When you get started on your health journey, there is so much conflicting information about certain diets. Is this diet good, is that diet too extreme, what road do I follow? I am going to make my best attempt at educating you on why you MUST cut out the following foods completely, besides maybe as cheat meals or special occasions, so that you can achieve optimal levels of health.
Nearly every nutritionist, coach, and functional medicine practitioner, worth a grain of salt, agrees with the fundamental principles of this article because the research has been and is very clear. Certain processed foods cause disease, make you fat and bloated, and will limit your success in the gym.
In the typical American diet there are numerous foods that are toxic, many of us are allergic too, and they make us fat through a process that is not so flattering and inflames our gut.
You see if we eat foods that irritate our intestinal wall, our intestines go from their normal permeability, which only lets fully digested foods through, to becoming what is commonly called “leaky gut syndrome” where the intestinal wall becomes inflamed and starts leaking undigested food particles into the bloodstream.
When undigested foods enter the bloodstream, protein molecules, fats, sugars, etc. The body sees this as a foreign invader much like a virus or bacteria. This causes an immune response. Thus inflammation and pain occurs.
After a long enough time of having leaky gut, by eating inflammatory foods, you begin to get bloated and fat, as the body begins to protect itself by storing more fat and trying to compensate. More and more undigested bloat, water, inflammation, and fat builds up in the body. What we get is people who are puffy, and have a bunch of unhealthy fat around their waist, thighs, and especially the belly area.
So what are these foods that cause a “leaky gut” and why are they so toxic? To start with it is important to reference Dr. Weston A Price. He was a dentist in the 1930s who traveled the world, and he found that wherever untouched populations of indigenous people started eating refined and processed western food, they were sick within one generation. They all grew up deformed and with cavities and poor facial features. This is serious stuff. If you eat these foods in excess, you will get autoimmune disease, poor mental health and brain fog, generally high levels of aches and pains, and a whole host of potential illness and disease.
The reason for this is the human organism is not designed to be eating this highly refined and processed foods, they are nutritionally devoid in terms of vitamins and minerals, and they are a relatively new thing in our diets (roughly the past 120ish years or so) so we have not adapted to them and never will. So what are these foods?
#1. Refined Grains
It is not that hard to find processed grains nearly everywhere. Go to a restaurant and the first thing they serve you is bread made primarily from white flour. People start their days with white flour bagels, toast, pancakes, waffles, cereals, bars, etc. All made with grains that are highly refined and crappy.
The reason refined grains are so bad is because they take out the germ of the wheat. The germ is essentially like the yoke of the egg, it contains all the healthy fats and vitamins and minerals that are needed to allow our bodies to process grain in a healthy way. Our bodies need the vitamins and minerals to process any food holistically.
This is why fruit is much healthier than just plain sugar, fruit has fiber, vitamin C, and a whole host of plant nutrients and vitmains that allow us to benefit greatly from it. But if we simply extracted the sugar alone from fruit, the end result is a much less healthy version on our bodies.
For this reason, anytime we eat refined grains, that are often oxidized (meaning oxygen has gotten to it and destroyed its nutritional value), the germ taken out (no vitamins and minerals), and chemically treated (chemicals preserve it longer on the shelf), then our body does not know how to process it. Besides the added chemicals and preservatives, our body does not know how to process grains without the essential vitamins and minerals that go along with it.
When we eat foods without any vitamins and minerals, our body has to leach the minerals from our own body to digest and process it!! The body works holistically, eating foods that are refined wreak havoc on the system.
White flour is literally the devil! A good book to read is Grain Brain and goes into this subject further. Furthermore, many of us are allergic to gluten, and some medical professionals refuse to accept that anyone who doesn’t have celiac should avoid gluten, these people are idiots.
Any heavily refined grain will cause your body pain, brain fog, and autoimmune illness by the very nature of it being heavily refined. Stick to fresh whole grains, or skip the grains entirely.
Link: Wheat and inflammation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3705319/
#2. Pasteurized and Homogenized Dairy Products
Raw milk contains tons of beneficial enzymes and bacteria that help to break down lactose and lactase, however some populations of people do not do good on ANY form of dairy.
Especially dairy that is not organic, cheese, milk, yogurt, is loaded with anti-biotics, hormones, and if you research how these animals are raised it is downright disgusting. Dairy is especially bad for females, it can throw off their entire hormonal system.
If you do not want to be taking cow steroids, anti-biotics, artificial hormones, then stop drinking and eating sludgy dairy. Most people who cut out dairy will find that they expel a ton of mucous that was coating their mucous membranes, and they also typically lose quite a few pounds rapidly.
Cheese and dairy has been shown to promote tumor growth in men and women alike, I would NOT advise eating dairy besides in very small amounts and from organic sources if you wish to avoid inflammation and potentially cancer.
