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In February 2016, news of cousin Kerry's stage-4 breast cancer diagnosis prompted my visit to Vancouver. Then 30 with a buzz cut, Kerry resembled an underage mother playing with her two-year old son, shrugging off chemo like a bad cold. But I couldn’t do the same. I was mad. Mad enough to do a talk on food. My talk was too late for her—she passed away in October the following year.
In loving memory of Kerry Yang.
06/24/2016
Presentation Abstract
Some common traits of twenty-first century adults: insomnia, fatigue, depression, forgetfulness, anxiety, frequent stress; children: hyperactivity, problems with attention and focus. Do you accept these characteristics and behaviors as the norm, the gift of life? Here I share my roadmap to discovering the true gift of life—it begins with food.
Duration: 44 minutes
Duration: 44 minutes
References:
- Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating — Walter C. Willett, M.D. with Patrick J. Skerrett.
- The UltraMind Solution — Mark Hyman, M.D.
- Nutrition (Quick Study Health) — BarCharts, Inc.
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals — Michael Pollan
Addendum:
By June 18, 2018, manufacturers must ensure that their products no longer contain partially hydrogenated oils for uses that have not been otherwise authorized by FDA.
Video Beats:
00:00 – Intro
00:07 – Roadmap to Health
01:19 – How Our Body Works with Food
03:40 – Cancers, DNA and Mutation
04:24 – Free Radicals Damage DNA
06:15 – Stress and Hormonal Imbalance
08:52 – What Drugs Do
09:14 – I thought I grew to have allergies
10:50 – U.S. Sugar Consumption from 1820 to 2012
11:34 – Recommended Sugar Intake from American Heart Association
12:18 – Eat to satisfy our nutritional needs and cravings
13:16 – Hidden Truth Behind Diet Fads
13:48 – Fats
16:32 – Trans Fats
17:45 – Proteins
20:20 – Carbohydrates
22:00 – Deconstructing Common Food Ads
22:50 – Trans Fats Labeling
23:38 – Got Milk?
25:59 – Soft Drinks
26:53 – Vitamin C
27:41 – How Vitamins Work
30:17 – Raw Food or Supplements
31:31 – Eating in or Dining out
32:35 – Changes in our Food Production Process
32:56 – Corn
36:58 – Food for Thought
40:07 – Our Relationship with Food
40:31 – Get Physical
42:20 – Roadmap Ahead
Transcripts
Hello, welcome to my talk on Food: The Balancing Act. I want to start by sharing my roadmap to health with you. Six years ago my nose was often congested. It got so bad when I woke up one morning struggling to breathe, inhaling really hard for air. I thought what if my airway closes and I just suffocate? But I never had allergies to anything, except for bug bites, nor did I have to carry an EpiPen around. So how did I get to the point where I was having so much trouble with the simplest task, breathing? I began studying about our body and what food does. I also learned about how our food production process changed over the years. In this presentation—
This presentation will arm you with the knowledge you need to live a long, healthy life or a shortened existence should you desire an early reincarnation—
—Let’s begin with how our body works with food. Each of us is unique because of our DNA, which stores instructions for all cellular activities. Our cells communicate and send signals to different parts of the body, so our brain knows if we are happy or sad, relaxed or stressed, focused or absent-minded, good or injured. Our glands produce hormones, which are messengers controlling our stress response, blood-sugar balance, mood, sexual behaviors, growth and healing. Our cells work with enzymes. Enzymes are catalysts allowing biochemical reactions. That means breaking down, building, transforming substances our body needs.
Enzymes need nutrients to perform those conversions. For example, without vitamin B6, no enzyme converting the turkey you ate to serotonin, that means no happy chemicals. Before you rush out and buy yourself a truck load of vitamin B6 so you can drown yourself in happy chemicals, I must warn you that too much B6 can cause neurological damage.
So, nutrients control enzyme functions building, maintaining, and repairing our DNA, keeping us alive and active. Any missing piece in this diagram will throw your body off balance. Your cells will stop following rules of the game, stop behaving normally. Cancer cells don’t behave like normal cells. They spread and metastasize. You are born with a set of DNA programming, your food intake enhances, impedes, or mutates your cell functions. This is like Mystique in X-Men.
[Slide: a Marvel movie clip of the female mutant turning into a male soldier]
She can mutate and transform into whoever she wants. We are not X-Men; our trans-formation takes longer than 3 seconds. Food and toxins in the environment can cause our cells to mutate. What all cancers have in common is damage to DNA. DNA is a favorite target for free radicals and oxidizing agents. So what are free radicals?
Free radicals are in the air you breathe, the food you eat, the water you drink, cigarette smoke, sunlight hitting the skin or beaming into the eye. Free radicals cloud the clear proteins that make up the lens of the eye like heat clouds the clear protein in egg white. You can also make free radicals when you burn (in cooking) fats or carbohydrates. DNA damage leads to cancer, heart disease, arthritis, cataract formation, memory loss, aging, the list goes on. That’s why you hear people say to eat antioxidants because antioxidants neutralize free radicals, stopping it from causing damage to your cells. You also hear people say eat whole foods. What they are referring to is the surface area exposed to oxygen.
When you cut an apple or an avocado, you see the surface going brown, that’s oxidation. The more you cut, the more refined the substance is, the more the oxidation. That’s why brown rice is more nutritious than white rice, grains more than flour or refined carbohydrates.
