Organic, Free Range, Grass Fed, and More

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Hank Rouse

These days, the topic of what’s in food is probably less important than what you’re likely to hear about food. People can go for years without discussing their diets, but it’s practically impossible to go a day without hearing terms like organic, omega, or carb. Upon hearing one of these terms, you’ve found evidence that advertisers have used their market research tools and, thus, determined that they need to shove these words down your throat, especially since you probably have no idea what they mean. You see, as long as you don’t know what they mean, they can spin them however they like. Spin: it’s not just for politicians anymore. But these terms do have meaning. And once you understand them, they can help you make smarter food choices.

Foods without labels
Some foods don’t require a label, which makes them harder to spin. These are mainly very fresh and haven’t been tampered with so, in general, they are your healthy alternatives. The spin doctors here play both sides of the fence. When it comes to non-labeled foods, the important issue is how these foods were raised. When it became clear that the reason certain companies could offer lower-priced goods was because they used inferior raising methods, those who didn’t use inferior methods began using terms to help distinguish themselves. When this affected the business of the former, they jumped into the fray and the spin games began. But that’s getting ahead of our topic. Let’s begin by defining which foods don’t require labels.

First are foods like apples, oranges, broccoli, and many other things that you can buy in the state that they come from the earth. Known as fruits, vegetables, and herbs, they’re entirely different than that soda you just bought with “real fruit flavor.” These foods have parts that aren’t really foods, either. Called fiber, it’s the indigestible part of a plant. It has no nutrient value, but it’s still an ultra-important part of your diet because it does all kinds of things, including cleaning out our digestive tract and soaking up excess cholesterol. It’s very important that our diets feature plants. They are loaded with nutrients and fiber and have no man-made ingredients (okay, some have pesticides, which we’ll get to in a minute). When we do things like cook or make juice from these items, they lose their nutrients and fiber, and get a label.

Next are grains and legumes. Things like rice and beans—also plants—these foods have more protein and calories than fruits and veggies. They are less easily found in their natural state. Rice, for example, often has its shell stripped, so it’s white. Grains get turned into breads and crackers, often at the expense of their healthiest ingredients. Beans get smashed and have things added to them. As a rule, the closer you can get a legume or grain to its original state, the better it is for you.

Finally, we have meats and dairy products. Nowadays, unless you live on a farm, you probably have to buy these with labels. That’s mainly due to suspect growing and harvesting practices. This topic is mainly one for Politics class, but we’re going to look at the consumer end of it next. Hey! What are you rolling your eyes at? Yes, you, the guy in the white suit taking up two seats. What are you dressed like that for? Going to the Kentucky Derby after class? Well, pal. I believe that this subject concerns you more than anyone, so pay attention.

These animal products are loaded with protein, vitamins, and sometimes carbs and healthy fats. But we need to be careful with them because meats (other than fish) and dairy products have a lot of saturated fat. You can buy all of these products with much of this fat removed. For the most part, this is recommended, which we’ll cover in the “fat-free” portion of the lecture later on.

Organic and other terms for natural foods
Now it’s time to get to some good jargon. You’ve heard all of these terms, probably while you’ve been considering buying any of the aforementioned food items. But just what do they mean?

Organic
Organic means living, so organic foods are supposed to be alive or, at least, recently alive. Originally, “organic” meant produce that hadn’t been sprayed with inorganic things, like pesticides. But now you’ll see “organic ingredients” in boxed, jarred, and canned foods, which can be confusing. Organic was once a term used only by the folks who showed up at your weekly farmers’ market. Then, word started to get out about large-scale farmers spraying nasty pesticides on their crops, pesticides that would still be on those crops when we bought them. Most people are pretty sure they don’t want to eat something made to kill animals, so when the little “organic” guys’ businesses started to feel the impact, the big guys just started slapping an “organic” label on anything, until the government had to step in.

Now we have an imperfect system. Organic rules can be fudged to some degree, but it seems to be getting better and not worse. It’s made the large growers a bit more cognizant about what they add to or spray on their crops. Organic has also trickled up. So now packaged foods using “organic ingredients” are labeled as such. But be prudent because the fine print will tell you how much is organic. Lobbyists haggle over how much organic stuff needs to be in a product for the word “organic” to appear on the label, and the amount has changed and will continue to change. So you can see a product with a big “organic” on its label with very little organic inside.

Also, many farmers claim that organic growing remains behind the times. They argue that their products don’t seem to grow as healthily using organic standards because the classification needs reworking. This is no doubt true, as we’ll probably never be able to create a perfect system.

Bottom line: “Organic” on a label is probably better, but you should read the fine print. The more concerned the farmer or rancher, the more information they want to provide. A company that spends a lot of effort to list its practices is probably better than one that won’t go to the trouble. As a general rule, those going out of their way to meet organic standards probably care more. It’s not perfect, but buying “organic” still stacks the odds in your favor.

Grass fed
Cattle were once all grass fed. They lived on prairies and ate grass, ’cause that’s all there was to eat. On the prairie, that grass is nutrient rich because of the soil. Cattle that ate it grew big and strong, and when we ate them, we grew big and strong. Then, some guy figured out that cattle, if they had to, would eat grain. This meant he could build houses and strip malls on the prairie, put the cattle into little fenced areas and feed them grain, and make a lot more money. The downside was that grain didn’t have the same nutrient value (like eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts instead of broccoli), so the cows weren’t so big and strong. To make them look like they once did, he started shooting them with things like steroids, so that the cattle started looking like Jose Conseco, and all was good in the world. Except that when we ate the cattle, they didn’t have the same nutrient value. This meant we ate the same calories with less nutrient value. When this happened, we got fat.

For a while, we were none the wiser. Then, people started getting sick and dying because some genius, low on grain, started feeding cows parts of other cows mixed with the grain to make more money. Cows aren’t carnivorous, like animals with sharp teeth, so this didn’t work well and bad stuff like E. coli started showing up in meat. Anyway, feeding cows other cows is now against the law, but lobbyists were also able to make a deal in which it’s nearly impossible for meat companies to be sued, so who knows what they’re actually up to.

Bottom line: Even though meat lobbyists have been hammering away at the “grass fed” requirements, it still means that the meat is likely to be much better in quality.

Free range
Cattle weren’t the only animals out on the prairie. Birds were there, too. In fact, birds were all over the place because they have wings and can, you know, fly. This became problematic when folks decided they wanted to raise them on farms. You listening, Colonel? Figuring that if birds couldn’t fly and, well, they would then need no space at all, “farmers” started loading them all together in tiny little pens. Irritated—naturally—the birds would peck at each other and cause general turmoil, so good ol’ Foster the farmer put them in little cages wherein they couldn’t get at each other—for their entire lives!

Since this isn’t Animal Cruelty class, let’s just talk about how healthy these birds are when they grow up and we eat them. When you get out and exercise, how does that help you? Hmm, since some of you can’t answer this, I’ll tell you. You get healthier. Your body systems work better and you get more muscle. Muscle is meat, like the part of a chicken that we want to eat. If you sit in a small room for a long time, how do you tend to look or feel? Answer: You get fat. You get sick. You die young. Take two chickens. Let one run around and eat stuff it finds growing out of the ground. Put the other in a 2-foot-square box and feed it junk food. Which one do you want to eat?

Bottom line: Only eat free-range fowl, which is harder than ever to find now that new grades of distinction have surfaced. Again, to stay on top of it, you’ll need to stay educated. To reiterate, the more concerned the company, the more likely they will want to educate you.

Farm raised
This term has to do with fish. For those of you who are confused, that is natural. Fish live in water. We live on land. How the heck do we farm them? The obvious answer is to put them in big aquariums, but that would be too expensive. Instead, they raise fish in fenced-off areas and treat them a bit like the birds mentioned above. This tends to cause a lot of damage for the ecosystem in general, but this isn’t Environment class. We don’t offer environment classes because they don’t help your standardized testing. Anyway, the effect on the fish depends a lot on the type of fish. Some, like catfish that naturally live in sluggish conditions, do okay, while others, like salmon, do terribly. In fact, salmon are migratory and swim for most of their lives. Keeping them in a “tank” wreaks havoc on their lifestyle. Farm-raised salmon don’t even have red meat, like they do naturally, and are dyed red for market. Do you really want to eat fish that’s been dyed red?

Bottom line: Avoid farm-raised fish when possible. Always avoid farm-raised salmon.

Local
Some of you are no doubt wondering why this rather boring-sounding label is taking up more shelf space lately. After all, isn’t the gourmand taught to eat from exotic and far-off lands? Who, with ample means, wouldn’t always opt for Maine lobster, Norwegian caviar, and water from New Zealand?

One concerned for the health of the planet might be the obvious answer. You don’t have to be Al Gore to deduce that using 500,000 gallons of gas so that you can sip from a melting glacier near Christchurch might create a ripple effect with negative implications for the planet. Buying locally allows us to play watchdog. It’s easy to check out your local dairy. Just ask around. You don’t even need to research. Good businesses tend to get talked about in the community. And if you suspect that a local business is wielding a bit too much power and influence over your neighbors, that’s probably all the information you need. But your local Chambers of Commerce, Better Business Bureaus, and independent news organizations are keen to help out should your scuttlebutt network not be broad enough.

Bottom line: Local companies should always be considered first.

Dirty Secrets of food processing Industry

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Hank Rouse

We have always processed our food; this is an activity that is uniquely human. We chop, soak, cook and ferment our food – as well as grind and dry – these are all types of processing.

Traditional processing has two functions: to make food more digestible and to preserve it for use during times when food isn’t readily available. Nutritious, long-lasing processed foods including pemmican, hard sausage and old-fashioned meat puddings and haggis, as well as grain products, dairy products, pickles—everything from wine and spirits to lacto-fermented condiments. Farmers and artisans—bread makers, cheese makers, distillers, millers and so forth—processed the raw ingredients into delicious foods that retained their nutritional content over many months or even years, and kept the profits on the farm and in the farming communities where they belonged.

Unfortunately, in modern times, we have substituted local artisanal processing with factory and industrial processing, which actually diminishes the quality of the food, rather than making it more nutritious and digestible. Industrial processing depends upon sugar, white flour, processed and hydrogenated oils, synthetic food additives and vitamins, heat treatment and the extrusion of grains.

BREAKFAST CEREALS
Let’s look at the processing involved in the typical American breakfast of cereal, skim milk and orange juice. Cold breakfast cereals are produced by a process called extrusion. Grains are mixed with water, processed into a slurry and placed in a machine called an extruder. The grains are forced out of a tiny hole at high temperature and pressure, which shapes them into little o’s or flakes or shreds. Individual grains passed through the extruder expand to produce puffed wheat, oats and rice. These products are then subjected to sprays that give a coating of oil and sugar to seal off the cereal from the ravages of milk and to give it crunch.

