The Battle for GMO Transparency

February 28, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Healthy-Eating

The Battle for GMO Transparency

By Elaine Charles, part 7 in my series on healthy eating

Twenty-two years ago, on February 4th, Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (BGH) was forced onto the market despite complaints from consumers and scientists warning that this technology is inherently dangerous.

“Despite the fact that consumers said they wanted labeling and independent safety testing, they just rammed it on through,” Ronnie Cummins, founder of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA)says.

“Here we are, 22 years later, [and] a large percentage of our farmlands and our foods in the United States now contain genetically engineered or genetically modified ingredients — 75 percent of all supermarket foods.

We’ve had an interesting 20-year battle with consumers asserting their right to know; their right to choose.”

 

If Lying Were Illegal, We’d Have GMO Labeling Already

It really heated up in 2012 when OCA, Dr. Bronner’s and a number of  allies began putting GMO Labeling initiatives on state ballots. California was the first, followed by Washington in 2013 and Oregon in 2014.

They came very close to winning all those state ballots, despite food and biotech companies outspending them many times over, pouring tens of millions of dollars into their anti-labeling campaigns.

Had lying to voters been illegal during those campaigns, there’s little doubt they would have won. During the 2012 campaign, the industry was caught misrepresenting academic affiliations, misusing federal seal of the FDA, and falsely quoting the agency in a mailer sent to voters.

The attorney general in Washington State also indicted The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) for carrying out an illegal money-laundering scheme to protect the identity of members who donated funds to the opposing campaign in 2013.

As explained by Ronnie:

“The Big Food companies had become so worried about consumer backlash by 2013 that they no longer were willing to go public with their donations to stop GMO labeling.

They set up a front group and laundered the money illegally and they got caught. Hopefully, they’re going to have to pay millions and millions of dollars in penalties.

But the thing they really hate the most is that we beat them in the court of public opinion. We educated a critical mass of American consumers about the hazards of GMOs and the chemical toxins — the pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides — that always accompany them.

We’ve alerted the public to the dangers of GMO-derived foods, and the public have stood up and even the corporate media and the indentured politicians in Washington have had to listen.”

 

GMO Labeling ‘War” Heated Up Several Notches After Vermont’s Success

In May 2014, Vermont passed a law requiring GMO ingredients to be labeled when sold in the state. The industry took the case to court, but the federal district court upheld the constitutionality of Vermont’s law.

The court also noted that under our federal system, states do have the right to pass laws about food safety or food labeling when the federal government has no policy. Ever since then, industry concerns have mounted to new heights, as have their efforts to squelch further labeling efforts once and for all.

“In July 2015, they managed to pass a law in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Pompeo Bill [aka the DARK Act, or Deny Americans the Right to Know], which was totally outrageous.

It basically said, ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter that 90 percent of consumers want to know if there are GMOs in their food. It doesn’t matter if we’ve had a hundred-year tradition of states being able to pass food labeling laws.

We’re going to squelch all that, because Monsanto, Coca-Cola, and the rest don’t want you to know.’ They rammed through that bill,” Ronnie says.

The House of Representatives’ passing of the DARK Act provoked hundreds of thousands of phone calls, emails, and visits with congressional representatives all over the country. As a consequence, the U.S. Senate got cold feet, and didn’t take up the bill in 2015.

 

Industry Proposes Unworkable ‘Compromise’

In face of that failure, the food industry set up closed-door meetings with consumer organizations in an effort to reach a compromise. Naturally,  the OCA or their allies were invited, as labeling opponents they’re not willing to compromise on your right to know what’s in your food, and your right to choice.

They did get a handful of people to meet with them though. The proposed compromise to mandatory labeling was to use so-called QR or smart codes on food packages.

By scanning the QR code using your smartphone, you could then look up information about the food on the brand’s website.

Few consumers fell for this ruse, and polls show 90 percent of American consumers want clear labels on food packages, NOT user-unfriendly smart codes. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced that a compromise with the consumer groups could not be reached.

 

Campbell’s Soup Company Breaks Rank

Vermont’s GMO labeling law takes effect on July 1, 2016 and food companies are undoubtedly on edge about the fact that some 40,000 or 50,000 food products will have to bear the “contain genetically engineered ingredients” label or be reformulated.

Campbell’s Soup Company broke ranks with the GMA and the rest of the food industry a few weeks ago when the company announced it will comply with the Vermont law. Campbell’s executives also said they will remove GMOs from certain products. Moreover, Campbell’s confirmed that food prices will remain unchanged.