What we see very common when we are under environmental stress and we don’t have the right nutrition is too much insulin, stress hormones and not enough thyroid hormones. Stress, poor diet, and lifestyle habits affect sex hormones leading to problems related to reproductive life cycle such as impaired mood, muscle loss, poor sleep, memory loss, and aging.
Environmental toxins and nutritional deficiency affect thyroid hormones, which affect heart rate, metabolism, central and peripheral nervous systems. Too little thyroid, you get things like insomnia, fatigue, depression, dry skin and hair, constipation, sensitivity to cold temperatures, frequent, heavy periods, weight gain, joint and muscle pain. Too much thyroid you get anxiety, irritability or moodiness, nervousness, hyperactivity, sweating or sensitivity to high temperatures, missed or light menstrual periods, diarrhea and weight loss.
Sleep helps us maintain low levels of stress hormones. We produce repairing, healing, and growth hormones when we have sufficient sleep. Lack of sleep increases stress hormones, which interferes with thyroid functions and makes us depressed and fat because it lowers appetite-suppressing hormones, which increases hunger. Stressed food triggers changes in our genes that lead to more stress.
What a lot of people tend to do when they get sick is to see doctors and take drugs to alleviate the symptoms. What drugs do is to mimic our enzyme functions, chemicals and hormones our body produces in order to operate or heal like it normally would.
Before I started studying about our body and food, I thought I grew to have allergies, so I tried taking Zyrtec, Claritin, and other antihistamines. They didn’t do anything for me. Made sense—because we are all unique, we don’t respond the same to the same drugs. Taking drugs over a period of time depletes your body’s ability to heal itself, make your own chemicals or hormones. Instead of drugs, what I really needed to ask was what I was putting into my body to cause so much inflammation in my sinus. And I did. There were a few factors, all related to food, and the main culprit is this—caramel peanut coated apples. So tasty—
—So sweet and so deadly. I used to have it once a week, plus some chocolates here and there. I didn’t think I consumed that much sugar, but it was more than what my body could handle. Processed sugar creates a lot of mucus in my respiratory system, and over time, it pushes my system out of balance. And I wasn’t the only one. This is the U.S. sugar consumption from 1820 to 2012. We are up from 20 teaspoons of sugar a year to over 130 pounds per person per year. Food industry knows fats and sugar are addictive so they deep fry or sweeten everything. Our senses adjust like people with addictions. We need more and more to satisfy our palate. Americans consume 10 times more sugar than other food additives besides salt. Is that balanced? This is the recommended sugar intake from American Heart Association.
[Slide: recommendation of no more than 9.5 teaspoons of sugar a day—the average adult intake: 22 teaspoons per day; the average child intake: 32 teaspoons per day.]
Average American adults and children easily exceed the recommended daily maximum. Not only is refined sugar of zero nutritional value, it damages your cells and is linked to obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, depression, acne, skin irritation, headaches, high blood pressure, fatigue, violent behaviors, and many more. But desserts are so irresistible! How can we eat to both satisfy our nutritional needs and cravings?
We are constantly being bombarded with miracle diets that guarantee to help us lose the weight we gained in the last decade in a month or a week, food commercials luring us to buy into what is good to eat and what cool people drink. Are vitamin supplements the magic pill to fulfill our nutritional needs? We love to go out to restaurants, but with all the toxins that are in the environment and our foods, it’s critical that we strike a balance between eating-in and dining out. Next I am going to show you the hidden truth in all these areas and the precautions you need to take starting with diet fads.
So many mesmerizing diets. Most focused on low fat, high protein, and low carbs. None of them are ideal. Because we need all food groups. Here is why. Fats are in all our cells and it protects vital organs and provides insulation. Body fats can store unabsorbed drugs that may have been taken years ago. So, the Zyrtec and other antihistamine I took years ago should be out of my system by now because I exercise and burn fat. If not, it might react with other things I take in the future and give me undesired side effects.
Fats help us absorb fat-soluble vitamins. And we need cholesterol to make cell membranes and the sheaths around nerves. Our body makes cholesterol. We can also get it from consuming animal products. People respond differently to cholesterol in their food. You often hear people say if you have high cholesterol, you should avoid eggs. No research has ever shown that people who eat more eggs have more heart attacks than those who eat few eggs.
We have high density and low density lipoproteins. High density means heavier, more muscular, less fat, more protein; low density means fluffier, more fat, less protein. LDL is often referred to as the bad cholesterol. We need cholesterol but too much may be bad for the arteries and the heart. The good cholesterol HDL particles sponge up excess cholesterol and carry it off to the liver for disposal and help with recycling of other lipoproteins.
Good fats increase good cholesterol, reduce risk of heart disease. Mono- and polyunsaturated fats are good fats: olive oil, avocados, nuts, seeds, whole grains, salmon and tuna are good sources. Saturated fats in butter or dairy products boost LDL. It doesn’t mean you can’t eat butter, just eat less of it and eat more good fats so you have more HDL to protect your arteries and heart. The only fats you really need to avoid are trans fats which are man-made.
Food companies destroy omega-3 fats in vegetable oils to make food last longer on the shelf without turning rancid. The process is called partial hydrogenation, which creates trans fats. Trans fats are in margarines, vegetable shortenings, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, fast foods and commercially baked goods. It’s worse than saturated fats because it lowers your good cholesterol HDL, making platelets stickier, more likely to form clots inside blood vessels in the heart, brain and elsewhere, causing heart disease, diabetes, death and disability. The Institute of Medicine says the safest amount of trans fats for human is zero.
