Herald article #3, the bad and the ugly in your diet

"Health Talk by Dr. Dean R. Brock, DC, APC Last week we talked about the good part of a healthy diet, now lets cover the bad and ugly parts, the foods that have brought on the overwhelming numbers of chronic diseases. The top culprits would have to be Grains, Dairy, Cheap Vegetable Oils, GMO and Industrial Farmed Meats. Grains were never intended to be consumed by humans, they are a cheap food capable of providing large amounts of calories to avoid starvation. Three serious problems associated with grains are the lack of nutrition, the large blood sugar spike and gut lining damage. A huge additional note on blood sugar is that it is the major contributor to hypertension. The insulin spike it induces causes the kidneys to retain sodium; this fluid retention raises blood pressure. Everyone has heard of gut disorders such as Celiac, which is associated with the ingestion of gluten (found in several grains). Gluten causes damage in everyone, but some individual's genes make them more susceptible to far greater damage. Lectins are also in all grains, beans and legumes and they create the same gut damage as gluten, in everyone. Lectins destroy connecter proteins that hold cells together, thus creating a “leaky gut” . So a gluten free diet using other alternative grains, merely avoids the damage from gluten and does nothing about the damage caused by lectins. Everyone benefits from a grain free (flour free) diet. Cows Milk, what is its purpose? It is a unique biological secretion of the mammary gland endowed by nature to fulfill the entire nutritional needs of a neonate. It provides immune system start-up and growth hormones (estrogen & testosterone precursors) to stimulate proliferation. So if you are not a four legged neonate, it is not for you. Now if you add on top of that what industrial farming has done to the cows, by feeding with grains instead of grass, injecting growth hormones and using antibiotics because the cows stand in their own excrement 24/7. They also decrease the age of starting to milk the cows and have increased the duration of milking. Pushing the productivity to extremes has made a food not intended for humans even worse. There are sufficient numbers of quality studies pointing to milk as the root cause of acne. More and more studies are linking milk to cancer, which is what happens when you ingest something that upregulates and over expresses system functions. There are also sufficient studies showing how cows milk induces hyperglycemia and promotes insulin resistance. So what do you do? Heard of Almond milk? Yes, milks made from nuts, they are a great source of healthy fats and fiber. Stay clear of soy, and read the labels for bad additives such as caregeenan and fructose. Better yet make your own, it is a simple process that just takes minutes. Vegetable oils, when produced under conditions that allow in oxygen and do not control high temperatures, yields a highly oxidized product that when used by the body as a building block of a cell wall, results in a stiffer, less fluid and less functional organelle. What we should be cooking with is a saturated fat, like coconut oil or tallow. These saturated fats due not undergo chemical changes at higher temperatures. Olive oil is also very good for us, however; it is a mono-unsaturated fat and it should be used raw, it is not for cooking. Maintaining it at high temperatures changes its chemical structure turning it into a trans fat which is a very unhealthy building block in cell walls. Additionally, when the industry turns these cheap oils into saturated fats (trans & hydrogenated) with electricity and hydrogen to extend the shelf life of a processed food, they have created a very damaging substance. The much maligned red meat is your best source of iron and B-12 and if it is fed properly (there is the problem), it is a phenomenal source of essential fats. Because Industrial farmed beef are fed cheap GMO grains (corn & soy) instead of their natural food of grass, the result is a meat that is high in a very bad form of saturated fat, very low in mono saturated fat (the good stuff), very low in omega 3 fat (the good stuff) and very high in a bad form of omega 6. Industrial farmed pork has the same bad fat profiles, in addition to issues with viruses and bacteria due to living conditions. Industrial farmed chickens have extremely high levels of arsenic. So meat being a major source of protein, and an essential macro nutrient, that we must have, what do we do? Buy from a local rancher that does not use antibiotics or hormones and only grass feeds. Fish, is an excellent source of protein but must be wild caught. If the package label does not say wild caught, don't buy it and certainly don't eat it. Farm raised fish is not a healthy alternative due to the environment they are raised in and the food they are fed, which can contain high levels of Polychlorinated biphenyls(PCBs), and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE), both toxic and linked to cancer. Since we have covered so much this week, and so as not to dilute the information and give you a change to absorb it, we will continue our discussion next week with exercise. Also coming soon an entire article will be devoted to GMO or genetically modified organisms.