In his book Fighting the Food Giants, biochemist Paul Stitt describes the extrusion process, which treats the grains with very high heat and pressure, and notes that the processing destroys much of their nutrients. It denatures the fatty acids; it even destroys the synthetic vitamins that are added at the end of the process. The amino acid lysine, a crucial nutrient, is especially damaged by the extrusion process.

Even boxed cereals sold in health food stores are made using the extrusion process. They are made with the same kind of machines and mostly in the same factories. The only “advances” claimed in the extrusion process are those that will cut cost, regardless of how the process alters the nutrient content of the product.

With so many millions of boxes of cereal sold each year, one would expect to see published studies showing the effects of these cereals on animals and humans. But breakfast cereals are a multi-billion dollar industry that has created huge fortunes for a few people. A box of cereal containing a penny’s worth of grain sells for four or five dollars in the grocery store–there is probably no other product on earth with such a large profit margin. These profits have paid for lobbying efforts and journal sponsorships that have effectively kept any research about extruded grains out of the scientific literature and convinced government officials that there is no difference between a natural grain of wheat and a grain that has been altered by the extrusion process.

THE RAT EXPERIMENTS
Unpublished research indicates that the extrusion process turns the proteins in grains into neurotoxins. Stitt describes an experiment, conducted in 1942 by a cereal company but locked away in the company’s file cabinet, in which four sets of rats were given special diets. One group received plain whole wheat grains, water and synthetic vitamins and minerals. A second group received puffed wheat (an extruded cereal), water and the same nutrient solution. A third set was given water and white sugar. A fourth set was given nothing but water and synthetic nutrients. The rats that received the whole wheat lived over a year on this diet. The rats that got nothing but water and vitamins lived about two months. The animals on a white sugar and water diet lived about a month. The study showed that the rats given the vitamins, water and all the puffed wheat they wanted died within two weeks—even before the rats that got no food at all. These results suggest that there was something very toxic in the puffed wheat itself! Proteins are very similar to certain toxins in molecular structure, and the pressure of the puffing process may produce chemical changes that turn a nutritious grain into a poisonous substance.

Another unpublished experiment was carried out in 1960. Researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were given eighteen laboratory rats. These were divided into three groups: one group received cornflakes and water; a second group was given the cardboard box that the cornflakes came in and water; the control group received rat chow and water. The rats in the control group remained in good health throughout the experiment. The rats eating the box became lethargic and eventually died of malnutrition. The rats receiving the cornflakes and water died before the rats that were eating the box! (The first box rat died the day the last cornflake rat died.) Furthermore, before death, the cornflakes-eating rats developed aberrant behavior, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions. Autopsy revealed dysfunction of the pancreas, liver and kidneys and degeneration of the nerves of the spine, all signs of insulin shock. The startling conclusion of this study was that there was more nourishment in the box than in the cornflakes. This experiment was designed as a joke, but the results were far from funny.

Most Americans eat boxed cereals today. Because these are fortified with synthetic nutrients, the USDA can claim that they are as healthy as the grains from which they are made. Many of these cereals contain at least 50 percent of calories as sugar. Those sold in health food stores may be made of whole grains and fewer sweeteners. However, these whole grain extruded cereals are probably more dangerous than their refined grain counterparts sold in the supermarkets, because they are higher in protein, and it is the proteins in these cereals that are rendered toxic by this type of processing.

THE EXTRUSION PROCESS
When we put cereals through an extruder, it alters the structure of the proteins. Zeins, which comprise the majority of proteins in corn, are located in spherical organelles called protein bodies. The scientific literature does contain one study on extruded grains, which investigated changes in protein body, shape and release of encapsulated alpha-zeins as a result of the extrusion processing. Researchers found that during extrusion, the protein bodies are completely disrupted and the alpha-zeins dispersed. The results suggest that the zeins in cornflakes are not confined to rigid protein bodies but can interact with each other and other components of the system, forming new compounds that are foreign to the human body. The extrusion process breaks down the organelles and disperses the proteins, which then become toxic. When the proteins are disrupted in this way, it can adversely affect the nervous system, as indicated by the cornflake experiment.

OLD FASHIONED PORRIDGE
There is only one way to put these companies out of business, and that is not to eat their food. So, what are you going to have for breakfast instead of cheerios and corn flakes? Eggs–any style–are always a good choice. As for grain, old-fashioned porridges made from non-extruded grains provide excellent nourishment at an economical price. Grains such as oats should be cut or rolled and then soaked overnight in a warm, acidic medium to neutralize the many anti-nutrients naturally occurring in grains, such as irritating tannins, digestion-blocking enzyme inhibitors and mineral-blocking phytic acid. This treatment can also gently break down complex proteins in grains. You soak the grains in warm water plus one tablespoon of something acidic, like whey, yoghurt, lemon juice or vinegar. The next morning, your grain will cook in just a few minutes. It’s best to eat your porridge with butter or cream, like our grandparents did. The nutrients in the dairy fats are needed in order for you to absorb the nutrients in the grains. Without the fat-soluble vitamins A, D and K2, you cannot absorb the minerals in your food. Furthermore, the fats in butter and cream slow down the release of glucose into the bloodstream, so that your blood sugar remains stable throughout the morning.

MILK
Milk is one of nature’s most perfect foods. Most of our milk comes from a sacred animal, the cow. Today, however, in the industrial system, we imprison cows indoors for their entire lives; we give them inappropriate feed such as soy, bakery waste, citrus peel cake and the swill from ethanol production, foods that cows are not designed to eat. The confinement environment and the inappropriate feed make these cows sick, so they need antibiotics and other drugs. We breed them to give huge amounts of milk, and give them hormones to increase milk production as well. These cows produce large quantities of watery milk with only half the amount of fat compared to milk produced by old-fashioned cows eating green grass. Then this milk is shipped to factories for processing.

Inside the plants, the milk is completely remade. As described by Emily Green in the Los Angeles Times, centrifuges separate the milk into fat, protein and various other solids and liquids. Once segregated, these are recombined at specific levels set for whole, lowfat and no-fat milks. Of the reconstituted milks, whole milk will most closely approximate original cow’s milk. What is left over will go into butter, cream, cheese, dried milk, and a host of other milk products. The dairy industry promotes lowfat milk and skim milk because they can make more money on the butterfat when used in ice cream. When they remove the fat to make reduced-fat milks, they replace it with powdered milk concentrate, which is formed by high temperature spray drying.

Then the milk is sent by tanker trucks (which are not refrigerated) to bottling plants. The milk is pasteurized at 161oF for fifteen seconds by rushing it past superheated stainless steel plates. If the temperature is 230oF (over the boiling point), the milk is considered ultrapasteurized. This ultrapasteurized milk will have a distinct cooked milk taste, but it is sterile and shelf stable. It may be sold in the refrigerated section of the supermarket so the consumer will think it is fresh, but it does not need to be. The milk is also homogenized by a pressure treatment that breaks down the fat globules so the milk won’t separate. Once processed, the milk will last for weeks, not just days.

Processing makes the milk difficult to digest and renders the proteins allergenic. Animals fed pasteurized milk exclusively develop nutrient deficiencies and become infertile after several generations.

Fortunately, Real Milk from pasture-fed cows, milk that is not pasteurized, processed or homogenized, is becoming more widely available. In fact, demand for Real Milk is growing rapidly. To find Real Milk in your area, visit realmilk.com

In order to make powdered milk, fluid is forced through a tiny hole at high pressure and then blown out into the air. This causes a lot of nitrates to form, and the cholesterol in the milk becomes oxidized. Contrary to popular opinion, cholesterol is not a demon but your best friend; you don’t have to worry about consuming foods containing cholesterol, except that you do not want to consume oxidized cholesterol. Evidence indicates that oxidized cholesterol can initiate the process of atherosclerosis.

Powdered milk is added to reduced-fat milks and milk products to give them body. So, when you consume reduced-fat milk or yoghurt, thinking that it will help you avoid heart disease, you are actually consuming oxidized cholesterol, which can initiate the process of heart disease.

ORANGE JUICE
Now, let’s turn to the orange juice, part of our “healthy breakfast” of cereal, lowfat milk and juice. An article from Processed and Prepared Foods describes a “a new orange juice processing plant is completely automated and can process up to 1,800 tons of oranges per day to produce frozen concentrate, single strength juice, oil extracted from the peel and cattle feed.” The new method of producing juice puts the whole orange in the machine. Another abstract states: “Various acid sprays for improving fruit peel quality and increasing juice yield are added to these processed oranges.” These compounds are added to extract as much juice as possible, as well as the oil out of the skin. The conventional orange crop is sprayed heavily with pesticides called cholinesterase inhibitors, which are very toxic to the nervous system. When they put the whole oranges into the vats and squeeze them, all that pesticide goes into the juice. Then they add acids to get every single bit of juice out of these oranges. So commercial orange juice can be a very toxic soup. This may be one reason that consumption of fruit juice is associated with increased rates of dementia.

What about the peel used for cattle feed? The dried, left-over citrus peel from orange juice production is processed into cakes, which are still loaded with cholinesterase inhibitors. Mark Purdey, in England, has shown how this practice correlates with mad cow disease. The use of organophosphates either as a spray on the cows or as a component of their feed, causes degeneration of the brain and nervous system in the cow, and if it’s doing it to the cow, there’s a possibility it may be doing it to you also.

The U.S. government tries to give the impression that pasteurization of juice is necessary to ensure our safety. However, it might surprise you to learn that researchers have found fungus that is resistant to pressure and heat in processed juices. They found that seventeen percent of Nigerian packages of orange juice and twenty percent of mango and tomato juices contained these heat-resistant fungi. They also found E. coli in the orange juice; it was pressure resistant and had survived pasteurization. So there is plenty of danger from contamination in these pasteurized juices.

In one study, heat-treated and acid-hydrolyzed orange juice was tested for mutagenic activity. The authors found that the heating process produced intermediate products which, under test conditions, gave rise to mutagenicity and cytotoxicity. In other words, there were cancer-causing compounds in the orange juice. In another study, gel filtration and high performance liquid chromatography were used to obtain mutagenic fractions from heated orange juice.

So if you want juice with your breakfast, avoid commercial processed orange juice. Instead, squeeze yourself a couple of organic oranges or an organic grapefruit–in other words, process the juice yourself! Mix that fresh juice with sparkling water and a pinch of salt for a delicious spritzer.