Now let’s look at proteins. Your hair, skin, muscles, and enzymes are mostly proteins. Your body constantly makes new proteins. We have two categories of dietary proteins, complete and incomplete. Meats, eggs, fish, dairy and poultry are complete proteins, which we can consume and make new proteins. Vegetables are incomplete so vegetarians need to eat in combinations that complement each other. You eat things in pairs such as rice and beans, tofu and brown rice, nuts and seeds, legumes and vegetables.
A lot of people take soy proteins over meat. But you have to treat soy the same as meat because soy is high in estrogen. Some studies show that too much of it stimulates cancer cells to grow and divide, may cause breast, uterine, prostate, and cervical cancers; others said the opposite. Soy affects different tissues at different life stages. The word on soy is still out there.
And cow’s milk is not recommended for infants. Only a quarter of the world’s adults can fully digest milk. Many have allergic response or sever chronic constipation with specific proteins in milk. A diet high in protein ignores a problem. Protein is acidic—the more you consume the more calcium you excrete as your body tries to balance the PH in your system. Loss of calcium leads to osteoporosis, broken bones or hips.
The key is to mix up your proteins and balance it with carbohydrates.
Carbohydrates are the single most important food for long-term health and brain function. Carbs are plant foods, not the doughnuts or bread we typically refer to. Plants manufacture and store carbohydrates as a chief source of energy through photosynthesis.
Plant foods are vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, beans, herbs, spices. Carbohydrates contain all the minerals and vitamins your body needs to operate normally, except for B12. B12 is found in animal products. Plant foods have fiber, which lowers your bad cholesterol, slows down the release of sugar, preventing spikes in insulin levels. Fiber also reduces constipation.
What diet fads do is depleting the nutrition your body needs, putting your body in an imbalanced state. To function optimally, we need to eat good fats, proteins, carbohydrates, not avoiding or overdoing any one food group. Next I’m going to deconstruct some common food ads, and you’ll see the ads are presented to the consumers in a fashion very similar to online dating.
[Slide: a funny cartoon drawing]
The lady says, "your profile said you love sport."
The big guy says, "I do; that’s why we come here. The dogs are on the big screen at 7."
This is the same as a lot of food ads where they only show you part of the truth. It’s up to you consumers to be vigilant about what is in the packaged goods. First example is trans fats labeling.
Remember the safest amount of trans fats for human is zero? You see under Total Fat, it says 0g trans fat, but if you read the ingredients, it contains hydrogenated oils. This is because FDA allows food manufacturers to say zero grams trans fat if the product contains less than 0.5g of trans fat per serving. A lot of products have cholesterol-free labels, but they can be high in trans fat and contain no cholesterol.
The milk-mustache campaign is so compelling and convincing. In the US, as many as 50 million Americans can’t digest milk. Half of Hispanic Americans, 75 percent of African Americans, and over 90 percent of Asian Americans can’t tolerate a lot of lactose. Unpleasant consequences include nausea, bloating, cramps, and diarrhea. Dairy is not the best way to get calcium because of the lactose, saturated fat, extra calories, and unneeded hormones. Do you know men who drank two or more glasses of milk a day were almost twice as likely to develop advanced prostate cancer as those who didn’t drink milk at all? High intake of dairy products also increases your risks of breast and ovarian cancers.
Milk is really an optional food. You can get calcium from vegetables and tofu. Your body constantly builds up and tears down bones, so what you need is more vitamin D and physical activity. Vitamin D helps absorb calcium, builds and maintains healthy bones. Physical activity prevents degeneration. The best source for vitamin D is from sunlight. But don’t expose yourself to so much sun that you get skin cancer, everything in moderation. Other alternatives for vitamin D include fatty fish or rich livers.
It may be happy calories for the soft drink companies’ revenue, but not your body. Soda, carbonated drinks, alcohol, and caffeinated drinks speed up the loss of minerals your body needs to perform important functions such as building DNA and proteins from scratch. Carbonated caffeine drinks double the loss. I never understood the attraction of soda because all it ever does is to make me burp. In high school, I decided that just because everyone else was into burping, I didn’t have to conform. So I quit all carbonated drinks then.
A little extra vitamin C at the beginning of a cold may help relieve some symptoms, but mega doses cure no cold. My gums used to bleed easy, I didn’t know why because I love oranges. I used to eat at least one a day, so I thought I must be vitamin C fortified. But turned out too much vitamin C can make it switch roles and act like a free radical. Instead of repairing my gums, it was doing the opposite. So too much of a good thing may be bad, again balance is important. Let’s go over vitamins next to make sure you don’t OD on vitamins.
I’m going to pick one vitamin from each category to discuss so you get an idea on their workings.
Fat-soluble vitamins are vitamins A, D, E, K. They are stored for a long time in fatty tissues and blood. Vitamin A for example, a lot of people tend to associate it with vision, but it does more than that. It can boost production and activity of white blood cells, help direct bone remodeling, and regulate cell growth and differentiation. You can get vitamin A from liver, fish, eggs, dairy, carrots, kale, red or green peppers. But too much can block the effects of vitamin D, which is good for bones and muscles and has a calming effect on cancer cells.