It doesn’t cost anything extra to add a few words to the label. The past argument that GMO labeling would result in a $500 price hike for the average American family was, and is, completely FALSE. Whole Foods Market has also announced that by 2018, any GE product sold in its stores will have a GMO label.

“The rest of the food industry cried out that Campbell’s had stabbed them in the back. Although a couple of them like Hershey’s, Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, Cheerios, Ben and Jerry’s, and then some restaurant chains like Panera and Chipotle had already said, ‘We’re getting GMOs out of our products.’ Then, of course, some of them have started buying up as many organic brands as they can,” Ronnie says.

“Basically, the Big Food industry is in disarray. They want this issue to go away because, according to Fortune magazine, they lost $4 billion last year. Consumers are mad at them; not only for having GMOs in their products, but for trying to conceal that.

Consumers are starting to say, ‘How come they took out all their GMOs in the European Union, but in the United States, they haven’t taken them out and they don’t want us to know?…

I think when we look at all these food companies, like Kraft, who are taking artificial colors and synthetic chemicals out of even their non-organic products, and buying up every organic brand they can buy, we’re seeing a change. American consumers are starting to not only take control of their health but take control of their food and their diets.

The food companies, the chemical companies, and Monsanto could ignore this for a while, but they can’t ignore it anymore.”

 

Besides GMOs, What Else Is the Food Industry Hiding From You?

The food and biotechnology industries have fought hard to prevent you from knowing there are GE ingredients in your food. So what else are they trying to keep you in the dark about? For starters, they don’t want you to know that some 95 percent of your meat and animal products come from animals that are fed GE grains, are drugged, and raised under horrific living conditions in feedlots and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

“We need to demand the right to know which of our meat and animal products come out of factory farms,” Ronnie says. “The next stage in this food fight to know what we’re eating and to be able to choose what’s healthy, sustainable, and humane, is to think a little bit more about meat, dairy, and eggs.”

Let’s also not forget that most Americans are spending half of our food dollars eating in restaurants … Does the menu really tell you very much? No. You have to become not just a passive consumer. Ask that waiter ‘Is this farmed salmon or is this wild-caught Alaskan salmon? You got this hamburger on the menu. Is this grass-fed? Does it come from a local or regional farmer,’ and so on.

There exists this conversation and this food fight into the other sectors of food and farming economy, which are huge. One of them is meat and animal products, the other are restaurants … Let’s think before we pull out our wallets. Let’s look more closely at these menus and labels. Let’s exercise our right. It is a right to take control of our health and of our food.”

Let’s also not forget the issue of pesticides. Since the introduction of Roundup in 1974, 1.8 million tons of it has been sprayed on U.S. crops alone. Worldwide, nearly 10 million tons of glyphosate has been used. It’s the most commonly used chemical in agriculture in the history of mankind.

This is truly outrageous when you consider that Monsanto deceived us yet again with this product. It’s neither biodegradable nor safe. Instead, research shows it’s a carcinogen. It also destroys critically important soil microbes, which has led to a reduction in food quality. We really need to double down  and eliminate this toxic assault, not just to protect ourselves, but also to protect the environment.

 

Get Ready for Biggest Food Boycott Ever, Lest Food Industry Backs Down

Vermont’s GMO labeling law takes effect this July. The GMA and its members, including Monsanto (which alone employs 300 attorneys), are appealing the federal district court decision to the circuit court. Ronnie is confident Vermont will prevail, but it’s certainly possible that some of the circuit court judges might not look at the fact in the same way the first judge did.

Even the food industry recognizes they may lose, which is why they’re pressuring the Senate to block all further attempts to label GMOs.

“The Senate Ag committee has a guy, Pat Roberts, from Kansas, who’s never seen a pesticide he didn’t love. He’s never seen a factory farm he didn’t love. He’s never seen a big check from special interests that he didn’t love to put in his bank account.

Even Roberts has said, ‘I’m not sure we can pass this [denial of consumer right to know] in the Senate’ … They’re going to try, perhaps until the last minute. But I think what it looks like at this point is that we can prevail.

If we don’t — if the Senate dares to ram through a bill in the last minute to take away the right of consumers to know what’s in their food, and the right of states … then we have a surprise for them. That 4 billion dollars that they lost from their bottom line last year is going to get a lot bigger, because you can’t just slap consumers around anymore.

We’re preparing a great boycott of all the GMA companies and all their brands if they dare to preempt Vermont at the last minute. But chances are they’re making plans. They’ve already decided like Campbell’s to throw in the towel. They’re going to either have labels on their products or they’re going to have to reformulate it.” Ronnie says.

