Aerobic Athlete and Brittle Bones

I find most females, especially athletic ones, are estrogen dominant. Estrogen inhibits osteoclast activity and progesterone facilitates osteoblast activity. So if you are deficient in progesterone, your bone remaking osteoblasts never get to go to work. I would run a full hormone profile on her. Her nutrition (especially protein intake secondary to the LV requiring it to detoxify estrogen), as well as taking progest, if needed should and will help over time. Researchers such as Peate and Sayle have proven that most, not all women with bone density issues are estrogen dominant and deficient in
adequate quality protein intake.

You Are What You Eat- Processed Foods: By Paul Chek

Do me a favor before you read the next paragraph – go to your cupboards and refrigerator, and take a look at how many packaged food items you have in your kitchen. While you are there pull out a desert item (i.e. ice cream), a boxed item (i.e. breakfast cereal) and any other item you have that is flavored (i.e. salad dressing) and take a look at the labels. After reading the ingredients list, ask yourself:

1. How many words am I unable to pronounce?
2. Which of these ingredients have I never heard of and/or have no idea what it is?

Go take a look at those labels and, when you come back to finish this article, I will tell you why you may be having such a hard time flattening your abs, and why, even if they are flat, you may feel so dull every day!

If you did this little exercise, you may be surprised at the number of multi-syllable words that look more like they should be the ingredients of super glue than of something you’re eating. It is time to enlighten you with regard to what some of these ingredients are and what they can do to you. The gigantic and often strange words listed as ingredients (where food items are supposed to be!) are various concoctions used to color, stabilize, emulsify, bleach, texturize, soften, preserve, sweeten, add or cover smells, and flavor! In case you were wondering just how many of these little chemicals were sneaking into your mouth each year, current statistics say that the FDA lists approximately 2800 international food additives and about 3,000 chemicals, which are deliberately added to our food supply. When considering the number of chemicals used in the process of growing and processing food, by the food to the time it reaches our stomach we have consumed between 10,000 and 15,000 chemicals a day! (1)

While some of you may be thinking, “I don’t eat that many food additives,” I have news for you. The FDA doesn’t require food additives considered to be Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS) to be put on an ingredients label. Instead, all that is required are the words “artificial flavor” or “artificial coloring” or “natural”. The fact is, the average American eats approximately his/her body weight in food additives each year, or approximately 150 pounds; this statistic is roughly the same for most English speaking countries. Of this amount, 15 pounds or more will be used as flavoring agents, preservatives and dyes, many of which are considered GRAS by the FDA. Before you get comfortable with chemicals considered to be GRAS, you should realize that to save time and money, the FDA allows the food and additive manufacturers to notify them of the GRAS status of their additives and they are allowed to provide their own evidence to support their claim! Think about that for a moment. Having the chemical manufacturers provide their own research showing a given chemical is safe is like asking a cigarette manufacturer do their own research showing cigarettes are safe! It’s no wonder that this takes place when billions of dollars are at stake and the health of the average person is unimportant.

The fact of the matter is food and additive manufacturers, like drug manufacturers, are running the largest study ever run in history – and you are the guinea pigs! That’s right. It is only when they get enough reports about the damaging effects of a given additive that they remove it from the GRAS list. With that in mind, what are the chances of some doctor reporting to the FDA that their patient suffered adverse reactions to acetaldehyde, acetic acid, or agar-agar when they were merely on the label as “food additives” and not listed individually because they are on the GRAS list? Consider the side effects of these chemicals:

• Acetaldehyde is known to be an irritant to mucous membranes, which line your entire digestive tract, is a central nervous system depressant and large doses may cause death.
• Acetic acid may cause gastrointestinal distress, skin rashes and eye irritation.
• Agar-agar may cause flatulence, bloating (good bye abs!) and may have a laxative effect (2).

Please realize, I just pulled these GRAS food additives out of a book entitled “Food Additives, A Shopper’s Guide To What’s Safe & What’s Not” by Christine Hoza Farlow, D.C., and there are hundreds more GRAS additives whose side-effects look more like something Saddam Hussein would be interested in purchasing to use against Americans than it does something to be put in food. Yet millions of people are eating these chemicals every day!