For water-soluble vitamins, we have vitamins C and B. They interact with each other, meaning the more C you consume the less B you keep and vice versa. B12 for example helps enzymes make dopamine. Dopamine is essential for attention and focus. Too little B12 leads to things like fatigue, memory loss, dementia, disorientation, or hallucination. Some drugs used to treat ulcers, gout, or seizures can also interfere with B12, same goes for too much alcohol. B12 is found in animal products such as liver, oyster, salmon, cheese and eggs. Other foods such as nuts, seeds, avocados, bananas can also help increase dopamine levels. So we need to have all vitamins in moderation, not overdo any one kind. Your next question might be is it good to take supplements?
The U.S. produces a huge surplus of corn crop and food scientists are a creative bunch. They make vitamins from the skin of corn, extract out the fats, starch and sugar to make fake fats, fake starch and fake sugar. How do you know you are not just eating corn? And what does the fake stuff do in your system? I don’t trust the source of vitamin supplements. I get my vitamins directly from the real food. And I eat everything, not just berries or kale, because there are hundreds of antioxidants in the foods we eat, each has its own unique set of chemical behaviors and biological properties. No single antioxidant can do the work of the crowd.
When you have more antioxidants in store, you can enjoy eating out. I love to go out to restaurants. It might be shocking news to some of you, but I do have In-N-Out sometimes. When we go out to eat, we can’t guarantee the restaurants are going to use the most organic ingredients. When I eat at In-N-Out, I see the cholesterol-free label on the bag of fries, and I know it could be deep fried in hydrogenated oils or trans fats. But I sure as hell going to enjoy every bit of it because I eat enough antioxidants and good fats at home to avoid blood clots and sustain free radical damage. You might think you are doing the same at home eating healthy. This next bit might make you feel a little bit sick.
At the beginning of the presentation, I mentioned our food production process changed over the years. I have one slide here to give you an example, and the example is corn. Corn is so versatile. Let’s look at the role corn plays in our food production cycle. Corn has been genetically modified to feed on fossil fuel, that’s petrol. And scientists figured out plants need nitrogen, so they fertilized corn in chemical explosives from World War II to obtain nitrogen. Do you know 0.1 part per billion atrazine, that’s herbicide used on corn fields, turns normal male frogs into hermaphrodites? If you are like me who didn’t know what a hermaphrodite was—
—It’s a person, animal, or plant having both male and female reproductive organs. The toxins go in the water, flow into the ocean, and screw up our ecology. The U.S. government subsidizes corn and when the farmers start growing these hybrid corn with the prescribed chemical fertilizers, they can’t grow anything else but corn and soybean in rotation because the soil is ruined.
The cows get fed corn and suffocate because their rumen is built to digest grass, not corn. The gas gets trapped in a layer of foamy slime in their rumen and the only way to get it out is to stick a tube down their esophagus. Imagine how stressed you would be if someone were to do that to you. The cows get fed corn, they get sick and they get drugged when what they really need is grass. The hormones of the animals and fish are all messed up, and we eat them. At supermarkets they sell organic milk and grass-fed milk because organic milk means the cows get fed organic corn. Corn is in the majority of our animal feed. And high fructose corn syrup is in everything from soda to TV dinners, ketchup, baby food, snacks and processed food including cereal.
If processed food is all we eat, then we are essentially walking corn.
When you consume fake foods, you are a host to many odd compounds and you put on extra weight. When your body doesn’t get the right nutrition, you get hungry. You need to eat more and more quickly, changing your fixed stomach to an elastic one. That means more weight gain and you fighting a losing battle.
But there is hope. Otherwise I would be more mad than I normally am. I love farmer’s markets because they are trying to do the right thing for our food and people. You might not realize the huge impact you have both individually and systemically depending on where you buy your food. I would like you to consider the following differences between local grass-fed and factory grain-fed productions.
[Slide: Food for Thought]
[
Local Grass-fed vs Factory Grain-fed
Taste : Tasteless
Nutrition : Illusion
Environmental : Pollution
Sustainability : Scarcity
Healthy Nation : Drug Nation
Boost Economy : Wealth Inequality
REASONABLE : CHEAP
]
Not only does conventional farming produce a lot of pollution, it’s also wasteful of our natural resources transporting produce from one end of the country to another. This leads to scarcity; we’ll have less of everything for our children. You can spend money on real food and get the right nutrition to function optimally, or you can spend on medicines and healthcare. It will cost you a lot more later. And even then you can’t guarantee to have your health back. Once you have cataracts, you have cataracts. Same for cancers, you might survive it, but there is a good chance it’ll come back.
When you frequent the farmers markets, you are supporting the local farmers, spreading the wealth, boosting local economy. With the supermarkets, you are only making the top 5 percent richer, accentuating the wealth inequality. I know we all want to save on food. I used to buy meats from Ralphs when it goes on sale, where it can be as cheap as $1 a pound. But it’s cheap for a reason. When I learned I was eating pesticides, petrol, stress hormones, and antibiotics, I switched. I learned the farmer’s market pricing is reasonable when they take time and care to grow produce and raise livestock healthily and naturally. I wouldn’t sell you a dozen eggs for $2 if I grew my own chickens in the backyard. You also don’t need to eat as much when you give your body the right nutrition. Our relationship with food is always going to feel a bit like this.