NATURAL NOURISHING BROTHS
In the past, many traditional cultures made use of animal bones to make broth. They recognized the health-giving properties of bone broth as well as wonderful flavors broth gave to soups, sauces, gravies and stews. Modern science has shown us that homemade bone broths are indeed the healing wonders of the food pharmacopia; they provide minerals in abundance, strengthen bones and sinews, heal the gut and help us detoxify. The gelatin in homemade bone broth is a natural digestive aid.

INDUSTRIAL SOUPS
Most commercial soup bases and sauces contain artificial meat-like flavors that mimic those we used to get from natural, gelatin-rich broth. These kinds of short cuts mean that consumers are shortchanged. When the homemade stocks were pushed out by the cheap substitutes, an important source of minerals disappeared from the American diet. The thickening effects of gelatin could be mimicked with emulsifiers, but, of course, the health benefits were lost. Gelatin is a very healthy thing to have in your diet. It helps you digest proteins properly and is supportive of digestive health overall.

Research on gelatin and natural broths came to an end in the 1950s when food companies discovered how to induce maillard reactions–the process of creating flavor compounds by mixing reduced sugars and amino acids under increased temperatures–and produce meat-like flavors in the laboratory. In a General Foods Company report issued in 1947, chemists predicted that almost all natural flavors would soon be chemically synthesized. Following the Second World War, American food companies discovered monosodium glutamate, a food ingredient the Japanese had invented in 1908 to enhance food flavors, including meat-like flavors. Humans actually have receptors on the tongue for glutamate—it is the protein in food that the human body recognizes as meat–but the glutamate in MSG has a different configuration, which cannot be assimilated properly by the body. Any protein can be hydrolyzed (broken down into its component amino acids) to produce a base containing MSG. When the industry learned how to synthesize the flavor of meat in the laboratory, using inexpensive proteins from grains and legumes, the door was opened to a flood of new products, including boullion cubes, dehydrated soup mixes, sauce mixes, TV dinners, and condiments with a meaty taste.

The fast food industry could not exist without MSG and artificial meat flavors, which beguile the consumer into eating bland and tasteless food. The sauces in many commercially processed foods contain MSG, water, thickeners, emulsifiers and caramel coloring. Your tongue is tricked into thinking that you are consuming something nutritious, when in fact it is getting nothing at all except some very toxic substances. Even dressings, Worcestershire sauce, rice mixes, flavored tofu, and many meat products have MSG in them. Almost all canned soups and stews contain MSG, and the “hydrolyzed protein” bases often contain MSG in very large amounts.

So-called homemade soups in most restaurants are usually made by mixing water with a powdered soup base made of hydrolyzed protein and artificial flavors, and then adding chopped vegetables and other ingredients. Even things like lobster bisque and fish sauces in most seafood restaurants are prepared using these powdered bases full of artificial flavors.

The industry even thinks it is too costly to just use a little onion and garlic for flavoring–they use artificial garlic and onion flavors instead. It’s all profit based with no thought for the health of the consumer.

Unfortunately, most of the processed vegetarian foods are loaded with these flavorings, as well. The list of ingredients in vegetarian hamburgers, hot dogs, bacon, baloney, etc., may include hydrolyzed protein and “natural” flavors, all sources of MSG. Soy foods are loaded with MSG.

Food manufacturers get around the labeling requirements by putting MSG in the spice mixes; if the mix is less than fifty percent MSG, they don’t have to indicate MSG on the label. You may have noticed that the phrase “No MSG” has actually disappeared. The industry doesn’t use it anymore because they found out that there was MSG in all the spice mixes; even Bragg’s amino acids had to take “No MSG” off the label.

HEALTH PROBLEMS
While the industry was adding MSG to food in larger and larger amounts, in 1957 scientists found that mice became blind and obese when MSG was administered by feeding tube. In 1969, MSG-induced lesions were found in the hypothalamus region of the mouse brain. Subsequent studies pointed in the same direction. MSG is a neurotoxic substance that causes a wide range of reactions in humans, from temporary headaches to permanent brain damage. It is also associated with violent behavior. We have had a huge increase in Alzheimer’s, brain cancer, seizures, multiple sclerosis and diseases of the nervous system, and one of the chief culprits is the flavorings in our food.

Ninety-five percent of processed foods contain MSG, and, in the late 1950s, it was even added to baby food. Manufacturers say they have voluntarily taken it out of the baby food, but they didn’t really remove it; they just called it “hydrolyzed protein” instead.

An excellent book, Excitotoxins, by Russell Blaylock, describes how nerve cells either disintegrate or shrivel up in the presence of free glutamic acid if it gets past the blood-brain barrier. The glutamates in MSG are absorbed directly from the mouth to the brain. Some investigators believe that the great increase in violence in this country starting in 1960 is due to the increased use of MSG beginning in the late 1950s, particularly as it was added to baby foods.

INDUSTRIAL FATS AND OILS
The food processing empire is built on industrial fats and oils, extracted from corn, soybeans and other seeds. Crude vegetable oil–which is dark, sticky and smelly–is subjected to horrendous processing to produce clean-looking cooking oils, margarine, shortening and spreads. The steps involved in processing usually include degumming, bleaching, deodorizing, filtering and removing saturates to make the oils more liquid. In the process, the nutrients and antioxidants disappear–but not the pesticides. Most processors also add a hexane solvent in order to squeeze the very last drop of oil out of the seeds. Caustic refining, the most widely used process for oil refining, involves adding very alkaline, chemicals to the oil.

In order to make a solid fat out of liquid oil, manufacturers subject the oils to a process called partial hydrogenation. The oil is extracted under high temperature and pressure, and the remaining fraction of oil is removed with hexane solvents. Manufacturers then steam clean the oils, a process that removes all the vitamins and all the antioxidants—but, of course, the solvents and the pesticides remain. These oils are mixed with a nickel catalyst and then, under high temperature and pressure, they are flooded with hydrogen gas. What goes into the reactor is a liquid oil; what comes out of that reactor is a smelly mass resembling grey cottage cheese. Emulsifiers are mixed in to smooth out the lumps, and the oil is then steam cleaned once more, to get rid of the horrible smell. The next step is bleaching, to get rid of the grey color. At this point, the product can be called “pure vegetable shortening.” To make margarines and spreads, artificial flavors and synthetic vitamins are added. But the government does not allow the industry to add synthetic color to margarine–they must add a natural color, such as annatto–a comforting thought. The margarine or spread is then packaged in blocks and tubs and advertised as a health food.

Saturated fat is the type of fat found in such foods as lard, butter and coconut oil. Saturated fat molecules are straight, so they pack together easily. That is why saturated fats are solid at room temperature. Unsaturated fats have a little bend at each double bond, with two hydrogen atoms sticking out on the same side. And when that molecule gets incorporated into your cells, the body wants those two hydrogen atoms to be on the same side of the carbon chain, forming an electron cloud; that is where controlled chemical interactions take place.

During the process of partial hydrogenation, one of those hydrogen atoms is moved to the other side, causing the molecule to straighten out so that it behaves chemically like a saturate—although biochemically it behaves very differently. The original, unsaturated molecule is called a “cis” fatty acid, because the two hydrogens are together, and then it becomes a trans fatty acid, because the two hydrogens are across from each other (“trans” means “across”). Your body doesn’t know that this new molecule is something that has never existed in nature before, and when you eat one of these trans fatty acids, it gets built into your cell membranes. Because of the chemical rearrangement, the reactions that should happen can’t take place. Enzymes and receptors don’t work anymore. The more trans fatty acids that you eat, the more partially hydrogenated your cells become and the more chaos that you are going to have on the cellular level.

All of the margarines, shortenings and even low-trans-fat spreads are made with these harmful ingredients. They’re used in chips and crackers, and most restaurants use them for cooking fries. Until the early 1980s, fast food outlets and restaurants cooked the fries in tallow, which is a very safe fat, but now they use partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

In the past, when you made desserts for your kids, at least the sugar they contained came with butter, eggs, cream and nuts—all good wholesome foods. Now manufacturers can imitate the butter, eggs, cream and nuts, so all you have is sugar, industrial oils and artificial ingredients in these instant puddings, pastries and other artificial desserts.

Many diseases have been associated with the consumption of trans fatty acids—heart disease, cancer, and degeneration of joints and tendons. The only reason that we are eating this stuff is because we have been told that the competing saturated fats and oils—butter, lard, coconut oil, palm oil, tallow and suet—are bad for us and cause heart disease. Such assertions are nothing but industry propaganda.

WESTON PRICE
Weston A. Price, DDS, discovered that as populations adopt processed foods, with each generation the facial structure becomes more and more narrow. Healthy faces should be broad. We are all designed to have perfectly straight teeth and not get cavities. When you are eating real, nutrient-dense foods, you get the complete and perfect expression of the genetic potential. We were given a perfect blueprint. Whether or not the body temple is built according to the blueprint depends, to a great extent, on our wisdom in food choices.

When primitive societies abandoned the traditional diet and began to eat processed foods, the next generation developed narrowed facial structure and many diseases. We know that if you continue this diet for three generations, reproduction ceases. This is the terrible price of the West, the Western Price. Civilization will die out unless we embrace the food ways of our ancestors. That means turning our backs on processed foods and getting back into the kitchen, to prepare real foods–containing healthy fats–for ourselves and our families.

OPTIMAL FOOD PREPARATION—MADE WITH LOVE
Food preparation is actually a sacred activity: According to esoteric lore, “If a woman could see the sparks of light going forth from her fingertips when she is cooking, and the energy that goes into the food she handles, she would realize how much of herself she imbues into the meals that she prepares for her family and friends. It is one of the most important and least understood activities of life that the feelings that go into the preparation of food affect everyone who partakes of it. This activity should be unhurried, peaceful and happy because the energy that flows into that food impacts the energy of the receiver.

“That is why the advanced spiritual teachers of the East never eat food prepared by anyone other than their own chelas (disciples). The person preparing the food may be the only one in the household who is spiritually advanced. An active charge of happiness, purity and peace will pour forth into the food from him, and this pours forth into the other members of the family and blesses them.”

To be healthy, we need to prepare our own food, for ourselves and our families. This doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the kitchen, but you do need to spend some time there, preparing food with wisdom and love. If no one in the family has time to prepare food, you need to sit down and rethink how you are spending your time, because this is the only way to get nourishing foods into your children. We can return to good eating practices one mouth at a time, one meal at a time, by preparing our own food and preparing it properly.