By the way, don’t be fooled by the use of the term “natural”. Insects, insect larvae, monkey guts, and even mercury are all “natural” and are just a few of the natural items that end up in your food! Eric Schlosser, in his book “Fast Food Nation”, sums it up nicely by quoting Terry Acree, a professor of food science technology at Cornell University who says, “A natural flavor is a flavor that’s been derived with an out-of-date technology”. Food manufacturers play with your perception of what given words mean and they know that if they can label an additive as “natural”, the health conscious label reading consumer is much more likely to purchase it, yet just because something is natural, doesn’t mean it’s better for you. After all, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and cocaine are all natural, but none of them are good for you!

To show what is being hidden from us and is right under our nose (literally!), consider these ingredients used in a Burger King strawberry milk shake, but are not disclosed because they are GRAS:

Amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl Nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerbate, heliotropin, hydroxyphrenyl-2butanone (10% solution in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent (3)!

To make this even more alarming, the ingredients listed here are only for the “strawberry flavoring” in a Burger King milk shake, this doesn’t include the ice cream or anything else in the shake! Can you imagine what the ingredient list for Neapolitan ice cream would look? Our liver must process all of this (Figure 1A & 1B), and when our liver becomes overworked, these chemicals can end up in our blood stream, with almost unlimited access to the cells of our bodies, as well as placing strain on our detoxification systems!

Figure 1A

Figure 1B

“Can’t Just Eat One” Syndrome

Have you ever reached for a bag of chips while thinking, “I really don’t need these, but I’ll just eat a few,” only to end up reaching back in the bag over and over until you reach the bottom? Or how about a tub of ice cream – ever started out nibbling away thinking “I’ll just have a few bites,” and next thing you know you’re scraping the bottom of the carton? Don’t feel bad if you do because, unless you were eating 100% certified organic chips or ice cream, you most likely fell prey to the chemical tricks food manufacturers are playing on your body and your wallet!

It turns out that food scientists have determined how to manipulate the part of your brain that controls food cravings called the appestat. The appestat constantly monitors the nutrient content of you blood and only when fifty-one specific nutrients are present at their proper levels will an individual feel entirely full and satisfied. Food scientists have found that by adding or subtracting some of these nutrients, they can manipulate your sense of hunger and satiety. While the research is still incomplete, it’s believed that that adding excess fat, sugar and salt to a food tends to make people over eat (4). This is why both sugar and salt show up in some of the strangest places. For example, would you have expected to find sugar in sandwich meats? Have a look at the ingredients on the package in your refrigerator and look for words ending with “ose”. Anything ending with this suffix is a sugar. While you’re at it, look at your catsup bottle, your canned soups, medicines and even cigarettes! How sweet of them to play such tricks on your appetite centers. If you are overweight, you are more than likely one of millions of victims of chemical manipulation!

So how effective have the food manufacturers been with their chemical games? Currently, approximately 90% of the money that Americans spend on food is used to buy processed foods (3). When you follow the advances in food science, there is loose parallel in how much fast food Americans are purchasing and the amount of chemical-trickery scientists do to our food. Consider that in 1970, when the food sciences were comparatively undeveloped, Americans spent approximately $6 billion a year on fast foods. By the year 2000, scientists had added thousands of new chemical tricks to their arsenal and, with more attractive packaging and advertising campaigns, fast food sales soured to $110 billion! This combination of advertising and chemistry used by fast food manufacturers is so successful that American fast food business tycoons can’t resist the opportunity to make billions by poisoning almost every corner of the globe. As of the middle of 2000, McDonald’s planed on opening 650 restaurants in Asia, 550 in Europe, 350 in Latin America, 200 in the US and another 250 in the rest of the world – a total of 1,500 new restaurants in Asia were planned by 2002! (5). Their strategic combination of marketing and scientific trickery has been so successful that half of Australian children ages 9 and 10 thought that Ronald McDonald knew what kids should be eating; McDonald’s has become the favorite food eaten by children in China! (6)

Table 1 America ranks among the lowest of all the major industrial nations in terms of life expectancy, yet spends significantly more money on health care than any country in the world.