[Slide: image of movie Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in up-close lightsaber combat]
We all want to be good, but sometimes we want to be bad or lazy and splurge. And we can if we eat healthy most of the time. Now your output is equally as important as your input. Physical activities burn calories that would otherwise end up stored in fat. Your muscles are constantly using energy even when you are sleeping. Fat replaces muscle without exercise, which decelerates your metabolism. When your body needs less and less energy to take care of its basic needs, more and more food goes into fat stores, making it easier to gain weight and harder to maintain weight. Brisk walking offers many of the same benefits as jogging outside or sweating it out in a gym. Brisk is moving as if you are late for an important meeting. Some people ask if I run. You probably can’t tell but public speaking speeds up my heart rate—
—the same as running. And I can tell you like exercise, my mood improves tenfold when it’s over! So to help your cardiovascular system—heart, lungs, and blood vessels—the activity must speed up your heart beat and breathing.
So, what’s your roadmap going to be? You know your nutrition needs is different from your neighbor’s. Diet fads only benefit the wallets of the authors and put your body in distress. You now have enough knowledge to navigate the food jungle and discern the whole truth in the ads you see. When you invest in your health, you will glow with all colors of the rainbow. Or, you can look jaundiced. You can enjoy French fries without worrying about heart attacks if you have the right balance in your food intake.
My studies on food took me back to the basics. They are: eat real foods, not too much, mostly plants, and exercise. When you adhere to these simple guidelines, you are poised for a long, healthy life. And where you choose to spend your dollar on food can perpetuate or re-balance the wealth distribution in our economy. Change begins with our food health.
That’s my presentation. Thank You.
This presentation will arm you with the knowledge you need to live a long, healthy life or a shortened existence should you desire an early reincarnation—
—Let’s begin with how our body works with food. Each of us is unique because of our DNA, which stores instructions for all cellular activities. Our cells communicate and send signals to different parts of the body, so our brain knows if we are happy or sad, relaxed or stressed, focused or absent-minded, good or injured. Our glands produce hormones, which are messengers controlling our stress response, blood-sugar balance, mood, sexual behaviors, growth and healing. Our cells work with enzymes. Enzymes are catalysts allowing biochemical reactions. That means breaking down, building, transforming substances our body needs.
Enzymes need nutrients to perform those conversions. For example, without vitamin B6, no enzyme converting the turkey you ate to serotonin, that means no happy chemicals. Before you rush out and buy yourself a truck load of vitamin B6 so you can drown yourself in happy chemicals, I must warn you that too much B6 can cause neurological damage.
So, nutrients control enzyme functions building, maintaining, and repairing our DNA, keeping us alive and active. Any missing piece in this diagram will throw your body off balance. Your cells will stop following rules of the game, stop behaving normally. Cancer cells don’t behave like normal cells. They spread and metastasize. You are born with a set of DNA programming, your food intake enhances, impedes, or mutates your cell functions. This is like Mystique in X-Men.
[Slide: a Marvel movie clip of the female mutant turning into a male soldier]
She can mutate and transform into whoever she wants. We are not X-Men; our trans-formation takes longer than 3 seconds. Food and toxins in the environment can cause our cells to mutate. What all cancers have in common is damage to DNA. DNA is a favorite target for free radicals and oxidizing agents. So what are free radicals?
Free radicals are in the air you breathe, the food you eat, the water you drink, cigarette smoke, sunlight hitting the skin or beaming into the eye. Free radicals cloud the clear proteins that make up the lens of the eye like heat clouds the clear protein in egg white. You can also make free radicals when you burn (in cooking) fats or carbohydrates. DNA damage leads to cancer, heart disease, arthritis, cataract formation, memory loss, aging, the list goes on. That’s why you hear people say to eat antioxidants because antioxidants neutralize free radicals, stopping it from causing damage to your cells. You also hear people say eat whole foods. What they are referring to is the surface area exposed to oxygen.
When you cut an apple or an avocado, you see the surface going brown, that’s oxidation. The more you cut, the more refined the substance is, the more the oxidation. That’s why brown rice is more nutritious than white rice, grains more than flour or refined carbohydrates.
What we see very common when we are under environmental stress and we don’t have the right nutrition is too much insulin, stress hormones and not enough thyroid hormones. Stress, poor diet, and lifestyle habits affect sex hormones leading to problems related to reproductive life cycle such as impaired mood, muscle loss, poor sleep, memory loss, and aging.
Environmental toxins and nutritional deficiency affect thyroid hormones, which affect heart rate, metabolism, central and peripheral nervous systems. Too little thyroid, you get things like insomnia, fatigue, depression, dry skin and hair, constipation, sensitivity to cold temperatures, frequent, heavy periods, weight gain, joint and muscle pain. Too much thyroid you get anxiety, irritability or moodiness, nervousness, hyperactivity, sweating or sensitivity to high temperatures, missed or light menstrual periods, diarrhea and weight loss.
Sleep helps us maintain low levels of stress hormones. We produce repairing, healing, and growth hormones when we have sufficient sleep. Lack of sleep increases stress hormones, which interferes with thyroid functions and makes us depressed and fat because it lowers appetite-suppressing hormones, which increases hunger. Stressed food triggers changes in our genes that lead to more stress.
What a lot of people tend to do when they get sick is to see doctors and take drugs to alleviate the symptoms. What drugs do is to mimic our enzyme functions, chemicals and hormones our body produces in order to operate or heal like it normally would.
