Photo from www.memorise.org
Soda: Sodas used to contain 9 teaspoons of sugar, which is an enormous amount to consume, especially on an empty stomach. But sodas today are sweetened with an equivalent amount of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which leads to obesity and fatty liver disease ( aka non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver) because it is not used like sugar by the body, but rather gets stored as fat. On top of the HFCS, sodas contain phosphoric acid, which cause calcium to be leached from your bones, teeth, and soft tissue, setting you up for osteoporosis, cavities, arthritis and other disease states.
What to do? Drink home-made herbal iced tea sweetened with stevia or sparkling mineral water with lemon/lime or plain coconut water, or try kombucha, a delicious, fermented carbonated beverage with liver-detoxifying properties that you can buy or make at home.
Grain-fed beef from CAFOs: What is grain-fed beef from CAFO (concentrated animal food operations)? It is the beef you eat in 99% of all restaurants and at home. It is also the beef from cows that have been fed an unnatural diet of corn and animal by-products in cruel, unsanitary and disease-causing environments. The meat from these cows is void of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a potent protector from cancers. The meat also has the wrong omega 3 to omega 6 ratio, causing inflammation in the body. It is low in riboflavin and other important B vitamins as well as having less Vitamin E, Vitamin K, and trace minerals like magnesium, calcium, and selenium.
What to do? If you want to eat beef, eat 100% grass-fed beef from health food stores, organic butcher shops and from local farm buyers’ clubs – go to www.eatwild.com and check out their directory.
Processed snacks and baked goods: What kind of snacks are we talking about? It’s the candy bars, Oreos, muffins, pastries, Cheez Whiz, and chips. Most processed snacks contain trans fats of some kind. Trans fats get incorporated into your cell structures when you eat them and take two years to cycle out. The incorporation of trans fats into cell walls leaves them incapable of important chemical reactions. As a result, there is chaos and dysfunction on the cellular level. Over a period of time, this leads to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, immune dysfunction, disrupted fetal growth, and obesity.
What to do? Eat whole fruit/veggies and cheese or hummus for snacks, as well as raw and unsalted nuts, plain yogurt (sweetened with stevia if you like), and home baked goods made from almond flour.
Juice: You were always told that fruit was good for you, and what is fruit juice but lots of fruit? So it must be very good for you, right? Wrong! Commercially produced juice has relatively little vitamin and mineral content, and it has had all the fiber taken out, so it sends your blood sugar sky high without giving you much of anything in return. It causes over production of insulin and weight gain, and also causes sugar crashes with accompanying energy lows, inability to think, and mood swings including irritability, anger, anxiety and sadness – yuck! As if impaired mental function weren’t enough, all of these symptoms are just little steps on the road to diabetes – nothing to laugh about.
What to do? Drink herbal iced tea sweetened with stevia or sparkling mineral water with lemon/lime or plain coconut water, or try kombucha, a delicious, carbonated fermented beverage with liver-detoxifying properties. You could also enjoy freshly squeezed vegetable juices with small amounts of fruit added in, and very occasionally treat yourself to fresh-squeezed straight fruit juice if you want, but have it with protein and fat to limit the effects of.
Cereal: All cereals except granola and muesli are extruded at extremely high temperatures (over 500 degrees Fahrenheit), altering the molecular structure of the grains in the slurry and burdening your body, which doesn’t know what to do with this strange food. Add in sugar or aspartame, food dyes, preservatives, and the worst quality commercial vitamins sprayed onto it, and you have an extremely artificial food that gives your body no real nutrients and all the burden of figuring out how to incorporate it. According to Paul Stitt, biochemist and industrial food critic, in an unpublished study conducted by a cereal company, lab rats lived two weeks only when given a diet of extruded cereal, while rats given only water lived significantly longer. In spite of all the marketing around it, as revealed by the autopsy in this study and others, the truth is that extruded cereal is terrible for your body, leading to dysfunction of the pancreas, liver and kidneys and degeneration of the nerves of the spine, all signs of insulin shock.
What to do?If you must have cold cereal, eat granola or muesli in plain yogurt and add raw, unsalted nuts and fresh fruit.
– Babette
To learn more about Babette, click here