Remember, every time you pull out your wallet, you cast your vote for the kind of food system you want, and that terrifies the food industry. They know they survive or perish at the hand of consumers, which is the reason for all this lack of transparency. Up until recently, most people were simply too uninformed to ditch their brands for something better. This is rapidly changing, and as it does, the status quo can no longer prevail. The food industry must change or die.

Hopefully, they will decide to not only stop fighting with regards to labeling, but also to take a long, hard look at the food they’re serving to kids in schools, old folks’ homes, retirement centers, corporate cafeterias, and veterans’ hospitals.

Our health care system simply cannot bear all of this diet-induced disease. “If they don’t, well, we’ll just make the organic and grass-fed industry and the natural health industry grow faster than ever,” Ronnie says.

 

Other Big Plans in Store to Inform and Protect Your Health

The OCA has hired legal help to draft new bills that require factory farmed foods to be labeled as such, and they’ve talked to several legislators across the country. So far, no one has agreed to support such a bill. In fact, as Ronnie says, they’re all “scared to death” of such legislation.

The factory farm industry, the drug companies that supply them with drugs, the genetic engineering and agribusiness centers that supply them with feed — these industries are massive, and they wield a lot of power.

“So far, we haven’t gotten any headway in states like Vermont, Wisconsin, or Maine where we’ve tried to talk about this,” Ronnie says.”But we think there’s another way that we can inform consumers about what’s in their factory-farmed foods.

What we started doing over the last year is try to send in some samples of milk, meat, and dairy products to labs to test for GMO DNA … animal drug residues … pesticide, fungicide, or herbicide residues, and/or their breakdown compounds (metabolites).” Ronnie says.

One major problem they encountered was that few labs were willing to work with them. To remedy this situation, the Natural Health Association and other groups, have joined forces with the OCA to set up our own independent laboratory. They’re also investigating labs around the world that might be willing to be objective.

“The industry likes to say, ‘Organic and grass-fed are not worth the extra money and that it’s all just hype. The Organic Consumers Association wants to take more of your hard-earned money to get you to spend it on organic or grass-fed when it’s not really necessary’ … [W]e will get rigorous scientific testing done, and then we will explain to the public, ‘Here’s what’s in your food. Here’s in what’s in your kid’s food,’ Ronnie says.

 

Taking Pesticides and Animal Drugs to Task

The agricultural industry uses some 20,000 different pesticides, many of which — despite being legal to use — act as hormone or endocrine disruptors. As explained by André Leu, author of “The Myths of Safe Pesticides,” pesticides pose a significant health threat even in minute amounts. Research also shows that the synergistic action between various chemicals typically makes them FAR more toxic in combination than individually.

“People are not paying attention to the fact that the most commonly used herbicide in America on corn is not even Roundup; it’s atrazine. How come atrazine is banned in the European Union and most industrialized countries?” Ronnie says.

“It’s very clear: It’s carcinogenic. It makes frogs develop extra legs. It turns male fish into female fish with eggs. It does damage to you when you drink that tap water or when you eat that food that’s got the atrazine residue.

We’ve got to keep educating people about GMOs. But the next stage in this food safety campaign is the toxic pesticides that always accompany them. We can add (when we’re talking about meat and animal products) the animal drugs that always accompany them.

Once we win consumers’ right to know what’s in their food, including the pesticides and the animal drugs, the big companies are going to stop using these things, and the organic and the grass fed sector will become what it used to be before the Second World War — the dominant part of our food and farming system.”

Creating Synergy Between Organic Food and natural Health

We’ve made great headway, but there’s clearly a lot more to be done. Ronnie and I personally thank you for everything you’ve done to further this cause, and hope you stick with us as we move forward. I strongly encourage you to give OCA your financial support, because we are making a difference.

Food companies have to start being honest and truthful in telling us what’s in our food, and we will not quit until they do. We can’t do it alone, however. We need your help, and this week, you can double the impact of your donation, as I will match each and every dollar you donate to the OCA.

 

In closing, Ronnie notes:

“The most encouraging thing about in the United States and North America these days is that we’ve got a hundred million people occasionally buying organic and grass-fed food products. A lot of them are buying them more than occasionally. That’s why we have this 55-billion-dollar industry of organic, non-GMO, and grass-fed.

But we also have a hundred million natural health consumers out there who are taking control of their health, who are at least occasionally buying supplements and visiting alternative practitioners. My big dream for 2016 is to create an even greater synergy between the organic consumers and the natural health consumers, because we live in a world where we need both organic food and grass-fed food, and natural.”