Human beings, armed with some 10,000 taste buds, are thought to have a fairly comprehensive sense of taste (7). While you would think that we would be capable of using this arsenal of taste buds to sniff-out foods of superior nutritional quality to eat, it would appear that chemical science has put up an effective smoke screen. Approximately 50% of the American population have eaten themselves into some degree of obesity and semi-starvation by consuming nutritionally inadequate foods! If that’s not enough, the US spends more money on health care than any other nation with each person averaging over $4,000 per year in medical expenses. Yet the US ranks last for life expectancy among all industrialized nations, is far from being the healthiest nation (Table 1). This is not hard to believe when you consider that in the year 2000, retail pharmacies in the US filled 3 billion prescriptions – that’s hardly what I would consider a healthy nation (8)! Then when you take into account that there were 281 million people living in the US in 2000, with 3 billion prescriptions being filled, that’s almost 11 prescriptions per person. This means, for every person who doesn’t buy a prescription, there is someone else getting 22 filled each year!
With prescription drug sales amounting to $145 billion in the year 2000 alone (9), and an additional $20.8 billion coming from over the counter retail sales (10), it would appear that the chemicals used in commercial farming, fast food restaurants and processed food are contributing a great deal of money to the medical and drug industry – all one big happy family of multi-billionaires!

Is Processed Food Really Food?

Have you ever wondered how it is that today that, in spite of the most advanced medical technology in history, in spite of the fact that we have more doctors, therapists, nutritionists, diet experts (per capita) and diet books than ever in history, we are more sick than ever in history? Could it be what we are eating? Were we always this sickly? I don’t think so, or we would never have withstood the selective pressures of evolution! Something has gone wrong – VERY WRONG!

In 1936, a highly respected scientist, dentist and expert in human nutrition named Weston A. Price, traveled the globe studying indigenous populations and correlating their dietary habits with their incidence of disease and dental carries (11). Price found that in tribes and cultures consuming a whole-food diet had virtually no dental carries (cavities) or disease!

Price also noted that diseases such as cancer were relatively unheard of in many cultures. Look at the photos in Figure 2A and 2B and ask yourself which Figure shows people who were eating “white man’s food” (processed food) and which were eating food native to their culture!

Figure 2A	Figure 2B

In Price’s study of primitive cultures, he consistently noted that they engaged in minimal food processing. Primitive peoples mostly used fire to cook meats, but not all, as the Eskimos and others commonly ate many portions of animals and fish raw. Salting, lacto-fermentation and pickling were among the very few methods of processing foods for storage and not surprisingly, these methods have been found to increase the nutritional value of many foods (12)!

Dr. Price’s research was consistent with the research of famous medical doctor, Francis Marrion Pottenger, who wrote the book, “Pottenger’s Cats”. Pottenger clearly demonstrate using extensive studies of cats that exposure to pasteurized milk and/or cooked meats resulted in rapid onset of disease and bodily malformation; his clinical observations suggested that similar results occur in humans. Because of the findings in his studies, Dr. Pottenger stated, “…nutrition becomes one of the most important elements in preventive medicine.” Regardless of which disease process is studied, the link between poor nutrition and disease, including cancer, clearly exists in studies and clinical observations of animals and man. In fact, I know of no study showing that a diet of processed foods provides health-giving benefits when compared to a whole-food diet!

What you see in most shopping carts today are what I call “non-foods”. My definition of a non-food is, “Any food that costs more in nutrition to digest, absorb and eliminate than it delivers to your body.” Most people forget that there is a cost to metabolize anything you put in your mouth. Literally every cell in the body needs proper nutrition or it will die. There are billions of cells involved in the processes of digestion, absorption and elimination of foods, not including the nutritional demands of human movement. Yet as indicated above, 90% of all the money spent on food in the US is spent on FAST FOODS! So where does that leave you?

