Have you ever eaten ice cream too fast?
Have you ever eaten ice cream too fast and ended up with a brain freeze?
You wouldn’t say you had an allergy to ice cream or a brain freeze condition would you?
It’s just a natural reaction of a healthy body to too much cold at once, right?
Or how about if you put too much Wasabi paste or hot chili peppers on your food and end up with a sudden blaze at the back of your head?
You wouldn’t say you were hypersensitive to hot foods or suffered from head blaze syndrome, would you?
It would just be a natural reaction of your healthy body to a food which was just too hot for your usual comfort range, right?
Here’s a whole new way to look at degenerative health conditions which are causing early death in today’s world, like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, gastrointestinal problems, obesity, cancer and dementia.
These are called NCDs, or non-communicable diseases. Many millions of Americans have been diagnosed with one or more of these.
And hundreds of thousands die every year, before their life expectancy.
And billions of dollars a year go into study and research into how to treat, cure, or manage the key indicators for these diseases.
But medical science has no answer for them.
So consider this. Most of the health conditions we today consider medical problems are not illnesses like an infection, or a bodily organ gone screwy all of sudden.
What if they are actually the natural reaction of a healthy body to a highly processed diet, the All-American processed food diet, sometimes called the Standard American Diet, or SAD?
Human experience demonstrates that our bodies tend naturally to stay healthy when they get the food they need and avoid being poisoned by substances that aren’t food.
We have been misled for decades by the idea that when blood sugar gets out of whack, or plaques appear in our arteries, or cell growth gets our of hand, or blood pressure goes up, or joints get stiff, or we get sad for no reason, that something is breaking down in our bodies.
And we believe that we need to do something to the body to fix that breakdown, like take a drug or other medical treatment.
But what if that breakdown is just a natural reaction of a healthy body to repeated insults from our food?
The food most people consume today, for decades at a time, may not be ice cold like our gulp of ice cream or too hot like the Wasabi, but it is dangerous to the body and causes major problems over time, because essential food factors have been removed and non-food factors have been added or have been allowed to contaminate the food.
Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig has become known for his no-nonsense revelations about the dangers of added sugar,, about the lies about fat, and about the ignorance regarding the causes of the obesity epidemic.
He points out that the problem is not which foods we eat or how much, but rather, it is “what has been done to our food.”
At least eight core processes of the body breakdown over time from the consumption of over-processed foods. And these processes breakdown primarily because of the way processed food affects our liver, brain and gut.
Here’s what’s commonly removed from our food in processing:
vitamins
minerals
water
fiber
structure
enzymes
Here’s what’s commonly added to our food in processing:
sugars
salts
processed fats (like hydrogenated oils)
artificial colors
flavors
stabilizers
texturizers
preservatives
emulsifiers
processed proteins (like texturized vegetable protein)
Here’s what’s allowed to contaminate our food from farm, barn, and packaging:
heavy metals
pesticides
herbicides
artificial fertilizers
antibiotics
hormones
chemicals to make harvest easier (like glyphosate on wheat)
chemicals to speed growth and maturity
microplastics
PFAS and BPA in packaging
Government regulators set labeling requirements for some of what’s removed and some of what’s added, but these are woefully inadequate to tell you the actual quality of the food.
And regulations set maximum allowable amounts for many of the contaminants, but they never take into account their effects accumulating over time, nor the effects of the combination of thousands of them.
So should we be chasing new medical treatments and “cures” for these natural reactions by our bodies to stuff which isn’t real whole food?
Or should we just stop eating ice cream so fast, or be more careful with the Wasabi paste?
Maybe we should just educate ourselves about how to consume nourishing food and avoid the rest, and wean ourselves away from addictive added sugars and chemicals.
Maybe we should encourage pregnant mothers to eat a wide variety of organic, whole foods prepared at home?
And start our kids off on mother’s milk?
And raise our children to know the wonderful taste of truly healthy food?
And as adults, avoid the foods which lack their original nutrition and are laced with additives which poison and addict us?
And instead, eat the foods which have their original food factors and structure intact, which are free of non-food additives, and which have been grown and raised as close to their natural environment as possible?
This way of thinking about health is a major challenge to our common assumptions, that as we age, things will inevitably start to break down and cause discomfort and disability, and that creeping conditions must be addressed medically or they will get only worse.
And it challenges the idea that each of us has our own unique set of inherent weaknesses which will eventually catch up with us because of our genes.
Of course near the end of our lives, one thing or another will tend to go first.
But there is no excuse for degenerative conditions in early or midlife, except for what we do to ourselves.
These conditions are happening in younger and younger people, and only because they are starting on processed food earlier and earlier, and because more and more of our foods are highly processed and actually designed to make us want more of them.
So consider this, if everything is working at age twenty, there is actually no reason it shouldn’t be working at age seventy.
Our bodies are miraculous, having accumulated wisdom over millions of years of how to transform foods from nature into a healthy life, to be there, active and on the ball, for a lifetime, for our grandchildren.
So I am proposing that early degeneration is not a medical condition but a healthy reaction to a toxic lifestyle.
We must stop finding fault with the body’s own natural responses to the poisons, contaminants, addictive agents, and missing food factors in our diets.
Conditions like allergies, inflammation, addiction, chronic susceptibility to infection, sore joints, pain, and mental symptoms, should not be immediately diagnosed as medical conditions requiring treatment.
They are all signs that the food and lifestyle environment must be looked at first.
Many current medical treatments are actually aimed at interfering with the body’s attempts to rectify the effects of poor diet and lifestyle.
If the natural response of the body poses an immediate threat, then there is a place for medical intervention.
But meanwhile, this new paradigm invites us to learn to take better care of ourselves.