 

Filed Under: GMO, Healthy Eating

The Truth About Sugar

February 21, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Healthy-Eating

The Truth About Sugar

By Elaine Charles, part 6 in my series on healthy eating

“The Truth About Sugar” a BBC production features Cara Patterson, Rick Shabilla, Audrey Cannon, and Simon Gallagher, who between them consume nearly 120 teaspoons of sugar a day.

Refined sugar has become a dietary staple in most developed nations, and many are at a loss as to how to avoid this pernicious ingredient, which can be found in virtually every processed food — typically in the form of high-fructose corn syrup.

High-sugar diets are undoubtedly the primary culprit in skyrocketing obesity and type 2 diabetes rates and other chronic health problems associated with insulin resistance.

For example, according to recent research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2015, obese children as young as 8 now display signs of heart disease, and excessive sugar consumption right from birth on is at the root of this trend.

 

Cutting out Sugar Is One of the Easiest and Fastest Ways to Improve Your Health

“The Truth About Sugar” which aired on BBC One, aims to “demystify some of the myths about sugar — namely, what food products secretly contain it — and demonstrate the impact it can make on your health if you reduce the amount you eat.”

Recent research has revealed that cutting out added sugars can improve biomarkers associated with health in as little as 10 days — even when overall calorie count and percentage of carbohydrates remains the same.

The study, led by Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist who has long argued that added sugar is toxic when consumed in too-high amounts, reduced the amount of added sugars from an average of 27 percent of daily calories down to about 10 percent.

This is in line with the most recent recommendations by the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, issued in February.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also proposed adding “added sugar” to the Nutrition Facts panel on processed foods, set at 10 percent of total energy intake for a 2,000 calorie-a-day diet.

Dr. Lustig’s research suggests such a labeling addition could potentially make a big difference in people’s health, provided they read food labels.

 

Sugar Is Disguised Under Many Names

Many are simply unaware of just how much sugar they’re consuming. Added sugar oftentimes hides under other less familiar names, such as dextrose, maltose, galactose, and maltodextrin, for example.

According to www.SugarScience.org added sugars hide in 74 percent of processed foods under more than 61 different names. For a full list, see ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’.

Misled by shrewd advertisers, many are also still unaware of how too much sugar can disrupt your health and well-being. As previously reported by The New York Times:

“The scientists who started www.SugarScience.org say they have reviewed 8,000 independent clinical research articles on sugar and its role in metabolic conditions that are some of the leading killers of Americans, like heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and liver disease.

The link between sugar and chronic disease has attracted increasing scientific scrutiny in recent years. But many studies have provided conflicting conclusions, and experts say part of the reason is that biased studies have clouded the debate.”

 

Industry Front Groups Work to Keep Sugar Hazards Secret

Indeed, the sugar-processed food and beverage industries have fought hard to hide and downplay the health hazards associated with sugar. Large sums of money have been spent to this end, and scientific integrity has been tossed by the wayside in order to convince you that sugar belongs in your diet.

Weight problems, they say, are due to inactivity — not excessive sugar consumption. The Global Energy Balance Network is one front group peddling this misinformation, originally funded with millions of dollars by none other than Coca-Cola.

But progress is being made due to all the public exposure and negative press, the Global Energy Network was shut down.

It was to counter profit-driven industry interests that www.SugarScience.org was created. Run by dozens of scientists at three American universities, this educational website makes independent research available to the public, so if you want the real scoop on what sugar does to your health, this is the place to look.

 

Refined Sugar Is All Energy and No Nutrition

When we talk about sugar, we’re really including ALL sugars, including honey, agave, table sugar, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and the natural fructose found in fresh-pressed fruit juice and whole fruits.

However, refined sugar and processed fructose are two of the worst, with fructose having even worse health impacts than refined sugar. In the film, biologist Marty Jopson, Ph.D., explains what makes refined sugar so unhealthy.

Sugar cane and sugar beets are used in sugar production, as these plants have high concentrations of sugar. The refining process further increases that sugar concentration.

Since all the fiber, roughage, and most of the water is removed, what’s left — the refined sugar — is nothing but empty calories (pure energy), completely devoid of nutrition. Should you fail to use up all these calories through physical activity, it will inevitably be stored as fat. And that’s the problem with eating some 30 teaspoons or more of refined sugar a day. You simply cannot burn it all!

For example, to burn off the calories from one Snickers bar you’d have to walk about five miles, and to offset a one-soda-per-day habit — equivalent to about 10 teaspoons of sugar — you have to walk one hour per day just to prevent additional weight gain.