The Superfoods That Could Change the Way You Eat, Feel and Live

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Hank Rouse

O’s editor in chief travels to Peru to experience a trove of life-giving superfoods that just might revolutionize your view of nutrition.

Around 4 o’clock on any given morning, Darin Olien will walk into his Malibu, California, kitchen and make himself a smoothie. This will not be an ordinary drink. The other day, for example, he tossed the following into his blender: coconut water, fermented sprouted brown rice, maca, aloe vera juice, barley grass powder, kamut juice powder, almond butter, camu camu, avocado, goji, lucuma powder, noni juice, cacao nibs, MSM, maqui, bee pollen, sacha inchi oil, omega-3-DHA/EPA oil, Hawaiian deepwater salt, chia seeds, nopal, goat yogurt, luo han guo, and a powder called Shakeology.

If you’ve never heard of many of these ingredients, you’re not alone. But stay with me here, because they’re among the most powerful nutrients on Earth. Olien’s specialty is what’s known as “formulating,” taking wildly beneficial substances and combining them into something even more potent: a supplement, a snack, a tea, a medicine, a smoothie. Every food in nature contains a mix of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, along with noncaloric vitamins, minerals, fibers-all of which fuel our cells-and each one has unique abilities that we really don’t understand, but it is now clear that some foods pack an extra biochemical punch. Camu camu fruit, for instance, provides the richest source of vitamin C known to exist. Maca, a hearty root that grows only in the high Andes, comes in yellow, red, and black varieties, boosts fertility, is said to balance hormones, and dispenses a day’s worth of kick-ass energy. Sacha inchi is another South American treasure, a protein-rich, metabolism-revving nut that delivers an omega-3 bonanza. Olien’s final ingredient, Shakeology, contains more than 70 components itself, a crazy cornucopia of good.

No one understands Shakeology better than Olien, who created it in 2008, after Carl Daikeler, CEO of the fitness company Beachbody, challenged him to come up with a supplement to match the tagline The Healthiest Meal of the Day. His customer was someone who wanted optimum wellness, wanted to lose weight, wanted cholesterol levels to drop-but had no intention of eating a platter of broccoli each day. Daikeler gave Olien no limits on quality, no cost/revenue restrictions; the goal was to shoot the moon, to seek out and combine the most extraordinary plants, fruits, nuts, herbs-nature’s secret weapons. And Olien found them: ashwagandha from China, cordyceps from Bhutan, yacon from Peru. An alphabet of vitamins and minerals from the purest sources. Prebiotics. Probiotics. Green tea and grapeseed extracts, chlorella and spirulina and hydrilla, a spectrum of enzymes. Since hitting the market in March 2009, more than 400,000 bags of Shakeology, at $119.95 each, have been sold.

Olien himself is a strapping guy, north of six feet and solid. He looks, in fact, like the steak-fed Midwestern varsity football player that he was, until a back injury derailed his athletic career. From that low point Olien had tried to rehabilitate himself using traditional methods-lots of animal protein, relentless physiotherapy-but it was only when he adopted a radically new diet of superfoods that he was able to regain his strength. This not only improved his health, it revealed his calling. “It was one of the greatest turns in my life,” Olien says, “because it got me into the question, ‘What can I do to fix this?’ I became very curious about the body, switched my major to exercise physiology and nutrition. Then I healed myself.” Over the years he also managed to help many others with their diet and fitness regimens, and Olien’s “concoctions,” his powders and bars and health innovations, began to attract attention.

On the first morning I met Olien I watched him doing squat jumps holding 40-pound weights, while holding his breath underwater. Another workout he likes to do involves harnessing himself to a 150-pound railroad tie and dragging it through thick sand. Whatever he eats needs to fuel these exploits, so people are often surprised to hear that his diet consists mostly of plants. Olien consumes no processed foods, no polysyllabic ingredients invented in labs, no high-fructose corn syrup or trans fats, no artificial flavorings, no antibiotic-laced dairy products, nothing that comes out of a drive-thru. In short, he doesn’t eat what’s generally on offer in the modern food world. “When people find out that I don’t eat this or I don’t eat that, I feel a sense of pity coming from them,” he says, “and I think, ‘Wow! You have no idea. I’m not deprived at all. Come to my kitchen! I’ll blow your mind.'”

Thing is, science is now catching up to something that nature has known all along: the rich greens, the vibrant yellows, the deep indigos of plants are key to our well-being. That meat we love so much? Proven to clog our arteries. Convenience foods-heavily sweetened and salted, laden with fat and chemicals-wreak havoc on everything from our immune systems to our moods to our weight. Here are the facts and they’re not very pretty: Americans are the fattest people ever in history. Obesity, a body composition topping 30 percent fat, is the most pressing health crisis we face, with 34 percent of the adult population falling into that category (plus 29 percent of all children). If you add in the merely overweight it’s closer to 68 percent. In the past 50 years the weight of the typical American citizen has increased, on average, by 25 pounds. If we continue at this rate, by 2050 every last person will have eaten himself into the danger zone.

“Every time you eat processed foods, you exclude from your diet not only the essential nutrients that we are aware of, but hundreds of other undiscovered phytonutrients that are crucial for normal human function,” Joel Fuhrman, MD, writes in his new book, Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, which stresses the importance of a diet full of high-quality produce. Mehmet Oz, MD, who wrote the foreword to Fuhrman’s book, believes that even a slight shift away from meat can improve your health. “What we really want to do is have people nudge themselves in the right direction,” he told me. “If you want to have a few bacon bits on your salad, God bless you, fine. That’s not where we’re losing the battle. We’re losing the battle when you have sausage for breakfast, a big pastrami sandwich for lunch, and pork chops for dinner.”

Yet we live in a mass-produced, big-box culture, where economic interests hold sway. Meat, corn, sugar-they come cheap, and we buy them. Plus, we tend to like the taste. But there are steep hidden costs in a food system that makes calories rather than nutrients-from the factory farms that treat animals like parts on an assembly line to the fact that obesity-related ailments like heart disease, stroke, and diabetes are skyrocketing and account for approximately $150 billion in healthcare expenses each year. As both Fuhrman and Oz would attest, anyone consuming a steady diet of man-made edibles would benefit even from something as prosaic as lettuce, but far more intriguing foods exist. As Olien began to talk about the vegetables, fruits, grains, herbs, and other plants he was hunting, I realized there was an entire universe out there I didn’t know about. I had never heard of lucuma or sapote or aguaje. What the heck was gac? The list was long.

Learning more requires a passport, because in acquiring these superfoods Olien doesn’t simply call up a supplier with his FedEx number, he goes directly to the source. In doing so he often ends up in extreme places, searching out plants that-although they may have been revered by past civilizations-are now largely forgotten. South America, with its jungles and rainforests and mountains, is especially rich. So when I heard that Olien was headed back to Peru, I invited myself along. I wanted to see firsthand what he was up to because it sounded so incredible to me, so mysterious and even magical. I wanted to taste these lost, powerful foods that had fueled warriors and emperors, plants with miraculous properties that had somehow almost vanished, disappearing beneath a sea of fast-food wrappers.

Lima
From the outside, Nicolaza Mendoza’s warehouse looks like any other drab building on the industrial fringe of a sprawling Latin American city. When I walked through the door, however, that impression was washed away by a wave of earthy scent. Colorful sacks were piled high on wooden palettes, each one stuffed with precious plants. Their names-una de gato, achiote, huasca-were written on the sacks in thick black marker. Mendoza, a small-statured woman with a serious face, is one of Peru’s most respected herbalists. She spoke no English; her daughter Luz Maria, a striking 32-year-old in a short black skirt and lavender eyeshadow, was there to translate.

“How do you say, ‘Hit the jackpot’ in Spanish?” Olien asked, smiling. He was carrying a list of substances he wanted to investigate, and it was a good bet that many were on the premises. Standing beside him, Bernd Neugebauer, PhD, surveyed the warehouse and nodded. At 59, with a mane of white hair and vivid blue eyes, Neugebauer has a distinguished air, bolstered by the four languages he speaks fluently and his provenance from one of Germany’s oldest forestry families. Neugebauer’s accomplishments and interests include cultivating organic aloe vera, beekeeping, shamanism training, and studying ancient farming methods. Currently he is restoring an entire Mayan village in the Yucatan. But his primary interest is soil. Only healthy, mineral-rich soil produces healthy, mineral-rich food, and the world’s topsoil is under great stress these days, overused, undernourished, and (due to increasing deforestation) prone to erode into the sea. Though he is an organic farming expert, Neugebauer has gone even beyond that, reaching into history to discover how past agricultural empires-Maya, Aztec, Inca-treated the land, and what we can learn from them. In 2006 Olien read an academic paper by Neugebauer about creating holistic and sustainable agricultural practices, and sought him out as a kindred spirit. Now the two team up often, with Neugebauer helping the farmers who grow Olien’s raw materials get the most out of their crops without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

Olien’s relationship to his suppliers is a deeply personal one. He believes in cultivating relationships first, supporting indigenous practices, seeking the highest-quality products and paying generously for them. The farmers he works with have become his close friends. “It’s fair trade on steroids,” he says of his approach. To that end, every last leaf that now sat in Mendoza’s warehouse met this gold standard. The herbs here were locally grown and carefully harvested. Her collection was all the more impressive when you considered Peru’s outlandish biodiversity. Luz explained how her mother traversed the country constantly, from one extreme to another, from the Amazon to the Andes to the Pacific Coast and everywhere in between, seeking out each region’s botanical treasures. The stakes were high: Billion-dollar drugs had been obtained in the rapidly dwindling rainforest-antimicrobial, antipain, anticancer medications, among countless others-and yet scientists agreed that only a small fraction of nature’s pharmacopoeia had ever been studied. “I’m amazed by what she knows,” Luz said, shaking her head.

I walked down the aisles behind Mendoza and Olien, leaning over the herbs to examine them. Una de gato, or cat’s claw, was a vine that had been chopped into little shingles; it was adobe red and smelled like the primeval forest. I had seen it referenced in a number of books as an antiaging “superherb.” Recently scientists have discovered that the most prized plants and herbs in native cultures contain high levels of nutrients that contribute ferociously to cellular health in ways we are only beginning to understand; cat’s claw has been shown to fight infection, decrease inflammation, and repair DNA. “This is the real pharmacy,” Olien said, gesturing at the sacks. “Hippocrates said, ‘Let food be your medicine’-and there’s a lot of medicine out there.”