We don’t need to be a doctor, nutritionist or research scientist to figure out what’s going on. We can use a simple accounting analogy to get a clear image of the blunder we have purchased our way into. Consider your body as a business. It costs money to run a business – you must purchase goods and services such as supplies, electricity, water, waste disposal and you must pay your workers. If your business doesn’t bring in enough money to pay your expenses, including adequate money for you to make a living, the business will go bankrupt! Your body is just like any business. You have about 100 trillion cells, all of which are like little employees working for you around the clock. To keep your body running, it too needs water, air, energy and supplies in the form of nutrition. The business of running a body is also a little tricky because while you may have an unproductive employee now and then in a business, you can always lay them off or fire them. In your body, you can’t lay your cells off, you can’t fire them, and if you don’t supply them with adequate nutrition to repair themselves, they get sick and start to die. If this goes on long enough, you too will go bankrupt and you will die!

Now, just look at the statistics for disease and drug-use in this country and you will get a very good picture of what happens when you consume a diet of “non-foods” – foods that take more out of your bodily bank account than you have in the account to spend. Literally every time you eat candy, cookies, soda pop, processed sandwich meats, white bread, white flower or pasteurized, processed anything, you are deviating away from the dietary plan the human body was designed for. You are also spending more money/nutrition to process garbage disguised as foods than the foods themselves bring in. This leaves the body no choice but to draw upon your own tissues for the nutrients it needs to try and survive. To prove my point, one need only look at the skyrocketing rates of degenerative diseases, which are highest – you guessed it – in those countries consuming the highest percentage of processed foods.

CHEK POINTS:

1. If you can’t pronounce a word on the label, don’t eat it! If you can’t pronounce a word on a food label, chances are very good it is a chemical that your liver will have to work to detoxify, and most likely, your liver won’t like it! Dr. Price found in his research of healthy people that they ate mostly unprocessed whole-foods and some minimally processed foods. They lived in accordance with nature and if you want to have a beautiful, healthy body, you should too!
2. If it’s a non-food, don’t eat it! The more non-foods you eat, the more likely your body is to go bankrupt! Remember, food manufacturers are NOT required to prove that their products sustain life. Pretty much every research dollar they spend is to determine how to make foods cheaper, increase shelf life and how to trick you into buying them. Just remember this Paul Chek rule – “The more money they spend to market any food, the worse it is likely to be for you”! Good healthy food requires little marketing because people know it’s good for you. They need to convince you to eat their garbage, so they need to spend a lot in marketing to ensure you do.
3. The longer it lasts on the shelf, the worse it is for you! Most things in nature will not last more than a few days once picked or killed for consumption. Increasing a product’s shelf life means stripping it of anything that can eventually go bad or rancid out of it, such as enzymes, vitamins, minerals and ultimately it’s life force! Many of the foods you eat today are so full of chemicals and pesticide residues you can leave them sitting on the kitchen counter for days on end and the ants won’t even touch them! The bugs are smarter than we are!
4. Never eat anything with “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated oils/fats” in it! These are cooked fats that have been altered in a way that make them very hard to digest, as well as being damaging to the body. This form of fat does not occur naturally in nature and in fact, chemists say the molecular structure of hydrogenated fats more closely resembles plastic than food! Read your food labels and you will likely be surprised at how much hydrogenate fats and oils you are eating!
5. Never eat any food product that has been “enriched”! The only reason food manufacturers “enrich” foods is because they have completely killed and stripped them in processing, leaving the foods so void of nutrition and life-force that they must add things back to them so they don’t kill off all their customers! If you read “Beating The Food Giants” by food scientist Paul A. Stitt, he tells you that the food manufacturers purchase the cheapest possible synthetic vitamins possible and they often apply them to foods (i.e. cereals) on the way in the oven! Any nutrition expert will tell you that most vitamins can’t withstand high heat and most of the rigors of processing. There is also plenty of literature suggesting that some synthetic vitamins may be toxic to the body!
6. Avoid eating anything that has been genetically modified or genetically engineered! Currently, almost ALL processed foods contain genetically modified organisms. This is an entire topic unto itself, but eating any genetically modified food is a risk that you may want to seriously consider if you value your health.

