herald article #4, GMO

Last week I spoke about the bad and ugly in our diet, covering Grains, Dairy, Cheap Vegetable Oils, and Industrial Farmed Meats. Today I will cover GMO and another large culprit that I left out, Fructose. Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) are created by taking one or more genes from one species and forcing it into the DNA of another species. Such genetic cross-breeding between incompatible species can never occur in nature. The two main types of GMO foods are Herbicide-Tolerant crops and Pesticide-Producing crops. Herbicide-Tolerant crops, are designed to withstand otherwise lethal doses of chemicals. Roundup Ready crops are in this category. Glyphosate residue (from roundup ready), enhances the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and toxins in the environment. This disrupts normal body functions and induces disease. Glyphosate is found in most commonly consumed foods in the Western diet courtesy of GMO sugar, corn, soy and wheat, Interestingly, your gut bacteria are a key component of glyphosate’s mechanism of harm. Roundup is suppose to be harmless to animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses (which allows it to kill weeds), called the Shikimate pathway, is absent in all animals. However, the Shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, and that’s the key to understanding how it causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans and animals. The bacteria in your body outnumber your cells by 10 to 1. For every cell in your body, you have 10 bacterial microbes of various kinds, and all of them have the Shikimate pathway, so they will all respond to the presence of Glyphosate! Glyphosate causes extreme disruption of the microbe’s function and lifecycle. What’s worse, glyphosate preferentially affects beneficial bacteria, allowing pathogens to overgrow and take over. At that point, your body also has to contend with the toxins produced by the pathogens. Once the chronic inflammation sets in, you’re well on your way toward chronic and potentially debilitating disease. Pesticide-producing crops, designed to produce a toxic protein inside the plant itself, which kills bugs that eat the plant by causing their stomachs to rupture. These are the so-called Bt crops. A study published in February 2012 shows that this Bt toxin is capable of breaking open human cells, causing the same kind of disruption in the gut of humans as it causes in the insects it kills. We are talking about gut permeability ("leaky gut"), which can predispose you to all sorts of health problems. An eye opener presentation is "Genetic Roulette-The Gamble of Our Lives", winner of the Top Transformational Film of 2012 by Jeffery Smith. The health promoting diet we have been talking about in previous articles, does not include most of the current list of GMO’s (corn, soy, wheat, and sugar). If you do consume these products read the label and make sure it is stamped NO GMO (and is preferably organic). Ask your local grocer to stock GMO FREE products. Use your shopping dollars to vote for NO GMO. Now the last of the health deteriorating culprits is High Fructose Syrup. I know everyone has seen the TV commercials where they tell you there is no difference between cane sugar and corn sugar, well I don’t know how they get away with it, but it is simply not the truth. Sucrose/Cane Sugar and Fructose/Corn Syrup are different types of simple sugars. After they are separated apart and broken down in your body they are metabolized using completely separate pathways. Cane Sugar/ Sucrose is broken down into mainly Glucose. Glucose is utilized by every cell in your body for energy, but Fructose is shuttled to your liver where it is metabolized into fats and a variety of waste products, one of which is uric acid. Uric acid drives up your blood pressure by inhibiting the nitric oxide in your blood vessels. Nitric oxide helps your vessels maintain their elasticity, so nitric oxide suppression leads to increases in blood pressure. Fructose consumption also leads to decreased signaling to your central nervous system from the hormones Leptin, Ghrelin and Insulin. These are key signals in regulating how much food you eat, as well as your body weight, all contributing to increased food intake and weight gain. Decreased Insulin and Leptin signaling is also a main cause of diabetes and a host of other obesity-related conditions. So what are we left with? Go back to our healthy diet which contains moderate amounts of small berries as your fructose source, no processed foods, and no soft drinks. If your going to take part in these bad items read the labels and pick the best choice of the evils, cane sugar over fructose, and by the way agave is at the top of the bad fructose list. If all of the above information does not convince you to get fructose products out of your diet, then ponder on the fact that mercury is used as a preservative for fructose products. Way too much information, so we will wait till next week to take a look at healthy exercise.