There was a row dedicated entirely to teas, lush manzanilla (chamomile), lemony cedron, eucalyptus, and menta blanca-white mint so strong it was as though an entire field had been squeezed into a teacup. Every smell was amplified. “Stand here for three minutes and just breathe deeply,” Neugebauer advised, “and you will be in wonderful condition.” The intensity of these substances was striking, given that we live in a diluted world, willing to eat a tomato that only vaguely tastes like a tomato, or an orange that looks orange only because it’s been shot full of dye.

One sack had frayed at the ends and its contents spilled out, revealing a root that looked like a thick, spiral cinnamon stick. I was examining it when Miguel Berumen, another member of Olien’s team, came over. Berumen was a walking superfoods encyclopedia, and the learning had started early. As a boy growing up outside Mexico City, he’d watched his grandmother heal family members with plants from her garden. “I’d get sick,” he recalled, “and she’d come over and brew up some herbs and say some prayers. That was just the logical thing to do.” When Berumen was asked a question about, say, sarsaparilla, the knowledge poured out, streams of words rushing and tumbling over themselves in excitement. “In ancient times they used this herb to make root beer. They also used sassafras. And manioc root to generate the bubbles!”

“Can you ask Nicolaza about kaniwa?” Olien asked Berumen. He’d mentioned kaniwa, a grain I’d never heard of, several times today.

“Kaniwa is a beautiful plant,” Neugebauer said, with admiration in his voice.
“It bounced off the page to me this morning,” Olien said, pointing to his notes. New quinoa, high Andes, he’d written in the margin. “We could sprout it. Make it a little more bioactive.”
Olien had explained to me how his formulas come together first by instinct, a gut knowing that eventually leads him into the lab, where everything will be rigorously tested. “I start with a question,” he said. “For Shakeology it was, ‘What do people need to thrive?'” From that point the different ingredients pop into his mind, inspirations bubble up, ideas appear-“and then I back into the science.” Once a product has been fine-tuned, Olien uses himself and his friends as guinea pigs. “That’s the ultimate test,” he said. “In your own body.”

The intricate synergies that keep our livers humming and our eyes focused and our brains remembering where we put the car keys are mirrored in the plant world. Each organism contains a universe within itself, countless components working together seamlessly to keep things in perfect balance. When Olien combines his raw materials-all of them functional foods-he’s seeking this same effect, in which the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. When we supplement our diets with specific vitamins-a vitamin D capsule, a CoQ10 pill-we’re doing the opposite: breaking nature’s systems apart. “The best example of this is the work that’s been done on vitamin A,” Oz had told me. “When you eat vitamin-A-rich foods like carrots, you reduce the risk of lung cancer. When you take vitamin A as a pill you increase the risk of lung cancer. How is that possible? It’s possible because when you take a carrot and put it into your mouth you don’t just get vitamin A, you get all the retinols. The different subtypes of all these different phytonutrients. And they’re in the perfect mix for us. Literally dozens of them in the right combinations-they’re the key that unlocks the cells’ abilities to defend themselves against cancer. If you take only a massive pharmaceutical dose of vitamin A, then you actually block the body’s ability to absorb the other components of the carrot.” The way these things operate, Oz said, is like a band playing in perfect tune: “The true benefit doesn’t come from just having the drum banging. You need the guitar, a little trumpet, a singer. That’s what makes the music.”

This vast, emerging alchemy was the most exciting part of his work, Olien agreed, stepping out of Mendoza’s warehouse into the hazy afternoon heat: “I’m not a fan of isolating. Who are we to separate things out? All of these herbs and vitamins have their buddies, and they want to come together.” He walked toward the bus that would take us from Lima into the wild folds of Peru. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he added, “watching the magic.”

Tarma
Fresh cacao is a strange and wonderful fruit. Outside, it’s a tough vermilion pod the size and shape of a toy football, but inside it contains another set of textures: a mass of wonky-shaped cubes nestled in a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, each with a furry white covering and a chewy bean in the center. When you bite into cacao the sensation is sexy and silky and delicious, kind of bitter and kind of sweet, with a darkly complex flavor that only hints at the chocolate it will eventually become.

“They called it the Food of the Gods,” Olien said, handing me another cube. “And it truly is.” He was wearing a pair of black shoes that slipped on like gloves, all five toes outlined, giving his feet the appearance of paws. It was perfect jungle footwear. We stood on the slippery hillside with three men from the small, organic cacao plantation where these fruit trees had been planted. Olien was always on the lookout for good sources of cacao, a key ingredient.

Botanists and herbalists-and superfood hunters-tend to get very worked up when describing cacao; its health attributes seem almost too good to be true. Cacao has more protective antioxidants than red wine, pomegranates, and blueberries combined. It’s a huge source of magnesium, a critical mineral for heart health, bone strength, and brainpower that many of us could use more of. These little beans contain a rainbow of minerals, a wallop of vitamin C, many essential fats, and the calming amino acid tryptophan, which in turn elevates levels of the happiness-inducing neurotransmitter serotonin. “Cacao is an absolutely perfect mood stabilizer,” Olien said. And more: The beans are rich in a wonderful substance called phenylethyl-amine (PEA) that our bodies produce when we fall in love; PEA also acts as a natural appetite suppressant. An aphrodisiac that helps you lose weight is so precious, in fact, that the Maya and Aztecs used cacao beans as currency, valuing them above gold.

“I want to make a convenient medicinal chocolate,” Olien said, holding up one of the pods. “As pure and raw as possible, all hand grown. It’d be like handing out delicious antidepressants to people!” To be honest, it was quite an idea: What if the foods we loved also happened to be incredibly good for us? What if, instead of doughnuts and nachos, we craved nature’s most exquisite gifts? What would the world look like if everyone functioned at peak energy, tipped the scales at their ideal weight, and ran around in a good mood? What if we didn’t need to take drugs to be happy or keep our hearts running smoothly or get a decent night’s sleep?

Neugebauer began to talk to the farmers, giving them some new ideas to fend off a fungus known as Monilia that was reducing their harvest. I watched him speaking to them in Spanish, kneeling down next to the trees and examining the soil. A walnut-skinned man in black rubber boots listened intently, a curved machete hanging from his belt. Standing at the edge of the path, Olien and Berumen were deep in conversation. “It can’t help but propel me into neurotransmitters,” I heard Olien say. His face was still smeared with red achiote dye from a stop we’d made earlier at a lowland jungle village called Pampa Miche, where we’d visited a tribe called the Ashaninka, renowned for their knowledge of local plants. Olien had stood by good-naturedly as a group of village women painted his face with scarlet stripes, looped boa constrictors around his neck, and dressed him in a native outfit consisting of a loose caftan, an elaborate sash of beads, and a jaunty straw hat.
Later, on an exploratory walk through the rainforest, he had downed a murky brown drink with a bitter flavor and the texture of phlegm. “What are the medicinals in this?” he asked Nuria, a sturdy woman in a red headscarf. She responded in a gale of Spanish, gesturing at the towering trees.

“Five different tree barks,” Neugebauer translated.
“Para potencia!” Nuria stressed. The women erupted in giggles.
Olien went on to sample wild cashew nut, a reddish fruit shaped like a small bell pepper. The shell of the nut contains a burning acid (something Olien had learned the hard way in Mexico last year, and ended up having the skin of his lips peel off). Stepping off the path, one of the Ashaninka men, who happened to be carrying a small monkey, reached up with a long knife and cut into the trunk of a nearby tree. A thick red sap began to ooze out. “Sangre de grado,” Berumen said, leaning over to examine it. “Dragon’s blood!”

This was a sighting: Sangre de grado is a substance so valuable and rare that counterfeit versions often show up in the markets. Used externally as a salve, it acts as a second skin to close wounds and stop infection; taken internally it heals ulcers and other stomach ailments. Dragon’s blood also exhibits antitumor and antiviral activity, qualities that have captured the pharmaceutical industry’s attention.

Nuria rubbed a few drops onto Olien’s forearm. The sap first looked red, then quickly turned a shimmery golden, before morphing again to a soapy white. “It’s sticky,” he said, touching it. “That’s how you know it’s really good,” Berumen said. “When it gets creamy like that.”

The visual effect was startling. The dark red liquid stood out against the light bark, as though the tree really were bleeding. It looked eerily like a human arm or leg. Olien traced the wound, letting the liquid drip onto his fingers. He was completely transfixed, and he stood there for several minutes, oblivious to anything else around him, even the scampering monkeys.

Junin
At 14,000 feet in the Andes, not much grows in Junin. There is one noteworthy exception: maca. This windblasted place is the maca capital of the world, and for that Olien loves it. “Ah, yeahhh,” he said as the lunar vistas rolled by, dust-colored barren hillsides dotted with the tiny figures of llamas and vicunas. The more I’d heard about maca, the more fantastic this little tuber seemed: A relative of the radish, it has been cultivated for 2,000 years in these parts. Maca is an adaptogen, Olien said, explaining how the brutal terrain had bred into the plant a kind of survivors’ guile that enabled it to respond to any conditions. In the body it helps balance whatever’s out of whack, particularly hormones. It boosts endurance, allowing people (and animals) to work long days at high altitude. Incan warriors liked to take maca before going into battle. In Junin, the local people ate it roasted, stewed, marinated, dried, fermented, made into tea. But for all its benefits, maca had flirted with extinction. In 1979 only 70 acres of it could be found in Peru. Since then its stock as a superfood has been steadily rising, and small farmers have started planting it again, realizing it’s worth far more in the marketplace than potatoes.

We were headed to visit Dina Guere Vega, a maca farmer whom Olien had been working with for six years. She and her family lived in a jumbled compound of low buildings that included a warehouse filled with maca bulbs. Guere Vega was a pocket-size woman with large brown eyes and a brilliant smile, bundled in a hand-knit alpaca sweater, and she greeted Olien, Berumen, and Neugebauer like family. Her husband stood beside her, wearing a wool hat with earflaps. Outside the wind howled, shaking the roof.
The smell of maca is intense and unique, like earth meets nuts meets a wood fire with undertones of licorice and wasabi, and it filled the warehouse-sacks of maca lined the walls. On one side of the building two women sorted through a sea of bulbs spread across a tarp. Olien reached into an open bag and pulled out a handful. The root looked like a petrified fig. “Powerful stuff,” he said. “This is dried. Takes about three months.” After that it would be carefully powdered and shipped to the United States. Maca’s strong odor (and that of other pungent herbs) had challenged Olien when it came to perfecting Shakeology’s taste without resorting to artificial ingredients. “I spent a year trying to get it right,” he said, describing the two flavors that resulted, chocolate and greenberry. “Because if I didn’t, no one in Middle America would drink it. You have to meet them in the place where they can receive it.”