References

1. Dworkin, A. and Kella, W. “Thriving in a Toxic World.” Olivenhain, CA: Professional Preference, 1996.
2. Farlow, C.H. “Food Additives: A Shopper’s Guide to What’s Safe and What’s Not”. KISS For Health Publishing, 2001.
3. Schiosser E. “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal”. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
4. Stitt, P. “Beating the Food Giants”. Natural Press; 1993.
5. The Ecologist, July/August 2000. News In Brief p.10
6. The Ecologist June 2001. “Pulling A Fast One”, by Ian Elliott p.36
7. Chek, P. “Under the Veil of Deception”. Encinitas, CA: A C.H.E.K Institute Publication, 2002.
8. Prescription Drug Sales Increased By Nearly 20% Last Year in US. http://www.mercola.com/2001/may/19/prescription_drugs.htm
9. US Drug Sales Up 15% Last Year. Reuters June 2, 2001.
10. Prescription Drugs and Mass Media Advertising 1999-2000. National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation
11. Price, Weston. “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration“. Price-Pottenger Foundation, 1945
12. Fallon S and Enig M. “Nourishing Traditions.” 2nd ed. Washington DC: New Trends Publishing, 1999.

You Are What You Eat- Grains: By Paul Chek

The story or grains is part and parcel with the story of bread, neither of which the human machinery are designed to function optimally on. While I’m sure this comment is a surprise to some of you, significant amounts of scientific evidence suggests that for all of human evolution, right up until approximately 10,000 years ago, the primary staple in the diets of most civilizations was animal meat. There were times when meat was scarce for a variety of reasons yet in, general our consumption of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds was seasonal and supplementary. Most of the animals we ate, such as deer, were plant eaters. These animals served to condense nutrition in their meats – one pound of meat contained the nutritional equivalent of several pounds of vegetables. Such a nutrient-dense source of nourishment allowed us a to have sustenance during the winter months when we had minimal food storage methods other than the cold itself. Although many argue (mostly from an emotional bias) that we must have carbohydrate sources to function, current biochemistry reveals that we do have the capacity to convert some fat molecules (glycerol) into carbohydrate (1).

While there are many controversial theories as to why we began farming, it is more commonly agreed upon that we began farming practices, or nurturing the growth of specific plant species and domesticating animals no longer 20,000 years ago and more likely as soon as 10,000 years ago (2). During this time, there has been a progressive increase in the consumption of grains and grain-based products, yet this time period is but a flash in the scope of human evolution, during which our digestive machinery was formed.

Before the advent of factory farming, grain was partially germinated (sprouted). This resulted from being sheaved and stacked in fields, which stood for several more weeks before threshing. During this period, the grain seeds were exposed to rain and dew which soaked into the sheaves. The grain could pick up this moisture and, with heat from the sun, conditions were ideal for favoring a degree of germination and enzyme multiplication in the grain (3).

The process of sprouting not only produces vitamin C, it changes the composition of the grain in numerous ways that make it more beneficial as a food. For example, sprouting increases the content of such vitamins as vitamin B, B2, B5 and B6. Carotene, which is converted to vitamin A, increases dramatically – sometimes eight-fold. Even more important in today’s climate of indigestion, is that phytic acid, which is a known mineral blocker, is broken down in the sprouting process. Phytic acid is present in the bran of all grains, the coating of nuts and seeds and inhibits the absorption of calcium, magnesium, iron, copper and zinc. These inhibitors can neutralize our own digestive enzymes, resulting in the digestive disorders experienced by many people that eat unsprouted grains; there are many scientific indicators linking grain consumption to rheumatic and arthritic conditions as well (4). Complex sugars responsible for intestinal gas are broken down during sprouting and a portion of the starch in grain is transformed into sugar. Sprouting also inactivates aflatoxins, which are toxins produced by fungus and are potent carcinogens found in grains.

