« Back to article list

"I'm Addicted To You, Don't You Know That You're Toxic?"

March 10, 2008

This newsletter is dedicated to the "can't eat just one" phenomenon that happens when we eat junk food! Ever promise yourself you'll eat just one cookie, one potato chip or one spoonful of ice cream only to devour the whole package or carton. Read on to find out how most processed food is engineered to encourage overeating not to mention big profits for the food companies!

Photo of Britney Spears

Remember the days when Britney looked like this? What a beauty! I used to think, "how on Earth does she keep that body with all the Starbucks, soda, fast food, and other processed junk the paparazzi always photographs her with?" But with youth and a pre-maternal metabolism on her side, she dazzled us with her hot body even though she ate so poorly.

In recent years however, Britney's unhealthy lifestyle (to say nothing of the pressures of super-stardom) has caught up with her and she has become yet another victim of the American Food Giants, not only being robbed of her gorgeous body, but also her health and her sanity! What has happened to her, and what we see happening to many Americans, is described in Paul Stitt's book, "Beating The Food Giants."

In this book, Paul Stitt talks about his work as a biochemist with many food companies including Quaker Oats. He clearly describes the practices these companies employ to ensure their profit margin, including engineering food that tastes good and encourages overeating, but is highly toxic and made of the cheapest materials designed to stay well on supermarket shelves, not in our bodies. He says, "An ever-increasing proportion of the food we eat is no longer even food but is now a conglomerate of high-priced chemistry experiments designed to simulate food." Yuck.

Like Britney, millions of Americans are hooked on processed foods, stuck in miserable limbo between sickness and health. They are slowly eating themselves into diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, hypoglycemia and obesity. What causes these insidious food addictions and just how do we "beat the Food Giants"?

Located in the base of the brain, the organ that controls our appetite is called the appestat. It is constantly monitoring our blood for the level of 51 different nutrients including vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids and fiber. Only when all of these nutrients are present in their proper levels will a person feel full and satisfied. If any of the 51 nutrients are missing, the person will feel hungry and keep eating.

When one eats a diet consisting of all whole, organic, metabolically appropriate and properly prepared food, these 51 nutrients are present in the proper amounts and that person will eat a normal amount of food for his body and his appetite will be satisfied.

Eating processed food is an entirely different story. The Food Giants have lots of nasty tricks up their sleeve to get you to gorge on their food and keep buying it including:

  • Loading their food up with refined sugar, unhealthy fat and/or refined salt. These ingredients are what Paul Chek, in his audio-book "You Are What You Eat", calls "non-foods". That is they "take more out of your body to digest, assimilate and utilize" than they provide. You need the nutrients in real food to detoxify yourself from these non-foods which means YOU KEEP EATING until you get these nutrients. Be careful because sugar is often disguised under names such as beet sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, confectioner's sugar, corn syrup, granulated sugar, honey, maltodextrin, maple syrup, raw sugar, sorghum, turbinado sugar, or anything ending in "-ose".
  • Conventional farming which alters the amount of nutrients in food. You eat a conventionally raised banana which is supposed to deliver a certain amount of potassium. It has been scientifically proven that conventionally raised produce does not deliver the same amount of nutrition as organically raised produce. Your conventional banana is deficient in the potassium it is supposed to provide so YOU KEEP EATING bananas until your appestat is satisfied with the right nutrients.
  • Adding "natural" and artificial flavors and colors. Not only have "natural" and artificial flavors been known to contain things like monkey intestines, waste beef and ground-up cats, but they are put in food to make your taste buds go crazy. If you have one bite you are hooked and YOU KEEP EATING until the whole bag is finished.
  • The use of artificial sweeteners, the dirtiest trick in the book. The Food Giants say they add them to foods to make them taste sweet without using sugar, a Godsend for diabetics everywhere, right? Wrong! They are added to foods to make you overeat and the American Diabetes Association should be ashamed for promoting these to diabetics that are looking for nutritional help on their website. There are no studies that prove that artificial sweeteners help humans or animals lose weight. In fact, when the University of Wisconsin did a study on the effects of artificial sweeteners on humans, they found that they had to put humans literally behind bars to keeping them from "snitching" food after drinking artificially sweetened beverages. Why is this? When your tongue senses something sweet coming into your body, whether real or artificial, the body converts blood glucose into storage fat, causing the blood sugar to drop. If no sugar or calories follow, like in the case of artificially sweetened drinks, your blood sugar stays dangerously low and you become hypoglycemic. This means that despite Herculean willpower, after drinking a diet drink you are likely to run to the closest kitchen or deli and YOU WILL KEEP EATING, probably the most sugary thing you can find.
  • Sneaky chemical engineering. According to Paul Stitt, the Nabisco Company spent millions of dollars developing the formula for Oreo cookies which "contains 23 different appetite stimulants and 11 artificial colors". You actually can't eat just one. So next time you buy a bag of Oreos or any other commercially packaged, processed food, rest assured YOU WILL PROBABLY EAT THE WHOLE THING and gain another pound.

Paul Stitt eventually became so sick of developing non-food products for the Food Giants, things he would not even let his own children eat, that he finally left to start his own company that makes whole foods and promotes healthy eating education.

What can you do to "beat the Food Giants"? First, remove all processed food from your diet. Processed food is usually anything that comes in a box, can or plastic wrapper. Second, do not eat any food that has an ingredient listed that you cannot pronounce. If you can't pronounce it, your liver has no idea what it is. Third, do not eat anything that has natural or artificial flavors or colors listed on the label. There are hundreds of toxic chemicals that make up these flavors and colors that the food companies are not required to list on the label. Fourth, stay away from the four white devils: white flour, refined salt, pasteurized dairy and white sugar. These are all highly processed and bad for your health. And finally, shop for organic foods from your local health food store, or even better your local farmer's market. The foods from local farmer's markets and food co-ops have traveled less distance and get to you quicker, thereby maintaining more of their nutrient value when they reach your plate.

Thank you for your continued support of The Organic Experience. I hope this newsletter has clearly explained some of the physical reasons we develop food addictions. Adopting a diet of organic food for your metabolic type is the best way to avoid the pitfalls of the Standard American Diet (SAD).

In health and happiness,

Jackie Blake
The Organic Experience