Dina and her husband reappeared holding trays of a golden liquid. “Liquor de maca!” Neugebauer said, reaching for a glass with a somewhat shaky hand. Since our arrival we’d been chewing coca leaves, the native remedy for altitude sickness, but he was feeling the elevation, and hoped that a little maca toddy would clear that up. We had three rounds of the stuff and later we would drink more maca, blended with dark beer and papaya. Its effect was smooth and kicky, like stepping on the accelerator of a fine sports car. As Olien said, it was an easy plant to love. The locals felt the same way and had even installed a 70-foot-high, shocking purple maca monument in the nearby town of Huayre.
But the picture wasn’t entirely rosy. Part of Neugebauer’s task here was to solve a pressing problem: Over the past year Dina’s fields had been producing far less maca, and the plants that were growing had shrunk dramatically in size. Dina thought that climate change was the culprit, erratic weather patterns bringing warmer temperatures and rain out of season. Neugebauer, however, believed a change in planting methods would not only restore her maca yield but double it. The two of them hunkered on a couch in the drafty room with wool caps pulled low over their heads. “He wants her to use a crane rather than a tractor,” Berumen translated. “To reach out and loosen a little area without turning the soil over. And he doesn’t think she’s digging deep enough.” Neugebauer also explained how he had resurrected the chaquitaclla, an Incan maca-planting tool shaped like a spear gun: “I took it into a machine design shop in Germany and told them, ‘Please mechanize this.'”

As old as maca’s tradition was, I could see that much of what was happening here was new. “Five years ago, none of this existed,” Olien said, surveying Dina’s compound, where a 2,000-year-old crop was being reintroduced to the world. Though we tend to think of progress as a straight charge ahead-more, new, bigger, faster-in maca’s case, moving forward required going back in time. I recalled a conversation I’d had with William Li, a Harvard-trained MD and the cofounder of the Angiogenesis Foundation, a vanguard group that’s proving how, at the molecular level, the foods we eat have a direct impact on whether our bodies are vulnerable to cancer. “Today we’re at a very awkward moment, I think, in human existence as it relates to food and health,” Li had said, “where we know intrinsically that there’s more to these things than we concretely recognize. And there’s a lot of historical stuff that’s been lost. How do we rediscover that? How do we take ourselves out of this cereal box?”

“I mean, why not think about trying to replace wheat with maca, for example,” Neugebauer had mused earlier. “Maca is the absolute superfood. Wheat has all sorts of problems.” On the surface this sounds preposterous-but is it? Considering that we’ve adopted a food system that’s created massive increases in both obesity and hunger, where prices are spiraling out of control, and monoculture and genetic modification work in opposition to
nature’s strategy of endless diversity, what these maca fields really represented, I thought, were ancient yet urgent ideas about how to live.

Huanco
“What does this look like?” Berumen asked, holding up the aguaje fruit in the open-air market.
“A hand grenade?” I said. Because it did.
“An ovary!”
The aguaje is a huge source of phyto-estrogens, Berumen said, and a perfect example of biomimicry in action. In other words, even before there were textbooks and search engines, nature had given us very clear directions. It’s no accident that walnuts, with their squiggly oval hemispheres, are the ultimate brain food. Or that a plant the rainforest natives call chanca piedra (“stone breaker” in English), which produces tiny green balls, is a natural remedy for kidney stones. Or that dragon’s blood, the sap that acts as a coagulant, actually bleeds out of the tree.

We stood in an aisle of the Huanuco market, squeezing aside as people bustled past. A short woman in a flouncy skirt walked by with a pig on a leash; another woman crouched on the ground next to a net bag writhing with tiny chicks. Fruits and vegetables were heaped everywhere. A light rain drizzled outside. Huanuco is a midsize city in central Peru, usefully located between the sierra and the high jungle. If you’re a farmer, there’s a lot of business to do here.

“The phytoestrogenic property of aguaje is different than soy,” Berumen continued, citing another plant with strong hormonal effects. “It actually assists the body in making estrogen.” He cut into the aguaje and handed me a piece. The fruit was bright orange, with the dry texture of cheese. The vivid colors in fruits and vegetables-created by chemicals called flavonoids-signal power. So far scientists have identified about 6,000 of these compounds-names like peonidin, kaempferol, apigenin, hesperitin, quercetin-but undoubtedly, thousands more exist. Flavonoids have been shown to improve brain function, motor skills, blood flow; they protect cells from inflammation and potential damage that can lead to cancer.

Eating a variety of plants is the best way to assure your body a wide array of flavonoids; in Peru, I’d discovered, this wasn’t a problem. Since my arrival I’d been presented with a steady stream of unknown foods. Along with cacao, maca, and aguaje I’d tried granadilla, a fruit that cracks open with a snap, revealing a fist-size mass of seeds, each covered in a translucent membrane. The seeds were crunchy and sour, the membrane was soft and sweet, the combination was sublime. Olien had produced a bag full of dried aguaymanto, raisinlike fruits with a sharp citrusy tang. Berumen had talked about “monster fruit”-a corncob-shaped plant that tasted like a cross between a guava and a pineapple-and declared it “the most delicious thing ever.” ButMonstera deliciosa (its Latin name) had to be carefully ripened and prepared, he warned: “If you bite into it fresh, it’s like eating razors. It cuts up your whole mouth.” There was black sapote, a fruit that tasted like chocolate pudding, and the succinctly named peanut butter fruit. In the market we had also come across lucuma, a fruit Olien likes for its mild, butterscotchy taste (in Peru, lucuma-flavored ice cream is as popular as chocolate or vanilla). “It blends well,” he said, slicing the skin off like that of a mango. “Balances out the astringents.” The fruit had a soft, cakey texture. “It’s one of the most mineral-rich foods in the world,” Berumen added.
We walked past rows of fish on ice, midsize animal carcasses dangling from hooks, rafts of flowers and sheaves of herbs. A heavyset woman in fuchsia lipstick presided over bushels of coca leaves. In a back corner, a group of older ladies had gathered around two large pots. One of them, an Indian woman with a long braid, ladled something that looked like porridge into a metal bowl. “Medicina!” she said, pointing at Olien and then handing
the bowl to him. Then she pointed to her stomach: “Medicina!” she stressed again, flashing a smile that revealed many missing teeth.

“Ah, the gringo needs some medicine,” Olien said, raising an eyebrow. “What is this?” he asked Berumen to inquire. The stuff in the bowl smelled acrid, even rotten. Berumen spoke to the women in Spanish and then after a moment he turned to us. “It’s called tocosh,” he said. “A traditional Andean food made from fermented potatoes.” The process, he translated, involved burying the potatoes in river soil for up to two years. Amazingly, this produced a natural penicillin.

Olien raised a gloopy spoonful to his mouth, hesitated for a moment, and then bravely swallowed it. Even from three feet away the aroma made my eyes water. “It’s a lot better than it smells,” he said, delivering the verdict. “It’s actually good.” I tried it, and agreed. The tocosh was warm and subtly sweet, with hints of vanilla. There was something comforting about it, and I could feel my body wanting more. Later I would learn that tocosh had been an Incan delicacy, and that even in sophisticated cities like Lima, Peruvian doctors still prescribed it for stomach disorders, and for its overall healthful effects.

“Oh my God, would I like to see the nutrient content on this,” Olien said, taking another spoonful. “Because that is not a potato anymore. It’s a completely new structure.” Fermenting a food, he explained, was like turbocharging it. This is the process, of course, that turns grapes into wine, milk into cheese. Essentially you’re letting food go bad in a good way, by creating an oxygen-free environment around it. During fermentation, benevolent armies of bacteria break down starches to sugars; those are converted to health-enhancing alcohols and acids. Whole new vitamins, enzymes, and amino acids can spring up. The result is a food with alchemical potency. This technique is so ancient that we don’t have any records of its origin, but historians believe it goes back at least 9,000 years, to China.

“If you look at the history of food, there’s been this tribalism,” William Li had pointed out. “Things are passed down-and there’s so much we don’t know. Space is a frontier. Oceans are a frontier. I think food is a whole other frontier,” he said. “And it’s not something you have to train with NASA for, or put on scuba gear for. It’s sitting in front of us every single day.”

Ambo
The Yacon farm was perched at the top of a road that zigzagged up the mountainside in a series of hairpin turns. The road was narrow and crumbly with scree, its thin ribbon of shoulder edged by sheer cliffs. There were no guardrails. I watched the bus driver hunch over the wheel in tense concentration, muttering under his breath. The view at the top, however, was worth the white-knuckle ride. The farm was tucked in a pristine valley glowing with more shades of green than the spectrum seemed able to hold, ringed by majestic peaks.

“Have I talked to you about yacon?” Olien asked, describing the potato-shaped vegetable that was, improbably, a cousin of the sunflower. “It’s an amazing food, a tuber that has a bunch of different sugars in it.” The most important of these sugars is a rare type known as fructooligosaccharide (FOS), and yacon is the richest known source of it. Although FOS tastes beautifully sweet, it’s not processed in the body like other sugars because we lack the enzymes to digest it (making it perfect for diabetics-and dieters, because few calories are absorbed). But rather than being expelled like some alien substance, on its way through your body yacon does a number of helpful things. It acts as a prebiotic, encouraging healthy bacteria in your intestines and colon, and aids in fat metabolism, cholesterol management, vitamin absorption, blood sugar regulation, even bone density. “It could be a sweetener solution for the entire planet,” Olien said.

The farm’s owner was a local man named Luis Alva, known to his friends as Lucho. He was burly, in his 30s with a wide face that looked both tough and kind. Alva had a quiet gravitas, which made sense when you learned what he’d been through on his family land. Twenty years ago, at a house only a mile away, his father was killed by the Shining Path, the leftist guerrillas who brutalized Peru during the ’80s and ’90s (and remain on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups). It was not a tragedy that anyone around here had forgotten. But today Lucho was buoyant, glad to see Olien and Berumen again, and to meet the rest of us.

In 2006 Berumen had been trolling the Internet and came across an arcane reference to yacon. He sent it to Olien, who was astonished by the “perfect storm of health benefits” the plant seemed to provide. “I thought, ‘This is an amazing product,'” Olien recalled. “You can’t get it anywhere, not even online. And then I was like a pit bull. I just kept saying, ‘We gotta bring it here.’ And maybe I got ahead of myself. ” He laughed, then added: “But that inspired all of what’s growing here.”

