A few years ago, I started this journey to understand why we get fat and what we can do about it. I wanted to understand this so I could help other people lose weight and keep it off. The interesting thing is, my research took me down a path I was NOT expecting. It led me into the causes, prevention and reversal of things such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and a host of other diseases that plague our society today.
I have reviewed literature and research from top experts and educational institutions on all these topics. What I’ve found is that everyone has their ‘shtick’. Meaning all these researchers and academics focus on one particular thing, whether that be obesity, heart disease, autism, diabetes, cancer…you name it. This makes perfectly good sense. I mean, you cannot be an expert on everything. In order to really understand a problem, you have to go deep.
The thing I find interesting is that when you review all of their work, there is a common thread across them all.
Food.
The majority of the health problems we are facing today are caused by what we are eating (and not eating).
I’m not sure why this surprised me. It makes perfect sense. If you look back at over the last 30 years, we have become more overweight and more sick than ever before. How can this be? There are more gyms than ever before. There are more diets and diet “foods” than ever before. It just does not seem to add up.
The bottom line is this. The more convenient a food is, the more unhealthy it is for you. Our bodies were design to eat whole foods. Our bodies know how to manage whole foods. Whole foods were designed by nature to provide our bodies all the things we need to be healthy.
So, how did we get all messed up? Well, I think we got too smart.
We started taking our whole foods and with our “smarticles” (this term came from my time watching the Disney Channel with my kids), we started figuring out ways to make them more convenient to grow, sell, package, ship, and ultimately get into our bodies. In order to accomplish this, we had to process our food. When we process food, we have to take things out and add things in, to accomplish this goal of convenience.
So, what is the big deal? We take a few things out and add a few things in, right?
Well, there are 2 problems with this. The first is that some of things we are choosing to put in our food were never designed to be consumed by our bodies and/or we were not designed to manage the high doses of these ingredients we are adding to our food. Secondly, we are removing things from the food that are apparently important. All of the things in whole food were designed to work together in our body. If we remove part of the whole food, then it does not work in our bodies the way it was designed to. This is where we get into trouble. There are still thousands of phytochemicals in whole food that we have yet to even identify – let alone to fully understand how they all work together as a whole. I love technology and what science can do is amazing and I think we need all that. But when you make a mistake, you need to correct it, not apply more fixes (in the form of medications, procedures, and operations) to the problem.
The bottom line is this. Convenient food is making us sick (slowly). You may not realize it today or tomorrow, but as a society we are seeing the results of convenient foods in the form of diseases at an earlier and earlier age. There is plenty of documentation and research on all of this.
The good news is, you do not have to be a statistic. You can avoid all this by just by focusing on a fresh organic whole foods diet. A simple shift in making whole foods a priority in your diet will absolutely change not only any weight issues you might have, but a host of other health issues that may or may not have even surfaced for you yet. The closer your food is to the way it was found in nature the better off you will be.