How to Sprout Grains Fill a mason jar one-third of the way with any grain or seed. Add filtered water to the top of the jar and screw on the top with its screen insert.  Allow the seeds to soak overnight and pour off the water. Rinse the seeds well – you can do this without removing the top. Invert the jar and let sit at an angle so it can drain, and to allow air to circulate.  These seeds should be rinsed every few hours, or at least twice a day. In one to four days the sprouts will be ready. Move the sprouts to another container and move them to the refrigerator.

By purchasing your own organic whole grains and sprouting them before making your own breads or cereals, you can save yourself from the unwanted effects of phytic acid; you can also buy sprouted breads in many health food stores. Phytic acid, as I mentioned above, is also present in the coatings of seeds and nuts. As I am sure you are aware, many health and nutrition experts advocate the consumption of nuts and seeds and they are prevalent in many health food bars. Unfortunately, eating nuts and seeds without soaking them for at least 8-12 hours to break down the phytic acid can produce the same enzyme blocking and mineral blocking effects eating un-sprouted grains can, which is one of the reasons many of my clients find great relief when removing grains from their diet, particularly those containing gluten.
As is the norm when studying scientific or lay literature on any topic, there is always opposition among experts – and so it is in the case of phytic acid (phytates) and the potential problems it can cause. Some experts claim that cooking and processing, as in the making of bread, break phytic acid down, and nullify its effects on those consuming processed grain products. While my clinical observations suggest the opposite, some interesting test results with regard to zinc deficiency support my contention that merely milling grains into flour and baking it may not break down phytates.

In 1964 it was found that boys in Iran and Egypt had severely underdeveloped testicles. Tests showed that they had extreme zinc deficiency, yet zinc was plentiful and widely consumed in those countries. It was discovered that zinc was bound by phytates in the bread they ate, and while the bread contained a great deal of zinc, it was useless because it was locked up (5)! This important finding will become even more important in understanding the potential downfalls that come with over-consumption of processed grains as presented below.

While there is little argument that whole-grain cereals and breads are more nutritious, provide more fiber and aid detoxification, care must be taken to avoid consuming ill prepared or processed grains. As you are surely well aware, we have not only deviated far from our ancestral dietary, but we are in the era of highly processed foods. Food manufacturers have clung to public misperceptions with regard to white foods, particularly white breads, white rice, white sugar and white table salt, all of which are commonly referred to as white death by most nutrition experts and naturopathic physicians, and for good reason!

White flour became popular sometime prior to 1872, when the roller mill began to replace the stone mills of old. White flour, known to be better for making pastries and baking in general, was only available to the rich prior to advent of the roller mill because its production required significant manual labor, which only the rich could afford. Stone mills have no mechanism to remove the germ from the flour so the flour had to be sifted through silk filters over and over again until if finally reached a cream color, similar to that of milk. This labor-intensive process resulted in white flour, then a product perceived as one of royalty. The inability to afford white flour resulted in it being sought after by the poor, much the same as the chair was sought after by Egyptian peasants prior to their common use, as the chair was only used by royalty at one time.

While the poor had developed a taste for white flour and a desire for the sense of stature they must have felt it afforded them, they were nonetheless developing an attraction to a nutritionally deficient food source. With the advent of the roller mill, the baker was able to produce white bread at a cost most anyone could afford, all the while the nutritious portions, the bran and germ of the grain were generally fed to pigs and other farm animals! Not long after white flour was accessible to all classes, cereals began to suffer the same fate, losing their nutritional value due to processing. Today, the nutritious portions of the grain are sold off to health food stores and supplement manufacturers, so in effect, many of you pay for the same grain two or three times in the form of flour, fiber to combat constipation and finally vitamin supplements such as vitamin E from wheat germ.