But it’s not just candy, pastries and soda that are loaded with added sugars. Savory foods contain it as well. As do most, if not all condiments, and even infant formula and baby food.

 

How Much Sugar Do You Eat Each Day?

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know the exact answer to that question, and the reason for this is because it’s in virtually all processed food products, including products you would never suspect would have added sugar in it.

For example, the film mentions that a serving of Pad Thai noodles contains 9.5 teaspoons of sugar; a package of sweet and sour chicken with rice contains 12.5 teaspoons (more than a can of soda); and a can of baked beans contains 6 teaspoons of sugar — which, remember, would ideally be your grand total for the day!

The film goes on to discuss the science of addictive foods, and how food manufacturers employ scientists to determine the precise “bliss point” of each food, be it tomato sauce or chips. This “bliss point” is achieved through combinations of sugar, salt, and fat, plus proprietary additives and flavorings.

One question raised is: were food manufacturers to take sugar out of their foods completely, would we still buy them? The answer is likely no, because without all these flavor additives, of which sugar is more or less essential, many processed foods would be unpalatable, as the processing removes much of the natural flavors.

This is a problem relegated to the processed food industry. You don’t really have this problem when you’re cooking from scratch with whole foods, which are packed with natural flavors. Then all you need is seasoning. Rarely, if ever would you consider adding several teaspoons of sugar to a home-cooked meal!

 

How Quickly Can a High-Sugar Diet Pack on Unwanted Pounds?

So, just how quickly can a high sugar diet like this pack on extra pounds? To use Dr. Jopson’s example, let’s say you drink 3 cups of tea or coffee per day, and you add 2 teaspoons of sugar to each cup. Let’s also assume that you’re not burning off that extra sugar due to a sit-down job and leisure time inactivity. At the end of one year, that sugar (6 teaspoons a day), would turn into a whopping 4.5 kilos, or 9.9 pounds, of body fat.

When you consider that most consume five or six times more sugar than that each day, it’s easy to see how obesity has become more the norm than the exception. One of the volunteers featured in “The Truth About Sugar” had a body fat percentage of 51, and that’s not unusual these days. A body fat percentage of 32 and over is considered obese for women, and anything above 25 percent falls in the obese category for men.

 

What to Do If Your Body Fat Percentage Is Too High

It’s important to realize that the benefits of reducing belly fat go far beyond aesthetics. Abdominal fat — the visceral fat that deposits around your internal organs — releases proteins and hormones that can cause inflammation, which in turn can damage arteries and enter your liver, affecting how your body breaks down sugars and fats.

The chronic inflammation associated with visceral fat accumulation can trigger a wide range of systemic diseases linked with metabolic syndrome. This is why carrying extra weight around your middle is linked to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes, and other chronic diseases, and why measuring your waist-to-hip ratio is actually a better indicator of your health status than body mass index (BMI).

For the majority of people, severely restricting carbohydrates such as sugars, fructose, and grains in your diet will be the key to weight loss. Refined carbohydrates like breakfast cereals, bagels, waffles, pretzels, and most other processed foods will raise your insulin levels and, over time, cause insulin resistance, which is the No. 1 underlying factor of nearly every chronic disease and condition known to man, including weight gain.

If you’re currently drinking soda, other sweetened beverages, or fruit juices on a daily basis, you may want to start by eliminating those, and work your way through the rest of your food choices from there. The only beverage your body truly needs is clean, pure water.

As you cut the sugars from your diet, you need to replace them with healthy substitutes like vegetables and healthy fats (including natural saturated fats). You can find a detailed a step-by-step guide to this type of healthy eating program in my comprehensive nutrition plan, and I urge you to consult this guide if you are trying to lose weight.

Remember, one of the simplest guidelines to shedding excess weight is to EAT REAL FOOD, meaning food in the most natural form you can find, ideally whole organic produce, and pasture-raised when it comes to meats and animal products like dairy and eggs.

Intermittent fasting can further boost weight loss, as it:

  •    Increases secretion of human growth hormone (HGH), a fat-burning hormone
  •    Increases catecholamines, which increases resting energy expenditure
  •    Decreases insulin levels and improves insulin sensitivity
  •    Increases ghrelin, aka “the hunger hormone,” thereby reducing overeating
  •    Shifts your body from burning sugar to burning fat as its primary fuel

 

Sugar Addiction Is Real

The film also addresses the very real phenomenon of sugar addiction. Previous research has demonstrated that sugar is more addictive than cocaine.