Before I started studying about our body and food, I thought I grew to have allergies, so I tried taking Zyrtec, Claritin, and other antihistamines. They didn’t do anything for me. Made sense—because we are all unique, we don’t respond the same to the same drugs. Taking drugs over a period of time depletes your body’s ability to heal itself, make your own chemicals or hormones. Instead of drugs, what I really needed to ask was what I was putting into my body to cause so much inflammation in my sinus. And I did. There were a few factors, all related to food, and the main culprit is this—caramel peanut coated apples. So tasty—
—So sweet and so deadly. I used to have it once a week, plus some chocolates here and there. I didn’t think I consumed that much sugar, but it was more than what my body could handle. Processed sugar creates a lot of mucus in my respiratory system, and over time, it pushes my system out of balance. And I wasn’t the only one. This is the U.S. sugar consumption from 1820 to 2012. We are up from 20 teaspoons of sugar a year to over 130 pounds per person per year. Food industry knows fats and sugar are addictive so they deep fry or sweeten everything. Our senses adjust like people with addictions. We need more and more to satisfy our palate. Americans consume 10 times more sugar than other food additives besides salt. Is that balanced? This is the recommended sugar intake from American Heart Association.
[Slide: recommendation of no more than 9.5 teaspoons of sugar a day—the average adult intake: 22 teaspoons per day; the average child intake: 32 teaspoons per day.]
Average American adults and children easily exceed the recommended daily maximum. Not only is refined sugar of zero nutritional value, it damages your cells and is linked to obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, depression, acne, skin irritation, headaches, high blood pressure, fatigue, violent behaviors, and many more. But desserts are so irresistible! How can we eat to both satisfy our nutritional needs and cravings?
We are constantly being bombarded with miracle diets that guarantee to help us lose the weight we gained in the last decade in a month or a week, food commercials luring us to buy into what is good to eat and what cool people drink. Are vitamin supplements the magic pill to fulfill our nutritional needs? We love to go out to restaurants, but with all the toxins that are in the environment and our foods, it’s critical that we strike a balance between eating-in and dining out. Next I am going to show you the hidden truth in all these areas and the precautions you need to take starting with diet fads.
So many mesmerizing diets. Most focused on low fat, high protein, and low carbs. None of them are ideal. Because we need all food groups. Here is why. Fats are in all our cells and it protects vital organs and provides insulation. Body fats can store unabsorbed drugs that may have been taken years ago. So, the Zyrtec and other antihistamine I took years ago should be out of my system by now because I exercise and burn fat. If not, it might react with other things I take in the future and give me undesired side effects.
Fats help us absorb fat-soluble vitamins. And we need cholesterol to make cell membranes and the sheaths around nerves. Our body makes cholesterol. We can also get it from consuming animal products. People respond differently to cholesterol in their food. You often hear people say if you have high cholesterol, you should avoid eggs. No research has ever shown that people who eat more eggs have more heart attacks than those who eat few eggs.
We have high density and low density lipoproteins. High density means heavier, more muscular, less fat, more protein; low density means fluffier, more fat, less protein. LDL is often referred to as the bad cholesterol. We need cholesterol but too much may be bad for the arteries and the heart. The good cholesterol HDL particles sponge up excess cholesterol and carry it off to the liver for disposal and help with recycling of other lipoproteins.
Good fats increase good cholesterol, reduce risk of heart disease. Mono- and polyunsaturated fats are good fats: olive oil, avocados, nuts, seeds, whole grains, salmon and tuna are good sources. Saturated fats in butter or dairy products boost LDL. It doesn’t mean you can’t eat butter, just eat less of it and eat more good fats so you have more HDL to protect your arteries and heart. The only fats you really need to avoid are trans fats which are man-made.
Food companies destroy omega-3 fats in vegetable oils to make food last longer on the shelf without turning rancid. The process is called partial hydrogenation, which creates trans fats. Trans fats are in margarines, vegetable shortenings, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, fast foods and commercially baked goods. It’s worse than saturated fats because it lowers your good cholesterol HDL, making platelets stickier, more likely to form clots inside blood vessels in the heart, brain and elsewhere, causing heart disease, diabetes, death and disability. The Institute of Medicine says the safest amount of trans fats for human is zero.
Now let’s look at proteins. Your hair, skin, muscles, and enzymes are mostly proteins. Your body constantly makes new proteins. We have two categories of dietary proteins, complete and incomplete. Meats, eggs, fish, dairy and poultry are complete proteins, which we can consume and make new proteins. Vegetables are incomplete so vegetarians need to eat in combinations that complement each other. You eat things in pairs such as rice and beans, tofu and brown rice, nuts and seeds, legumes and vegetables.
A lot of people take soy proteins over meat. But you have to treat soy the same as meat because soy is high in estrogen. Some studies show that too much of it stimulates cancer cells to grow and divide, may cause breast, uterine, prostate, and cervical cancers; others said the opposite. Soy affects different tissues at different life stages. The word on soy is still out there.
And cow’s milk is not recommended for infants. Only a quarter of the world’s adults can fully digest milk. Many have allergic response or sever chronic constipation with specific proteins in milk. A diet high in protein ignores a problem. Protein is acidic—the more you consume the more calcium you excrete as your body tries to balance the PH in your system. Loss of calcium leads to osteoporosis, broken bones or hips.
The key is to mix up your proteins and balance it with carbohydrates.
Carbohydrates are the single most important food for long-term health and brain function. Carbs are plant foods, not the doughnuts or bread we typically refer to. Plants manufacture and store carbohydrates as a chief source of energy through photosynthesis.
