I don’t know about you, but I want to live, and not just be alive scraping the barrel, zombied out in front of the couch, or God forbid, attached to a chemo drip, but I want to really live! Have fun, be vital, eat, move, learn, play, meet great people, all of it! But it’s not always that easy, is it. Someone named Dr. Bliss is working against us.
The thing about health is that it’s hard, damn hard to stay committed. You can half commit and be mostly healthy, and in your youth that sometimes work just fine. But you hit a certain age and those transgressions turn up as symptoms of ill health: dry skin, allergies, sore muscles, achy bones, headaches, gas, constipation, diarrhea, fatigue. When this happens, your body is telling you: wake up!
Before I committed to my health, I would make a million excuses. I exercised regularly, have always loved veggies and salads, didn’t eat a lot of fried foods, so I assumed I was fine. But I had a killer sugar habit. Monday morning would roll around, me, Starbucks, and a million other North Americans: “I’ll have a pumpkin spiced latte, non-fat, whip cream, and throw in a maple scone.” Or Friday night, girl’s night out and I’m not DD: I’ll have a bucket of wine please, and let’s make a midnight pit-stop at 7-11 for nachos and magical cheese sauce. Or it’s Wednesday and you’re in a mid-afternoon slump and your office-mate brought chocolates. Then you crash 40 minutes later and decide to brew coffee: cream and sugar please. Then someone makes microwave popcorn – come on! Put a fork in me.
Now, in your 40s and even earlier, all those health hiccups add up and give your system a beating. When I finally really looked at what I put in my body, on a regular basis, I was shocked. I did a weeklong food diary and wrote down every little thing. I highly recommend it. Start now. Just write it all down, no judgment, don’t try to be good, just do it, for a week, and learn. This created a major epiphany for me. Like maybe I’m not so healthy.
The other thing that moved me to change was understanding the body. What are we? We’re about 70 to 100 trillion cells. Each one of those cells is a little factory, expert in manufacturing whatever the tissue it resides in might need, expert in transporting, then expert in waste disposal. These cell factories depend on the sum of the body’s thinking cells (the brain) to make sure the grand human is feeding them quality raw goods to do their job.
The second thing these cells need is the ability to carry waste away. The body needs this to heal, to clean itself at a cellular level. If not done quickly, toxicity will damage the cell. No cell can survive surrounded by its own refuse.
Imagine each cell as a little human being. The thought of giving that little guy crap food then making it live in its own stink is really sad. The cellular and extracellular fluid must also maintain mineral balance and a constant pH—so easily thrown off by sugars and stimulants. If your cells are healthy, disease can not happen.
As for raw materials, we know, at a basic level, cells need oxygen, nutrients and intracellular enzymes – these are what generate energy. Try this: when you eat, remind yourself, the goals is to stay alive, to be vital, to heal, not pure pleasure. Pleasure is only one small part of eating. And the thing about health is, the big guns are working against us. Greedy corporations are banking on the fact that you forgot that eating supplies nutrients/ energy, all they care about is satisfying pleasure centers. How? The perfect balance of sugar, fat and salt.
There is actually a scientist in the world of industrial food manufacturing called Dr. Bliss. Everybody wants him. His job is to find the “Bliss Point” of any given food the big guns (Kraft, Nestle, CocaCola) are planning to roll out. It could be the next glitter yogurt tube, or PB&J, a new flavor of soft drink, a new Oreo blend, or a bacon ranch potato chip. He has spent a lifetime honing where humans bliss out. How does he do that? Statistical analysis and the perfect ratio of sugar, salt and fat to create a flood of dopamine and other pleasure-based hormones in the brain. So you go, “Ahhhhhhhh. Yum.”
Is it a trick? A crime? When you consider the food has little else going for it except this “pleasure” response, and cool packaging, and is actually toxic to the body, I’d say it’s a bit of a crime. They use chemicals to do this. When they do use sugar, it’s bleached and sprayed, and usually from the genetically modified sugar beat or worse, high fructose corn syrup from GM corn. The salt is also bleached, chemicals are added, then it’s baked at 540 degrees where nothing good happens. The fat is from fragile vegetable fat, that’s been hydrogenated and refined and is absolutely toxic to the body. Those ingredients, plus whatever the base is, maybe ultra-processed potato flour or moldy peanuts, I don’t know, but gross.
Point is, Kraft and Nestle aren’t making your next “natural, oat-filled, whole-grain, breakfast bar” with your health in mind. They’re doing it for profit, market share, and they will use the cheapest ingredients to get that. The only reason they’re even jumping on the health trend is because it’s the largest growing niche in the grocery food business: organics and gluten free have become a 30 billion dollar/year business! It’s only about 4-5% of market share, but the bad guys can not ignore this or we might just win.
So the bad guys (yes I talk like a 3 year old) are doing their best to get healthier, and I say that ever so loosely. They call it natural, but really it’s been completely denatured through the use of agricultural pesticides, herbicides, dessicators and the like. I would not touch grain products that are not organic—they say wheat is sprayed 5-8 times once out of the ground, while sitting in the silo, with guess what? Glysophate. It’s apparently a terrific dessicator too! That means it keeps moisture away, it won’t mold. How convenient! Thank you for poisoning us. Don’t even get me started on the downstream effects of all these toxins in the ground, what it does to the soil, water supply and wildlife. Memorize this: 2.5 billion pounds of pesticides are released into the environment each year, grapes have over 35 different pesticides used. People consume 8-15 pounds of food additives per year.
Where am I going with this? Being healthy is hard because we can’t trust what’s on the shelf. We have little understanding where our food comes from and how long it’s been sitting there. Which doesn’t matter because it’s not even food anymore! But we can change this— we dictate what ends up on the grocery shelf by our consumer choices. We have more choice now then ever in history, though most the options will send us to an early grave, there are some very good ones.
Eat clean, give your cells the good stuff. Organic is the only choice. Does some spray make its way to an organic farm? Sometimes--but I’d prefer to not be sprayed in the face! There is just no way we can remain healthy eating poisoned food. It’s that simple. You want to get healthy, it starts here, with a commitment. We know it’s hard but you are wroth it. Let me know how it goes. If this helped you please hit like and subscribe. Happy, healthy, eating… xx Shannon