And, as revealed in my interview with Dr. Pamela Peeke, author of The New York Times bestseller, “The Hunger Fix: The Three-Stage Detox and Recovery Plan for Overeating and Food Addiction,” refined and processed “hyperpalatables” (sugary, fatty, and salty food combinations) hijack the reward center in your brain, causing brain changes identical to those in drug addicts and alcoholics.

A critical player in all forms of addiction, including food addiction, is the neurotransmitter dopamine. Groundbreaking research into addiction has revealed that you will not feel pleasure or reward unless dopamine binds with its receptor, called the D2 receptor, which is located all throughout the reward center in your brain. When dopamine links to this receptor, immediate changes take place in brain cells and then you experience a “hit” of pleasure and reward.

However, when you indulge in too much of these hyper-stimulators, your brain’s reward center notes that you’re overstimulated, which the brain perceives as adverse to survival, and so it compensates by decreasing your sense of pleasure and reward. It does this by downregulating your D2 receptors, basically eliminating some of them.

But this survival strategy creates another problem, because now you don’t feel anywhere near the pleasure and reward you once had when you began your addiction, no matter whether it’s food or drugs. As a result, you develop tolerance which means that you want more and more of your fix but never achieve the same “high” you once had. And so, cravings grow stronger.

 

Breaking Sugar Addiction

Fortunately, there are solutions to unhealthy junk food cravings. One of the most effective strategies I know of is intermittent fasting — mentioned above — along with diet modifications that effectively help reset your body’s metabolism, i.e. replacing sugars and non-vegetable carbs with vegetables and healthy fats.

Intermittent fasting will help you reduce your calorie intake and help your liver to produce healing ketones. When sugar is not needed for your primary fuel and when your sugar stores run low, your body will crave it less.

Another helpful technique, which addresses the emotional component of food cravings, is the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). If you maintain negative thoughts and feelings about yourself while trying to take physical steps to improve your body, you’re unlikely to succeed. Fine-tuning your brain to “positive” mode is absolutely imperative to achieve optimal physical health.

Unfortunately, many people shun this notion, not because it doesn’t make sense, but because the medical establishment has conned them into believing that it means they’ll be shelling out many thousands of dollars for traditional psychological care.

While traditional psychological approaches may sometimes work, EFT has shown to be a far better, not to mention inexpensive, solution. If you feel that your emotions, or your own self-image, may be your own worst enemies when it comes to altering your relationship with food, I highly recommend you read my free EFT manual and consider trying EFT on your own. A version of EFT specifically geared toward combating sugar cravings is called Turbo Tapping.

Eating REAL Food Is the Answer (see the blog Top 7 Nutrient-Dense Foods)

The concerted effort by the processed food industry to make their products as addictive as possible has the unfortunate side effect of stimulating your metabolism to burn carbs as its primary fuel. As long as you are in primary carb-burning mode, you will strongly crave these types of foods.

The solution is to decrease the amount of processed foods you eat, and replace them with real foods, i.e. high-quality whole foods. Also remember that non-vegetable carbs need to be replaced with healthy fats to successfully achieve this metabolic switchover.

Again, intermittent fasting is one of the most effective ways to end junk food cravings, especially cravings for sugar and grains. No matter how cleverly enhanced these junk foods are, your cravings for them will dramatically diminish, if not vanish altogether, once your body starts burning fat instead of sugar as its primary fuel.

To protect your health, I recommend spending 90 percent of your food budget on whole foods, and only 10 percent or less on processed foods. Unfortunately, most Americans currently do the opposite, which is in large part why so many struggle with junk food cravings. Remember, virtually ALL processed foods are to some degree designed to have a high “craveability” factor, and it’s really difficult to find products that do not contain high amounts of addictive sugar and carbs.

Filed Under: Healthy Eating, Sugar High-Fructose

Two Meals a Day Is Ideal, But Which Two Is Up to You

February 7, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Healthy-Eating

 

Two Meals a Day Is Ideal, But Which Two Is Up to You

By Elaine Charles, part 5 in my series on healthy eating

How many meals a day is ideal? There are many answers to this question, but if you want to optimize your lifespan and decrease your risk for developing chronic degenerative diseases, the answer is becoming very clear.

The longstanding conventional answer is that most people need three square meals a day with snacks in between to maintain stable blood sugar and insulin levels.

However, there’s compelling evidence suggesting this near-continuous grazing may be partially to blame for the obesity and diabetes epidemic.

The most obvious risk with spreading out your meals to morning, noon, and evening is overeating. Other less obvious risks are biological changes that result in metabolic dysfunction, subsequent weight gain, and diminished health.