Plant foods are vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, beans, herbs, spices. Carbohydrates contain all the minerals and vitamins your body needs to operate normally, except for B12. B12 is found in animal products. Plant foods have fiber, which lowers your bad cholesterol, slows down the release of sugar, preventing spikes in insulin levels. Fiber also reduces constipation.
What diet fads do is depleting the nutrition your body needs, putting your body in an imbalanced state. To function optimally, we need to eat good fats, proteins, carbohydrates, not avoiding or overdoing any one food group. Next I’m going to deconstruct some common food ads, and you’ll see the ads are presented to the consumers in a fashion very similar to online dating.
[Slide: a funny cartoon drawing]
The lady says, "your profile said you love sport."
The big guy says, "I do; that’s why we come here. The dogs are on the big screen at 7."
This is the same as a lot of food ads where they only show you part of the truth. It’s up to you consumers to be vigilant about what is in the packaged goods. First example is trans fats labeling.
Remember the safest amount of trans fats for human is zero? You see under Total Fat, it says 0g trans fat, but if you read the ingredients, it contains hydrogenated oils. This is because FDA allows food manufacturers to say zero grams trans fat if the product contains less than 0.5g of trans fat per serving. A lot of products have cholesterol-free labels, but they can be high in trans fat and contain no cholesterol.
The milk-mustache campaign is so compelling and convincing. In the US, as many as 50 million Americans can’t digest milk. Half of Hispanic Americans, 75 percent of African Americans, and over 90 percent of Asian Americans can’t tolerate a lot of lactose. Unpleasant consequences include nausea, bloating, cramps, and diarrhea. Dairy is not the best way to get calcium because of the lactose, saturated fat, extra calories, and unneeded hormones. Do you know men who drank two or more glasses of milk a day were almost twice as likely to develop advanced prostate cancer as those who didn’t drink milk at all? High intake of dairy products also increases your risks of breast and ovarian cancers.
Milk is really an optional food. You can get calcium from vegetables and tofu. Your body constantly builds up and tears down bones, so what you need is more vitamin D and physical activity. Vitamin D helps absorb calcium, builds and maintains healthy bones. Physical activity prevents degeneration. The best source for vitamin D is from sunlight. But don’t expose yourself to so much sun that you get skin cancer, everything in moderation. Other alternatives for vitamin D include fatty fish or rich livers.
It may be happy calories for the soft drink companies’ revenue, but not your body. Soda, carbonated drinks, alcohol, and caffeinated drinks speed up the loss of minerals your body needs to perform important functions such as building DNA and proteins from scratch. Carbonated caffeine drinks double the loss. I never understood the attraction of soda because all it ever does is to make me burp. In high school, I decided that just because everyone else was into burping, I didn’t have to conform. So I quit all carbonated drinks then.
A little extra vitamin C at the beginning of a cold may help relieve some symptoms, but mega doses cure no cold. My gums used to bleed easy, I didn’t know why because I love oranges. I used to eat at least one a day, so I thought I must be vitamin C fortified. But turned out too much vitamin C can make it switch roles and act like a free radical. Instead of repairing my gums, it was doing the opposite. So too much of a good thing may be bad, again balance is important. Let’s go over vitamins next to make sure you don’t OD on vitamins.
I’m going to pick one vitamin from each category to discuss so you get an idea on their workings.
Fat-soluble vitamins are vitamins A, D, E, K. They are stored for a long time in fatty tissues and blood. Vitamin A for example, a lot of people tend to associate it with vision, but it does more than that. It can boost production and activity of white blood cells, help direct bone remodeling, and regulate cell growth and differentiation. You can get vitamin A from liver, fish, eggs, dairy, carrots, kale, red or green peppers. But too much can block the effects of vitamin D, which is good for bones and muscles and has a calming effect on cancer cells.
For water-soluble vitamins, we have vitamins C and B. They interact with each other, meaning the more C you consume the less B you keep and vice versa. B12 for example helps enzymes make dopamine. Dopamine is essential for attention and focus. Too little B12 leads to things like fatigue, memory loss, dementia, disorientation, or hallucination. Some drugs used to treat ulcers, gout, or seizures can also interfere with B12, same goes for too much alcohol. B12 is found in animal products such as liver, oyster, salmon, cheese and eggs. Other foods such as nuts, seeds, avocados, bananas can also help increase dopamine levels. So we need to have all vitamins in moderation, not overdo any one kind. Your next question might be is it good to take supplements?
The U.S. produces a huge surplus of corn crop and food scientists are a creative bunch. They make vitamins from the skin of corn, extract out the fats, starch and sugar to make fake fats, fake starch and fake sugar. How do you know you are not just eating corn? And what does the fake stuff do in your system? I don’t trust the source of vitamin supplements. I get my vitamins directly from the real food. And I eat everything, not just berries or kale, because there are hundreds of antioxidants in the foods we eat, each has its own unique set of chemical behaviors and biological properties. No single antioxidant can do the work of the crowd.
When you have more antioxidants in store, you can enjoy eating out. I love to go out to restaurants. It might be shocking news to some of you, but I do have In-N-Out sometimes. When we go out to eat, we can’t guarantee the restaurants are going to use the most organic ingredients. When I eat at In-N-Out, I see the cholesterol-free label on the bag of fries, and I know it could be deep fried in hydrogenated oils or trans fats. But I sure as hell going to enjoy every bit of it because I eat enough antioxidants and good fats at home to avoid blood clots and sustain free radical damage. You might think you are doing the same at home eating healthy. This next bit might make you feel a little bit sick.