While there are a number of nutritional deficiencies in white flour when compared to its stone ground counterpart, I would like to share a few of the less technical ones with you here:

• Zinc, which naturally occurs in the outer portions of the grain, is milled away in the production of white flour. This disrupts the natural ratio of zinc to cadmium so that the zinc-cadmium ratio is reversed. Any cause of a zinc shortage in the body is a cause for concern because this very important mineral is a catalyst to numerous enzymatic and hormonal functions, not to mention being essential to protein synthesis and reproduction, the importance of which will become evident below.
• White flour contains only 13% of the chromium, 9% of the manganese and 19% of the iron that is contained in whole wheat. Due to the fact that many of the B vitamins are concentrated in the outer parts of the grain, white flour is deficient in B vitamins (6).
• White flour does not contain the germ of the wheat, which is a potent source of vitamin E, resulting in a high potential for vitamin E deficiency in those who’s diet is inadequate for vitamin E sources and/or comparatively high in bread-stuffs (7).
• Research shows that since as long ago as the 1950’s, conventionally farmed American grains have been low in protein quality and quantity. So much so in fact that whenever the US tried to give its surplus grains away to countries with starving populations, they would not accept US grains if any other country was offering theirs; they had found that the deficient US grains did little to maintain or improve the health of the starving (8).

After 130 years of consuming highly processed grains in the form of breads, pastries and cereals, chronic disease states are rampant among most industrialized nations, with the greatest prevalence in England, which has the greatest consumption of white flour, white sugar and tea per capita – the US is in a strong second! Not surprisingly, we appear to be continuing another trend that began with the introduction of the steel roller mill – a declining birth rate. As you can see in the diagram, the more bran and germ millers extracted from flour, the lower the birth rate per 1000 people there were in England between 1872 and 1945. Today, things are not much better. Artificial insemination is a big business and, if not for advanced medical technologies, we would be losing a huge amount of babies that wouldn’t have survived even 100 years ago. Additionally, there are significant reductions in sperm counts among males, which may well be the result of both over-consumption of highly processed foods and toxicity in our food supply and our eco-system.

According to a recent analysis by University of Missouri epidemiologist Shanna Swan (9), the average sperm count of men in the United States and Europe has plummeted by more than 50% since the late 1930s. This finding fuels ongoing concerns that male reproductive health may be deteriorating. Based on 61 studies published since 1938, involving a total of nearly 15,000 subjects, Swan found that average sperm counts among healthy American men have dropped from 120 million sperm per milliliter (million/ml) of semen in 1938 to just over 50 million/ml in 1988, a decline of 1.5% per year. In Europe, sperm counts have fallen to roughly the same level, though twice as fast, at 3.1% each year between 1971 and 1990. While environmental chemical exposure is suspected, there is a very real possibility that malnutrition secondary to consuming too many processed foods is a real possibility. Francis Marion Pottenger Jr., MD demonstrated with his cat studies that feeding cats processed foods led to numerous disease processes, infertility and eventually extinction!

Over the past 18 years that I have been consulting people with physical and dietary complications and challenges, I have seen a distinct pattern – the over-consumption of processed carbohydrates! Most people get their dietary education from watching TV commercials and reading magazines. These are the two worst places in the world to acquire nutritional information because this is exactly where big industry plants its hooks into you. Another problem was the boom in running and triathlons, which resulted in the production of numerous popular books on how to eat for success in these sports. The diet plans in these books commonly resemble the USDA Food Pyramid (Figure 1 ), which is commonly referred to as the USDA Feedlot Pyramid by nutritional experts such as Dr. Barry Sears (author of “The Zone Diet”) because such dietary proportions are far better suited to fattening animals than they are to health and vitality! Unfortunately, the USDA Food Pyramid is used as a guideline by most school cafeterias preparing food for your children!