This blog is for individuals who DO NOT have insulin resistance. I will cover that topic next week.

 

The Case Against Eating Multiple Meals a Day

According to Dr. Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, where he studies meal timing and calorie restriction, even three meals a day may be too much.

Based on his research, he’s convinced the fewer meals you eat, the better you’ll fare overall. As reported by Time Magazine:

“Longo says studies that support a grazing approach tend to be flawed in predictable ways. They often look only at the short-term effects of increasing meal frequency.

While your appetite, metabolism, and blood sugar might at first improve, your system will grow accustomed to your new eating schedule after a month or two. When that happens, your body will start expecting and craving food all day long instead of only around midday or dinnertime.”

 

Eat Breakfast or Dinner, but Not Both…

While I’m still convinced that intermittent fasting is an important strategy for effective weight loss and disease prevention, it likely doesn’t matter which meal you skip — breakfast or dinner — as long as you skip one of them.

The benefits of intermittent fasting are:

  •    Increases secretion of human growth hormone (HGH), a fat-burning hormone
  •    Increases catecholamines, which increases resting energy expenditure
  •    Decreases insulin levels and improves insulin sensitivity
  •    Increases ghrelin, aka “the hunger hormone,” thereby reducing overeating
  •    Shifts your body from burning sugar to burning fat as its primary fuel

If you have a physically taxing job, you are likely better off eating a solid breakfast and lunch, and then skipping dinner. The key to remember is to only eat within a window of six to eight consecutive hours each day, and avoiding food for at least three hours before bedtime.

As long as you restrict your eating to this window, you can choose between having breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner, but avoid having both breakfast and dinner.

If you chose to eat dinner, it’s important to avoid eating for at least three hours before going to bed.

This is another important factor that can help optimize your mitochondrial function and prevent cellular damage from occurring, which will be in the next segment.

That said, none of this probably applies to normal weight teens or growing children. They likely need three square meals a day unless they’re overweight. For kids and teens, the type of food they eat would be a primary consideration.

Ideally, all of their meals would revolve around eating REAL FOOD — not processed foods, fast food, and sugary snacks. Drinking plenty of pure water and avoiding sugary beverages is another key consideration.

 

The Benefits of Avoiding Late-Night Eating

If you want to live a long healthy life and avoid chronic degenerative diseases then it’s important to have a minimum of three hours after your last food intake before you go to bed.

This is due to the way your body produces energy. Many don’t realize that your mitochondria are responsible for “burning” the fuel your body consumes and converting into usable energy.

These tiny bacterial derivatives live inside your cell and are optimized to create energy from the food you eat and the oxygen in the air you breathe. Your cells have between 100 and 100,000 mitochondria.

Your mitochondria create energy by generating electrons that are normally transferred to ATP (adenosine triphosphate). When you don’t have insulin resistance this energy transfer works quite nicely, but when you are insulin resistant or you eat excessively, dysfunctions tend to emerge.

If you consume more calories than your body can immediately use, there will be an excess of free electrons, which back up inside your mitochondria.

These electrons are highly reactive and they start to leak out of the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. These excess electrons leak out and wind up prematurely killing the mitochondria, and then wreak further havoc by damaging your cell membranes and contributing to DNA mutations.

There are many knowledgeable experts that believe this type of mitochondrial dysfunction is one of the keys to accelerated aging.

So how can you apply this knowledge? Simple: resolve your insulin resistance as soon as you can (next week’s blog), and do not eat for AT LEAST three hours before you go to sleep.

Your body will use the least amount of calories when sleeping, so the last thing you need is excess fuel at this time that will generate excessive free radicals that will damage your tissues, accelerate aging, and contribute to chronic disease.

Interestingly, if you have insulin resistance, intermittent fasting is, without a doubt, the most powerful intervention I know of to help you resolve it. This is one of the reasons why I now believe skipping dinner may be an even better strategy than skipping breakfast.

Clearly skipping dinner is more difficult to implement from a social perspective, but it might be a superior biological strategy.

 

Can Drinking Water Before Meals Help You Lose Weight?

In related news, recent research suggests drinking 500 ml (a little more than two eight-ounce glasses) of water half an hour before your meals may help boost weight loss. Obese participants who “pre-loaded” with water before each meal lost an average of nearly three pounds (close to 1.5 kilos) more than the control group over the course of three months.

All participants, including the control group, received a weight management consultation on how to improve their diet and exercise. Those who ate three meals a day and drank water prior to each meal lost an average of nearly 9.5 pounds (4.3 kilos) in three months.