At the beginning of the presentation, I mentioned our food production process changed over the years. I have one slide here to give you an example, and the example is corn. Corn is so versatile. Let’s look at the role corn plays in our food production cycle. Corn has been genetically modified to feed on fossil fuel, that’s petrol. And scientists figured out plants need nitrogen, so they fertilized corn in chemical explosives from World War II to obtain nitrogen. Do you know 0.1 part per billion atrazine, that’s herbicide used on corn fields, turns normal male frogs into hermaphrodites? If you are like me who didn’t know what a hermaphrodite was—
—It’s a person, animal, or plant having both male and female reproductive organs. The toxins go in the water, flow into the ocean, and screw up our ecology. The U.S. government subsidizes corn and when the farmers start growing these hybrid corn with the prescribed chemical fertilizers, they can’t grow anything else but corn and soybean in rotation because the soil is ruined.
The cows get fed corn and suffocate because their rumen is built to digest grass, not corn. The gas gets trapped in a layer of foamy slime in their rumen and the only way to get it out is to stick a tube down their esophagus. Imagine how stressed you would be if someone were to do that to you. The cows get fed corn, they get sick and they get drugged when what they really need is grass. The hormones of the animals and fish are all messed up, and we eat them. At supermarkets they sell organic milk and grass-fed milk because organic milk means the cows get fed organic corn. Corn is in the majority of our animal feed. And high fructose corn syrup is in everything from soda to TV dinners, ketchup, baby food, snacks and processed food including cereal.
If processed food is all we eat, then we are essentially walking corn.
When you consume fake foods, you are a host to many odd compounds and you put on extra weight. When your body doesn’t get the right nutrition, you get hungry. You need to eat more and more quickly, changing your fixed stomach to an elastic one. That means more weight gain and you fighting a losing battle.
But there is hope. Otherwise I would be more mad than I normally am. I love farmer’s markets because they are trying to do the right thing for our food and people. You might not realize the huge impact you have both individually and systemically depending on where you buy your food. I would like you to consider the following differences between local grass-fed and factory grain-fed productions.
[Slide: Food for Thought]
[
Local Grass-fed vs Factory Grain-fed
Taste : Tasteless
Nutrition : Illusion
Environmental : Pollution
Sustainability : Scarcity
Healthy Nation : Drug Nation
Boost Economy : Wealth Inequality
REASONABLE : CHEAP
]
Not only does conventional farming produce a lot of pollution, it’s also wasteful of our natural resources transporting produce from one end of the country to another. This leads to scarcity; we’ll have less of everything for our children. You can spend money on real food and get the right nutrition to function optimally, or you can spend on medicines and healthcare. It will cost you a lot more later. And even then you can’t guarantee to have your health back. Once you have cataracts, you have cataracts. Same for cancers, you might survive it, but there is a good chance it’ll come back.
When you frequent the farmers markets, you are supporting the local farmers, spreading the wealth, boosting local economy. With the supermarkets, you are only making the top 5 percent richer, accentuating the wealth inequality. I know we all want to save on food. I used to buy meats from Ralphs when it goes on sale, where it can be as cheap as $1 a pound. But it’s cheap for a reason. When I learned I was eating pesticides, petrol, stress hormones, and antibiotics, I switched. I learned the farmer’s market pricing is reasonable when they take time and care to grow produce and raise livestock healthily and naturally. I wouldn’t sell you a dozen eggs for $2 if I grew my own chickens in the backyard. You also don’t need to eat as much when you give your body the right nutrition. Our relationship with food is always going to feel a bit like this.
[Slide: image of movie Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in up-close lightsaber combat]
We all want to be good, but sometimes we want to be bad or lazy and splurge. And we can if we eat healthy most of the time. Now your output is equally as important as your input. Physical activities burn calories that would otherwise end up stored in fat. Your muscles are constantly using energy even when you are sleeping. Fat replaces muscle without exercise, which decelerates your metabolism. When your body needs less and less energy to take care of its basic needs, more and more food goes into fat stores, making it easier to gain weight and harder to maintain weight. Brisk walking offers many of the same benefits as jogging outside or sweating it out in a gym. Brisk is moving as if you are late for an important meeting. Some people ask if I run. You probably can’t tell but public speaking speeds up my heart rate—
—the same as running. And I can tell you like exercise, my mood improves tenfold when it’s over! So to help your cardiovascular system—heart, lungs, and blood vessels—the activity must speed up your heart beat and breathing.
So, what’s your roadmap going to be? You know your nutrition needs is different from your neighbor’s. Diet fads only benefit the wallets of the authors and put your body in distress. You now have enough knowledge to navigate the food jungle and discern the whole truth in the ads you see. When you invest in your health, you will glow with all colors of the rainbow. Or, you can look jaundiced. You can enjoy French fries without worrying about heart attacks if you have the right balance in your food intake.
My studies on food took me back to the basics. They are: eat real foods, not too much, mostly plants, and exercise. When you adhere to these simple guidelines, you are poised for a long, healthy life. And where you choose to spend your dollar on food can perpetuate or re-balance the wealth distribution in our economy. Change begins with our food health.
That’s my presentation. Thank You.
PS
I love to share my experience and learning, but please consult your doctor for medical advice.
© 2018 Janey Play
Curiosity, clarity, and shared joy in everyday life.
Curiosity, clarity, and shared joy in everyday life.