It is estimated that nearly 60-80% of the hormones that we get from the American diet that contribute to breast,ovarian, prostate cancer come from dairy. These cancer types are very hormone dependent for growth.
Dr Ganmaa from Harvard found that the dairy industry contributes these harmful hormones, and that we should really be discussing this problem as a matter of public health. This fact concerns me greatly when it comes to cancer prevention.
“In a 2002 study of cancer and diet in 42 countries, Ganmaa and colleagues found that countries with the highest consumption of dairy products suffered the highest rates of prostatic and testicular cancer. (A similar study Ganmaa did in 2005 showed much the same results for breast, ovarian, and uterine cancers.”
Article Link:https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/05/modern-milk.html
#3. Refined and processed Vegetable Oils, Unhealthy Fats.
We were all told saturated fat is bad, which is a complete lie. The government and organizations around the world are now having to admit that oops, we got that wrong and the fats we told you to eat actually make you sick.
Vegetable oils such as corn, soy, and canola, are all once gain, relatively new inventions in the modern human diet. They are too high in Omega 6 fatty acids, and most americans eat too many Omega 6 fatty acids compared to healthier Omega 3s, this leads to a pro-inflammatory effect on the body.
Eating too many vegetable oils will gunk up your arteries, cause brain fog, and promote high levels of inflammation within the body.
Look at nearly any junk food bar, cereal, etc. and you will sometimes find corn, soy, and canola all 3 in the product. Especially commercial salad dressings are garbage. Restaurants are notorious for using low quality crappy oils for frying and cooking foods, and this can lead to an allergic or inflammatory response in many.
“Coinciding with this increase in the ratio of (n-6) : (n-3) PUFA are increases in chronic inflammatory diseases such as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), cardiovascular disease, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). By increasing the ratio of (n-3) : (n-6) PUFA in the Western diet, reductions may be achieved in the incidence of these chronic inflammatory diseases.”
This excerpt from the literature simply means this: eat more omega 3s and decrease inflammation, eat more omega 6s, especially from refined oils, and increase inflammation and thus disease.
#4. Sugar, and especially High Fructose Corn Syrup.
If we look at the moment Richard Nixon brought High Fructose Corn Syrup to the market, obesity began skyrocketing. The simple fact of the matter is that white sugar (sucrose) and high fructose corn syrup are in EVERYTHING.
Switching to more natural sugars and fruits is a big step in the right direction. If you eat too much sugar, and ESPECIALLY too much processed sugar, you will become inflamed, fat, lethargic, and clog your arteries.
If you watch the documentary, Sugar the Bitter Truth by Dr. Robert Lustig, he explains how HFCS is actually better defined as a poison, because your liver must process it all, much like alcohol, and that SUGAR can clog your arteries!
We were told saturated fat clogs your arteries so everyone stopped eating animal protein and healthy fat, and started eating loads of sugar instead.
Obesity is all around us and no one can figure out why!
#5. Anything heavily processed and that is not fresh.
If most of your food is out of a box, can, pre-packaged etc. chances are your chemical intake is way higher than it should be, as most of the preservatives and fillers used to make products shelf-stable are toxic the human body.
In fact, if you research you’ll find examples of how many of these chemicals were banned in Europe a long time ago once they were found to be toxic, we are much more corrupt here in the U.S. and lucky for us they stay on the market!
This is how you lose weight, build muscle, and develop a vibrant and healthy body.
Some people I coach and work with eat almost EXCLUSIVELY the foods on this list, and their bodies show it. You will end up anxious, depressed, inflamed, sick with autoimmune disease, and weak, because by the very nature of these foods your body has no option but to function poorly.
Learning to see what foods in particular set you off is very important. I am not saying you can never have a cheeseburger or a cheat meal, but you should be optimally healthy FIRST.
My gut health and digestion is very strong because I eat right about 90% of the time, so when I cheat its not that big a deal I may feel a bit of a detox and that’s it. But if you are already sick, bloated, and suffering from a leaky gut, you need to cut all of these foods out or you will not get lasting results.
You need to eliminate these foods NOW, there is not one single thing that is more important when it comes to being healthy and losing weight that you could do.
Also, it is my recommendation that BEFORE you go down the route of trying to medicate everything you suffer from, stop labeling things such as “I have this” “I have this illness etc.” I say that because oftentimes these are just symptoms of the underlying problem of toxicity resulting from eating foods that you are highly allergic too and toxic from.
The human body needs vitamins minerals, fresh whole foods, healthy protein sources, healthy fats, from both animals and plants, and plenty of love. It cannot run on these processed foods.
Supercharge your brain, your body, and your life, by cutting out these foods completely for 30 days and see how you feel after. I promise you you’ll feel better than you ever imagined.