The next morning we headed to the fields in Alva’s truck, driving up a red dirt road that also served as a thoroughfare for Andean shepherdesses and their flocks. The women wore bright shirts and shawls in magenta, canary, emerald, tangerine, turquoise, along with the traditional pleated wool skirts and black flat-brimmed hats, which they decorated with bits of tinsel. We passed a group of alpacas, shaggy white beasts with unicorn faces and cranky dispositions, and a cow with long eyelashes that was mowing some bushes.
Yacon produces large green leaves that gave Alva’s fields a lush appearance, like a vast carpet of salad. “Historically, yacon was called the apple of the Earth,” Berumen noted. After sitting in the sun, apparently, it literally tastes like an apple, though the tuber itself resembles a yam. “You can dehydrate it, extract juice, or make a syrup out of it,” Berumen said. I watched as a field hand pulled up a plant, its roots caked with soil. Alva peeled the brown skin with a knife. Inside, the yacon was crystal white with tiny violet dots around its perimeter. It had an icy, juicy look and a crisp texture and it tasted fresh and light, like highly delicious air or a ghost carrot. I could have eaten it all day. “No applicacion de herbicida,” Lucho said. “Nada, nada, nada.” He used only organic fertilizer in his fields, no chemicals at all.

The spectacular valley, the happy workers, the mountain air, the bountiful crops-no one could argue against this as an ideal. Earlier I’d asked Olien what I thought was a key question: Is it possible to mass-produce this kind of quality? “I think we’re proving that you can,” he answered without hesitation. He added, “If you get the highest nutritional value from your food, you need less of it. The vacant foods-we need more of them, because they’re posers. They’re empty.”

He was right. It was really that simple: The body with its unknown galaxies of cells, its unseen cogs and wheels, its ropes and coils of DNA, needs to be nourished, and it doesn’t thrive on red dye #40 or propylene glycol or butylated hydroxyanisole with a ciprofloxacin chaser. “These plants you’re writing about have powers that are sacred,” Oz had stressed. “That word belongs in your story.” And these sacred foods do not have to remain in backcountry Peru. They could be available to all if we were willing to think and farm and eat differently.

Alva pulled his truck over to the side of the road and pointed to a field where eight varieties of yacon were growing. He wanted to see which type would do best in this environment, and produce the most FOS. The winner would be a kind of superyacon, a super-superfood. Olien opened the passenger door and got out, walking to the edge of the field. Below he could see the blue rooftops of a tiny school, kids playing soccer in front of it. The workers moved among more yacon, small figures bent in the furrows, and the Arischaca River rushed in the background while the Andean women tended their sheep in the peacefulness and fullness that was now here. The valley stretched out before him, green and red, the vertiginous perfection of it all, the terraced fields, the veins of soil. In the gold afternoon light Olien sat down in the yacon field, among the floppy leaves. And then he lay back and closed his eyes, smiling.

7 Foods That Can Lower Blood Pressure

Posted on April 4, 2015 by Hank Rouse

Oranges

Stock up on this citrus fruit the next time you hit the grocery store. Oranges are bursting with vitamin C, and some studies suggest that people who get lots of vitamin C in their diet may reduce their risk of developing high blood pressure.
Best bet: Drink the juice (it’s loaded with other compounds that may reduce blood pressure) or eat the whole fruit for some extra fiber along with the vitamin C.
Other sources of vitamin C: Guava, grapefruit, broccoli, tomatoes, strawberries, bell peppers, kiwi
Try this: Toss together a fresh citrus salad of peeled sliced oranges, shaved fennel, thinly sliced onion, olives and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, recommends Aglaia Kremezi, author of Mediterranean Hot and Spicy.

Cranberry Orange Fruit Bars

The cranberries in these scrumptious treats boost their vitamin C content up a notch: One bar boasts 25 percent of the Daily Value recommended for C.
Get the recipe here.

Low-fat or skim Milk

Getting enough of the white stuff isn’t just good for your bones. Milk and other dairy products contain a trio of nutrients that may push down your blood pressure: calcium, potassium and magnesium. These nutrients are so important that the DASH diet (short for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) includes two to three daily servings of nonfat or low-fat dairy products.
Best bet: Stay away from artery-clogging saturated fats by choosing nonfat dairy products.
Other sources of calcium, potassium and magnesium: Hazelnuts, wheat bran, calcium-fortified orange juice
Try this: Whip up a healthy version of an old-fashioned milkshake by blending skim milk, frozen strawberries and nonfat vanilla frozen yogurt.

No-Bake Macaroni & Cheese

Don’t like to take your milk straight? You don’t have to! This grown-up version of the kiddie fave is studded with broccoli – and the cheese in the creamy sauce bumps of the dish’s calcium content to 40 percent of the Daily Value.
Get the recipe here.

Bananas

If your blood pressure has been inching up lately, make bananas your go-to fruit—they’re rich in potassium and fiber. “A diet with plentiful potassium-rich foods has been shown to help lower blood pressure,” says Joan Salge Blake, R.D., author of Nutrition & You: Core Concepts for Good Health.
Best bet: Bananas taste sweetest when their skins are slightly speckled with brown but they’re still firm.
Other good sources of potassium: Potatoes, tomato paste, apricots, lentils
Try this: “For a guilt-free dessert or breakfast, top banana slices with plain low-fat yogurt and a sprinkle of cinnamon,” Kremezi suggests.

Banana Pudding Pops

These frozen treats taste way more decadent than they are: One popsicle has just 1 gram of fat and only 82 calories.
Get the recipe here.

Sweet Potatoes

This super-sweet Thanksgiving staple packs a powerful potassium punch, which is why it deserves a spot at the dinner table year round. “Potassium causes the kidneys to excrete excess sodium from the body, and keeping sodium levels low can help drive down blood pressure,” Salge Blake says.
Best bet: Eat them with the skin for a tasty fiber boost.
Other sources of potassium: Beet greens, white beans, plain nonfat yogurt
Try this: Bump up the potassium content of potato salad. Boil sweet potatoes, then combine them with chopped apple, diced celery and sliced scallions. Toss with a dressing of olive oil, cider vinegar and honey.

Black Bean Smothered Sweet Potatoes

In less than 15 minutes, you can have this potassium-packed treat on the table: While the sweet potato is cooking in the microwave, just toss the black beans with tomatoes and Southwestern spices.
Get the recipe here.

Herbs and spices

Salt may be off-limits when you’re trying to lower your blood pressure, but you can spice up your dishes with fresh herbs. Even easier, raid your spice rack. “It’s no doubt stocked with wonderful dried herbs and spices that are naturally sodium free,” says Salge Blake.
Best bet: If you like fresh herbs but don’t have time to chop them, try herbs in a tube, like the ones from Gourmet Garden.
Other sources for flavor: Onions, garlic, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice
Try this: Make an exotic spice mix by combining Aleppo or Maras pepper (available at Middle Eastern markets or Kalustyans.com) with ground cumin, lemon zest, Greek oregano and chopped cilantro, Kremezi suggests.

Herb & Onion Frittata

The best thing about this single-serving egg dish is its versatility: Any combo of your favorite herbs will work – you can make it different every time.
Get the recipe here.

Salmon

Few foods have more heart-healthy benefits than this nutritional superstar. Salmon is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which studies suggest not only lower blood pressure, but may also boost good cholesterol, cut triglycerides and slow the growth of arterial plaque.
Best bet: Turn it into a supper staple. Salmon and other omega-3-rich fish are so good for your heart that the American Heart Association recommends eating two 3.5-ounce servings per week. No time to cook? Canned or pouched salmon is just as good: Instead of tuna, mix it with nonfat yogurt and diced celery to make a tasty sandwich spread, or toss it with greens and other veggies for a main-dish salad. It’s available with or without bones and skin.
Other sources of omega-3 fatty acids: Herring, mackerel, sardines, anchovies
Try this: Give grilled or broiled salmon steaks or filets a tropical flair with a fresh and spicy salsa. Combine diced papaya, mango, pineapple, red bell pepper and red onion with chopped cilantro, olive oil and lime juice.

Black Bean & Salmon Tostados

A cut above fish tacos, these tasty tostados are made with canned salmon; leave in the bones (so soft you won’t notice them) for a shot of calcium to go along with the ample omega-3s and 12 grams of fiber.
Get the recipe here.

Dark Chocolate

The next time you crave chocolate, give in. Besides their mood-boosting effects, the flavonols in dark chocolate may protect against high blood pressure and stroke, in part by improving the elasticity of blood vessels.
Best bet: When choosing chocolate, go as dark as your taste buds can stand. Check labels for the percentage of cacao, which is the source of all that antioxidant goodness. Dark chocolate typically ranges from 45 percent to 80 percent cacao. And eat a square, not the whole bar.
Another healthy chocolate treat: Sugar-free hot cocoa—in one study it lowered blood pressure, but the sugared kind did not.
Try this: “Toast slices of chewy whole-wheat bread, then brush them with fruity extra virgin olive oil while they’re still warm. Sprinkle the slices with Aleppo or Maras pepper to taste, and top with shavings of good quality dark chocolate,” says Kremezi.

Chocolate Crunch

The bittersweet chocolate in this sweet-and-salty snack is a good source of flavonol-rich cacao and it has less sugar than semisweet chocolate, bumping its health benefits up a notch. Most important, it’s addictive!
Get the recipe here.

Fat, Not Glucose, is the Preferred Fuel for Your Body

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Hank Rouse

While we may consider ourselves to be at the pinnacle of human development, our modern food manufacturing processes have utterly failed at improving health and increasing longevity.

During the Paleolithic period, many thousands of years ago, our ancestors ate primarily vegetables, fruit, nuts, roots and meat—and a wide variety of it. This diet was high in fats and protein, and low in grain- and sugar-derived carbohydrates.

The average person’s diet today, on the other hand, is the complete opposite, and the average person’s health is a testament of what happens when you adhere to a faulty diet. Humans today suffer more chronic and debilitating diseases than ever before.

And there can be little doubt that our food choices play a major role in this development. Quite simply, you were not designed to eat large amounts of refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, cereal, bread, potatoes and pasteurized milk products.

As Mark Sisson states in the featured article1:

“If you want to live a better life and eat the best foods nature provided for health and fitness, then it’s time to ditch the old paradigms and climb on to the primal approach to eating better.”

Is Glucose Really Your Body’s Preferred Fuel?

The notion that glucose is the preferred fuel for your body is a pervasive one. Everyone from diabetics to top athletes are advised to make sure they eat “enough” carbs to keep their systems from crashing. This is unfortunate, as this misguided advice is at the very heart of many of our current health failures.