An additional problem that has come part and parcel with increased mechanization of food processing and the desire to increase shelf life of foods has been the addition of sugar to what was originally a potentially good food – natural unprocessed cereal grains. Consider that when ground to the particle size used to make white flour, the flour covers 10,000 times the surface area of the grain itself. The result is that when you eat a processed food product like white bread, cookies, donuts or classic boxed cereals, you are eating a high starch (high sugar) food that will be absorbed at almost the same rate as straight table sugar! While considering that, review these statistics from the book “Crazy Makers” by Carol Simontacchi, who compares the sugar content of 1 ounce of Pepsi (1.2 teaspoons of sugar) to common breakfast cereals:

• Lucky Charms = 2.8 teaspoons per oz.
• Froot Loops = 3.3 teaspoons per oz.
• Cinnamon and Spice flavored Quaker Instant Oatmeal = 4.3 teaspoons per oz.!

Additionally, in his book “Beating the Food Giants”, Paul Stitt shows us that the average breakfast cereal today ranges between 46% and 53% sugar! With this knowledge, watch to see how much sugar people add to their cereals before eating them and how much soda pop is consumed in concert with many of these non-foods!

We have an epidemic on our hands with insulin insensitivity (Syndrome X), adult onset diabetes and obesity! We have children consuming massive quantities of sugar and food additives, most of which, like sugar are stimulants. White flour is literally a sugar in itself, and where it is mixed with fats in processed foods, the fats are commonly hydrogenated and rancid, increasing your susceptibility to a number of disease processes!

I suggest the following CHEK Points to improve your health and vitality:

1. Before entertaining consumption of grain foods, always exclude all grains except corn, rice, buckwheat and millet for two weeks. If you feel a noticeable improvement in your health and well-being, you are probably gluten intolerant. When you start eating grain foods again after two weeks off, start slowly and eat only one grain food to minimize the possibility of a potentially uncomfortable reaction by the body; diarrhea and stomach pain is common among those that are gluten intolerant!
2. MINIMIZE all consumption of commercial, processed grains and grain-based products.
3. If you plan to eat any grains at all, restrict yourself to organic, unprocessed corn, rice, buckwheat or millet, rotating them on a four-day cycle. Only eat them after they have been presoaked for at least 12 hours to break down the phytic acid.
4. If you enjoy grain based breakfast cereals, purchase only whole organic grains, soak or sprout and make your own breakfast cereals. There are a few companies that make reasonable boxed breakfast cereals, although my suggestion is to stay away from any processed, cooked grain products what so ever!
5. If you enjoy bread, buy only sprouted whole-grain breads that contain no additives or preservatives. Use the above cereal guidelines to choose your breads and determine if you are gluten intolerant.
6. Avoid any conventionally prepared pasta. Purchase only organic rice pasta or gluten-free pasta if you are gluten intolerant. Pasta is considered to be one of the foods most heavily laden with pesticide residues!
7. Apply the soaking principle to all seeds and nuts. Pour the water off the nuts and replace it each day. Keep refrigerated while storing once soaked.
8. Never eat more grain-based foods than ideal for your metabolic type with regard to how much carbohydrate you should be eating.

References

1. McArdle, W, Katch, F, Katch, J. Essentials of exercise physiology. Lea & Febiger, 1998.
2. Crowe, I. The Quest for Food: Its Role in Human Evolution and Migration. Tempus, 2000.
3. Fallon, S. and Enig M. “Nourishing Traditions.” 2nd ed. Washington DC: New Trends Publishing, 1999.
4. Cordain, L. “Cereal grains: Humanity’s double-edged sword.” World Rev Nutr Diet; 84:20-73. 1999.
5. DiCyan, E. “Beginners Introduction to Trace Minerals” McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books, 1984.
6. Ballentine, R, “Diet and Nutrition, A Holistic Approach.” Himalayan International Institute. 1997.
7. Picton, L.J. “Thoughts on Feeding”. London: Faber and Faber LTD, Mcmxlvi
8. Pfieffer, E. “Ehrenfried Pfieffer Himsel”, audiocassette series. Acres USA, www.acresusa.com
9. Halwell, Brian. The Worldwatch Report: Sperm counts are dropping. Monday, February 22, 1999. Online. www.enn.com.