed down by a toxic burden and cannot handle any more chemicals. Fresh organic food is the best place to start healing, and in eating it you feed the little powerhouses (mitochondria) that fuel your weight loss and every vital system in your body. Say goodbye to the chemicals and poisons you have unconsciously taken in until now.