As Mark so succinctly spells out in his article, FAT is actually the preferred fuel of human metabolism, and this can be traced back to our evolutionary roots.

Historically speaking, carbohydrate intake has always been quite low. Likewise, the diseases we now know are associated with insulin resistance—which is primarily caused by excess consumption of refined carbs—have been quite rare.

The evidence is both clear and overwhelming: Carbohydrate intake is the primary factor that determines your body’s fat ratio, and processed grains and sugars (particularly fructose) are the primary culprits behind our skyrocketing obesity and diabetes rates.

“It follows logically that if you can limit carb intake to a range of which is absolutely necessary (and even up to 50 grams a day over) and make the difference up with tasty fats and protein, you can literally reprogram your genes back to the evolutionary-based factory setting you had at birth – the setting that offered you the opportunity to start life as a truly efficient fat-burning organism and to continue to do so for the rest of your life as long as you send the right signals to your genes,” Mark writes.

Why the Low-Carb/High-Fat Diet Works for Weight Loss

Switching from a carb-based diet to a fat- and protein-based diet will help rebalance your body’s chemistry, and a natural side effect of this is weight loss, and/or improved weight management once you’re at an ideal weight. One explanation for this is that you don’t really get fat from eating too much and exercising too little. Nor do you get fat from eating fat. One researcher that has clearly established this is Dr. Richard Johnson, whose latest book, The Fat Switch, dispels many of the most pervasive myths relating to diet and obesity.

Dr. Johnson discovered the method that animals use to gain fat prior to times of food scarcity, which turned out to be a powerful adaptive benefit. His research showed that fructose activates a key enzyme, fructokinase, which in turn activates another enzyme that causes cells to accumulate fat. When this enzyme is blocked, fat cannot be stored in the cell. Interestingly, this is the exact same “switch” animals use to fatten up in the fall and to burn fat during the winter. Fructose is the dietary ingredient that turns on this “switch,” causing cells to accumulate fat, both in animals and in humans.

In essence, overeating and excess weight could be viewed as a symptom of an improper diet. It’s not necessarily the result of eating too many calories, per se, but rather getting your calories from the wrong sources. In simple terms, when you consume too many sugars and carbs, you set off a cascade of chemical reactions in your body that makes you hungry and craving for sweets:

First, fructose is metabolized differently from glucose, with the majority being turned directly into fat because fructose stimulates a powerful “fat switch.”
This rapidly leads to weight gain and abdominal obesity (“beer belly”), decreased HDL, increased LDL, elevated triglycerides, elevated blood sugar, and high blood pressure—i.e., classic metabolic syndrome.
Dietary carbohydrates, especially fructose, are also the primary source of a substance called glycerol-3-phosphate (g-3-p), which causes fat to become fixed in fat tissue.
At the same time, high carb intake raises your insulin levels, which prevents fat from being released.
Fructose further tricks your body into gaining weight by turning off your body’s appetite-control system. Fructose does not suppress ghrelin (the “hunger hormone”) and doesn’t stimulate leptin (the “satiety hormone”), which together result in feeling hungry all the time, even though you’ve eaten. As a result, you overeat and develop insulin resistance, which is not only an underlying factor of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and a long list of other chronic diseases.

The resulting equation is simple: fructose and dietary carbohydrates (grains, which break down into sugar) lead to excess body fat, obesity and related health issues. Furthermore, no amount of exercise can compensate for this damage because if you eat excessive fructose and grains—the primary ingredients NOT found in our ancestral diet—it will activate programming to cause your body to become, and remain, fat.

How Much Glucose or Carbs Do You Really Need?

The debate about whether or not you really need glucose, and if so, how much, is by no means settled. Earlier this year, I ran a series of articles featuring the back-and-forth discussion between two well-researched experts on this topic, Dr. Jaminet and Dr. Rosedale.

Dr. Jaminet is a proponent of so-called “safe starches,” and is of the conviction that depleting your glycogen store can stress other systems to provide the glucose your body requires to perform. Dr. Rosedale, on the other hand, points out that because glucose consumption will undoubtedly spike blood glucose levels and increase insulin and leptin, promoting resistance, glucose consumption is always associated with some incremental degree of damage and/or increased risk of mortality. His diet is subsequently extremely carb-restrictive.

Yet another diet similar to Drs. Jaminet and Rosedale’s is the GAPS diet, created by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, which is specifically designed to help “heal and seal” your gut. As such, it primarily consists of easily digestible, lightly cooked foods that are high in protein, fats, and fermented foods, and low in fiber and carbs.

Mark Sisson also adds valuable insight to this discussion2:

“At any one time, the total amount of glucose dissolved in the bloodstream of a healthy non-diabetic is equivalent to only a teaspoon (maybe 5 grams). Much more than that is toxic; much less than that and you pass out. That’s not much range for a so-called “preferred” fuel, is it?

Several studies have shown that under normal low MET conditions (at rest or low-to mid- levels of activity such as walking and easy work) the body only needs about 5 grams of glucose an hour. And that’s for people who aren’t yet fat-adapted or keto-adapted. The brain is the major consumer of glucose, needing maybe 120 grams a day in people who aren’t yet on a low carb eating program.

Low carb eating reduces the brain’s glucose requirements considerably, and those who are very low carb (VLC) and keto-adapted may only require about 30 grams of glucose per day to fuel the brain… Twenty of those grams can come from glycerol (a byproduct of fat metabolism) and the balance from gluconeogenesis in the liver (which can actually make up to a whopping 150 grams a day if you haven’t metabolically damaged it with NAFLD through fructose overdosing).

Bottom line, unless you are a physical laborer or are training (exercising) hard on a daily basis, once you become fat-adapted, you probably don’t ever need to consume more than 150 grams of dietary carbs – and you can probably thrive on far less. Many Pbers [Mark’s diet, Primal Blueprint] do very well (including working out) on 30-70 grams a day.” [Emphasis mine]

Key Point: Replace Carbs with Healthful Fats

As I see it, this is really a non-issue for most people as few people anywhere near Dr. Jaminet’s recommendation of cutting carbs from the standard 50 percent down to 20-30 percent of total calories. However, if you’ve already begun to seriously address your carb intake then you may want to experiment with various amounts of “safe carbs” like rice and potatoes. As Mark describes, the actual amount of carbs could vary anywhere from 30 to 150 grams a day, depending on whether your body has adapted to burning ketones and your level of exercise.

Keep in mind that when we’re talking about harmful carbs, we’re only referring to grains and sugars, NOT vegetable carbs.

When you cut grain/sugar carbs you actually need to radically increase the amount of vegetables you eat since, by volume, the grains you need to trade out are denser than vegetables. You also need to dramatically increase healthful fats such as avocados, coconut oil, egg yolks, raw grass fed organic butter, olives and nuts.

You would not want to use highly processed and genetically engineered omega-6 oils like corn, canola and soy as they will upset your omega 6/3 ratio. Of course you want to avoid all trans fats, but contrary to popular advice, saturated fats are a key component of a healthy diet that will promote weight loss.

A reasonable goal will be to have as much as 50-70 percent of your diet as healthy fat, which will radically reduce your carbohydrate intake. It can be helpful to remember that fat is far more satiating than carbs, so if you have cut down on carbs and feel ravenous, this is a sign that you have not replaced them with sufficient amounts of healthy fat. Sources of healthy fats that you’ll want to add to your diet include:

Olives and Olive oil (for cold dishes)

Coconuts, and coconut oil (for all types of cooking and baking)

Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk

Raw Nuts, such as, almonds or pecans

Organic pastured egg yolks

Avocados

Pasture finished meats

Palm oil

Unheated organic nut oils

Most people will likely notice massive improvement in their health by following this approach as they are presently consuming FAR more grain and bean carbohydrates in their diet, and any reduction will be a step in the right direction. To help you get started on the right track, review my Nutritional Plan, which guides you through these dietary changes one step at a time.

Recent Research Confirms Benefits of Low-Carb/High-Fat Diet

Conventional advice has focused on low-fat diets for weight loss and heart disease prevention, but again and again, studies demonstrate that this advice is diametrically opposed to reality… In one such study, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Heart and Vascular Institute compared the effects of two diets on vascular health; one low in fat, the other low in carbs. The study in question was presented at this year’s meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Denver, on June 33.

The study included a total of 46 men and women weighing on average 218 pounds. The six-month long weight loss program consisted of moderate aerobic exercise and strength training, and one of two diets, either:

Low-carb, high-fat: Less than 30 percent of calories from carbs (pastas, breads and sugary fruits), and up to 40 percent from fats (meat, dairy products, and nuts)

Low-fat, high-carb diet: Less than 30 percent of calories from fat, and 55 percent from carbs

The low-carb group on average shed 10 pounds in 45 days, while the low-fat group took 70 days to lose the same amount of weight. In terms of vascular health, the low-carb, high-fat dieters showed no harmful vascular changes, which is the primary reason for why so many are afraid of high-fat diets.

According to the lead investigator, professor of medicine and director of clinical and research exercise physiology, Kerry Stewart, Ed.D:

“Our study should help allay the concerns that many people who need to lose weight have about choosing a low-carb diet instead of a low-fat one, and provide re-assurance that both types of diet are effective at weight loss and that a low-carb approach does not seem to pose any immediate risk to vascular health. More people should be considering a low-carb diet as a good option.”

Stewart also believes that the emphasis on low-fat diets has likely contributed to the obesity epidemic in the US by promoting overconsumption of sugars and grains. I couldn’t agree more. The simple reason for this is that grains and sugars raise your insulin levels, which causes insulin resistance and, ultimately, weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease.

Listen to Your Body

The evidence is quite clear that chronically raising your blood glucose through consumption of grains and sugars will increase your insulin resistance, which in turn will increase insulin and leptin resistance. And avoiding insulin and leptin resistance is perhaps the single most important factors if you seek optimal health and longevity.

That said, the degree to which you choose to reduce carbs however is, ultimately, up to you. And certain individual biochemical differences can make one diet more beneficial for you than others. The key point is to be aware that consuming sugar, grains and starches will promote insulin resistance to some degree or other, depending on the amount you consume.

As always, remember to listen to your body as it will give you feedback if what you are doing is right for your unique biochemistry and genetics. So listen to that feedback and adjust your program accordingly.

TEAM HankFit247 Blog

Hank Rouse, CEO

Tag Archives: dairy products

Organic, Free Range, Grass Fed, and More

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The Superfoods That Could Change the Way You Eat, Feel and Live

7 Foods That Can Lower Blood Pressure

Fat, Not Glucose, is the Preferred Fuel for Your Body

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