 

Calorie Restriction Benefits Your Health

Getting back to intermittent fasting, many studies have confirmed the health benefits of calorie restriction, and it seems clear that eating less is part of the equation if you want to live longer. Interestingly, research has shown that life-long calorie restriction in mice “significantly changes the overall structure of the gut microbiota” in ways that promote longevity. So one reason why calorie restriction may lengthen lifespan appears to be due to the positive effect it has on gut microbiota.

The increase in longevity is also clearly associated with a decrease in disease states that would cut your life short, and calorie restriction is associated with a number of health improvements, including reduced visceral fat, reduced inflammation, lower blood pressure, and improved insulin sensitivity, just to name a few. Earlier research has demonstrated that calorie restriction helps extend the lifespan of animals by improving insulin sensitivity and inhibiting the mTOR pathway.

However, few people are keen on the idea of cutting your daily calories by about 25 percent or more for the rest of your life, and the good news is, you don’t have to.

Research has shown that intermittent fasting results in many of the same benefits as calorie restriction — even if you don’t place any restrictions on the number of calories you consume when you do eat.

 

Why Intermittent Fasting Is Beneficial Over Calorie Restriction

Intermittent fasting also has a number of added benefits over strict calorie restriction. For starters, it’s a lot easier to comply with, and compliance is everything. The calorie restriction route is also extremely dependent on high quality nutrition — you want to sacrifice calories without sacrificing any important micronutrients — and this can be another hurdle for many who are unfamiliar with nutrition and what actually constitutes a healthy diet.

You also want to avoid the counting calories and calorie restriction fallacies. Most people fail to appreciate that there are many intricate biochemical dynamics that occur that are unaccounted for when you just count “calories in and calories out.”

In terms of calorie restriction and weight, humans also tend to have an innate resistance to excessive weight loss, even in the face of severe calorie restriction. Dr. Ancel Keys demonstrated this in the mid-1940s when he designed an experiment to investigate the impact of starvation on human beings.

Thirty-six young healthy male volunteers were placed on a 24-week calorie-restricted diet of about 1,600 calories per day. They also had to walk for about 45 minutes a day. But instead of resulting in continuous weight loss, at 24 weeks their weight had stabilized, and no more weight loss could be elicited even when he reduced calorie intake down to 1,000 or less per day.

The drawbacks were clear. The men became obsessed with food to the exclusion of everything else in their life, and when the calorie restriction ended, they all over-reacted. Within a few weeks, they regained all of the lost weight plus about 10 percent more. Other studies have come to similar conclusions. So starvation-type diets may not be ideal for the average person. Your body will tend to shut down various processes in order to survive. For example, by reducing thyroid function, your body will not burn as many calories.

All of this may seem hopelessly contradictory. On the one hand, calorie restriction promotes beneficial biological changes that tend to extend life; on the other, there are built in mechanisms that when triggered by chronic calorie restriction can trigger other health problems. These are complex issues, and any extreme measure is likely to cause more problems than it solves.

The best we can do is come up with some general guidelines that replicate ancestral patterns. Daily intermittent fasting and avoiding eating for a number of hours before bedtime has many advantages over general calorie restriction and other radical diets, while providing many of the same benefits with a minimum of risk.

 

To Lose Fat You Need to Retrain Your Body to Burn Fat for Fuel

When you consistently eat every few hours and never miss a meal, your body becomes very inefficient at burning fat as a fuel, and this is where the trouble starts. It’s important to recognize that, with few exceptions, you cannot burn body fat if you have other fuel available, and if you’re supplying your body with carbohydrates every few hours, your body has no need to dive into your fat stores. When you apply intermittent fasting you not only avoid this but also will typically decrease your food costs and increase your health.

Eating fewer meals and timing those meals to occur closer together is one of the most effective strategies I’ve found to trigger your body to more effectively burn fat for fuel, and normalize your insulin and leptin sensitivity. If you’re not insulin resistant, intermittent fasting is not as crucial, but may still be beneficial.

If you’re among the minority of Americans who do not struggle with insulin resistance, recommendations are to simply avoid eating at least three hours before bedtime. That automatically allows you to “fast” for at least 11 hours or longer depending on if and when you eat breakfast.

Equally important is the recommendation to EAT REAL FOOD when you do eat, meaning food in the most natural form you can find, ideally whole organic produce, and pasture-raised when it comes to meats and animal products like diary and eggs. To that, add avoiding sitting, engaging in non-exercise movement throughout the day, and getting regular exercise. Exercise will not produce significant weight loss without addressing your diet, but when done in combination it can be significantly beneficial.

Filed Under: Healthy Eating