I have a friend who has taken prescribed anti-depressants for years. It’s not working anymore, and she is already at the maximum dosage allowable. Her doctor says she’ll have to ween herself off (which may take about nine months to a year) and then switch to a different drug.
I asked her if she was interested in the name of a Naturopath who could help her through this “detox” with natural extracts, etc. and she said, “Oh no! I’m too afraid of that natural stuff!” Well, to me this sentence was so funny I had to laugh. But, much to my surprise, she was serious. (But I guess if you turned the question around on me I’d probably say that I was afraid of chemicals in pharmaceuticals, so go figure.)
And then, a couple of days later at a dinner party where I brought a cheese and fruit plate, everyone was commenting on how especially good the cheese was. I said it was an organic white cheddar. My 50+, college-educated friend asked, “What’s organic?”
I guess I run in a smaller circle than I thought, but I’m amazed at how the average American has bought into the fact that pharmaceuticals are the only answer to everything, and that it does not appear to be important to really take a good look at the quality of stuff you put in their mouths! This is the stuff that fuels your body after all.
I think of myself not as a food zealot, but as more middle-of-the-road in my quest to make sound choices for my body and environment. But perhaps when considering the total population, I’m more on the fringe than I thought.
So, to help people make better food energy choices, I thought this month I’d concentrate on basic food ingredients in processed food. It is really a must to read labels these days AND understand what the label is actually saying.
According to a book by Mike Adams entitled “Grocery Warning,” the following are on the top of the list when it comes to the most dangerous ingredients in conventional foods:
1) Sodium nitrite — it’s carcinogenic, found in most processed meats like hot dogs, bacon, sausage. Used to make meats appear red (a color fixer chemical).
2) Hydrogenated oils — causes heart disease, nutritional deficiencies, general deterioration of cellular health, and much more. Found in cookies, crackers, margarine and many “manufactured” foods. Used to make oils stay in the food, extending shelf life. Sometimes also called “plastic fat.”
3) Excitotoxins — aspartame, monosodium glutamate and others (see below). These neurotoxic chemical additives directly harm nerve cells, over-exciting them to the point of cell death, according to Dr. Russell Blaylock. They’re found in diet soda, canned soup, salad dressing, breakfast sausage and even many manufactured vegetarian foods. They’re used to add flavor to over-processed, boring foods that have had the life cooked out of them.
So how do food companies manage to hide excitotoxins and taste additives to their foods? It’s easy: They just keep changing the words to confuse consumers. Once customers learned to avoid MSG / monosodium glutamate, the food companies started using yeast extract. And now, two years after Mike started sounding the alarm on yeast extract, many companies have switched to torula yeast, which accomplishes the same thing. Other hidden sources of MSG include: Autolyzed vegetable protein and Hydrolyzed vegetable protein.
THE INGREDIENTS “STACKING” TRICK
Food companies also use the good ol’ ingredients stacking trick to intentionally leave you with the wrong impression about what’s really in their food products. For example, one company makes a nutrition bar that’s absolutely loaded with sugar, but they way they’ve arranged the ingredients prevents sugar from appearing as the #1 ingredient. Instead, the first ingredient is rice. But looking down the label, you’ll find all the following forms of sugar, all in the same nutrition bar: Sugar, Sucrose, High-fructose corn syrup, Corn syrup solids, and Dextrose.
Add all these up, and the #1 component in the bar is, indeed, sugar (or sugary substances). But the manufacturer has used ingredients stacking to make you think the top ingredient is actually rice.
It’s a clever, dishonest technique used by food companies to lie with food labels. Remember, the longer the ingredients label, the less healthy the food. Read those ingredients lists before buying foods, and if you discover chemical names that you can’t pronounce, don’t buy the food. “Chemical energy” is usually not “feng shui harmonious energy” in the body!
