Death By Supermarket (24 page)

Gastric bypass leaves patients with stomachs the size of a walnut. More than one bite of food initially will cause them to become violently nauseous, and eating more will result in vomiting. Signing on for gastric bypass is voluntarily submitting to a procedure that will enforce starvation. In an attempt to supply the body with the nutrients it needs for 24/7/365 repair of cells, tissues, and bones and for replenishing hormones, neurotransmitters, and so on, the patient is advised to take a daily multivitamin.

In a perfect world, we could take the $25,000 to $30,000 that each gastric bypass surgery costs and instead sequester obese people in health facilities where they would get balanced meals of real, living food, any necessary hormone replacement, nutraceuticals (natural nutrients from plants that, when taken in specific doses, can have positive therapeutic effects), and other high-quality dietary supplements, exercise, emotional therapy, and lessons in shopping and preparing real food, so that after one year they would come out with balanced hormone levels and healed on the inside and out. Instead, we slice and dice their gastrointestinal tract and send them home to starve to death on less factory food than they would normally eat. One year later, they are emaciated down to an acceptable weight, but even more malnourished.

Anyone who is going to undergo gastric bypass would be wise to develop a relationship with a qualified clinical nutritionist who is capable of planning a nutrient-dense meal plan of real food, so that starvation can be achieved in the healthiest way possible, as bizarre as that sounds.

Your doctor may tell you that all of this is nonsense, as studies on mice, rats, monkeys, and even worms and protozoa (the smallest, single-cell animal) have proven that extreme low-calorie diets extend lifespan as much as 50 percent. In humans, nutrient-dense calorie-restrictive diets are believed to reduce the risk for cancer, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. Calorie restriction is said to reduce body weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and
glucose, factors that are all associated with good health and longer life. A number of hypotheses have been floated as to why calorie restriction provides greater life expectancy in studies, but so far no one knows for sure.
²⁴⁸

However, problems associated with calorie restriction are feeling cold, dwelling on food, including engaging in obsessive behaviors, temporary loss of energy, decreased sex drive, and feeling socially isolated, and in women the resulting weight loss can affect fertility and increase the risk of developing osteopenia (bone loss), leading to osteoporosis as well as loss of muscle mass.
²⁴⁹
These are all symptoms of malnutrition.

There’s a great scene in the movie
The Truth About Cats and Dogs
in which the thin, gorgeous Noelle (Uma Thurman) muses that she doesn’t know what’s inside of her since she never eats anything. Most people don’t give much thought about what their bodies are made out of. Eating real food has several purposes. First, your brain needs a constant drip of sugar (fuel). Equally important, your body is constantly breaking down and building back up again, and it needs an ongoing supply of fats and proteins to build lean body mass on a cellular level, as well as essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes that are the chemical catalysts that fuel metabolic processes. People need to eat a variety of food in adequate quantity every single day to give their bodies all these necessary supplies.

If your goal is weight loss, like Sisyphus, who was condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down just before he reached the top, this goal will be eternally out of reach. Let’s say you are a 200-pound woman or a 250-pound man and you need to lose 80 and 60 pounds, respectively. You can go on the South Beach low-cal diet and lose 30 pounds in three months. By this time your face will be hanging down around your neck and you will still need to lose 50 and 30 pounds, respectively. But can you continue eating low-calorie for more months? Now that you have lowered your caloric intake to a famine level for a substantial period of time, your body now has a higher insulin response to incoming food, a down-regulated thyroid, a lowered metabolic set point, a biological
inner drive for survival that is on red alert to hang onto fat cells, and a craving and bingeing response instigated by severe malnutrition. If you go off the diet, you will gain all of those pounds back and more.

If Americans would only turn to a balanced diet of real, living food, we could then achieve optimal health and body weight. Such a diet would balance our endocrine systems, heal malnutrition, ratchet up our metabolisms, calm unnatural hunger, and assure our bodies that we are not going to die so that it can let go of fat cells. In the first year, that 200-pound woman or 250-pound man may lose two pounds a week, but let’s say they both only lose one pound a week. At the end of the year, they would weigh 148 and 198, respectively. And they would not have been suffering on a “diet.” Furthermore, they will likely have exchanged 20 pounds of fat for muscle and may not even need to lose more.

Contrary to conventional medical wisdom, there is more to good health than losing weight. If you want to live into old age thinly and happily and die a peaceful death, you will not get there by starving your body. Low-calorie dieting is not the only starvation diet. The introduction of the lipid hypothesis 50 years ago ultimately led to the low fat diet, an extreme starvation diet.

THROUGH MY INFORMAL RESTAURANT
and market research I’ve learned one very important fact about Americans: We don’t like to chew. Check out the way people eat their cheeseburgers, fries, and Cokes. It’s
bite, chew, chew, swallow. Bite, chew, swallow. Bite, chew, chew, swallow. Glug, glug, glug, glug
. While primitive humans spent many hours every day chewing raw meat, nuts, seeds, and roots, consuming 300 to 400 calories per hour, modern Americans bite, chew, chew, swallow, and glug entire meals in mere minutes. According to Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, “The size of our faces has shrunk about 12 percent since the Ice Age when humans probably spent much more time chewing harder, tougher food to get the calories they needed for survival.”
²⁵⁰

As you recall, the lipid hypothesis centered around the beliefs that elevated blood-cholesterol levels were a risk factor for heart disease and that blood-cholesterol levels were elevated by eating cholesterol-laden foods and saturated fat. When this hypothesis was launched in the 1950s, the message to eat less saturated fat and cholesterol turned out to be a major boon to the food industry because this message threw a monkey wrench into our community consciousness about food and set the stage for the food industry to begin making billions of dollars. Americans didn’t know what to eat if they couldn’t eat what they had always eaten since the dawn of humankind. First we were told that historically eaten dietary fats were
unhealthy and caused disease. Then we were told to eat a low fat, high carbohydrate diet consisting of grains, steamed veggies, and fruit.

If there was ever a population less suited to a fat-free veggie diet, it was the American public. How many modern bite-chew-swallow-glug folks do you think could down plates of steamed vegetables throughout the course of one day? Not many Americans choose the dry veggie diet as a lifestyle— a diet that has never been eaten by any people on the face of the earth in the history of humankind. (Even vegetarian swamis in India eat ghee, clarified butter, and it was butter that nutritional researcher Dr. Price found in all the healthy primitive diets he studied.)

As with all unnatural diets, there were immediate and more long-term problems associated with the dry veggie/grain diet. For starters, this diet does not provide enough fat to modulate the absorption of all that roughage, and people who tried this diet suffered from extreme gastrointestinal distress. A more serious problem with a dry veggie diet, besides the boredom, gastrointestinal distress, and all that chewing, was the fact that few people actually choose this diet of dreary, fat-free brown rice, dry steamed veggies, and salad with the dressing on the side. Instead, Americans went for the addictively tasty-carb factory foods. In fact, back when this diet was introduced, the recommended ADA breakfast for type 2 diabetics was cold cereal, milk, banana, and orange juice—all carbs. But as Americans ate more easily chewed carbs (sugar), the 1970s and 1980s saw an exponential rise in obesity and disease. To address this mysterious rise in obesity and disease, in 1992 USDA introduced food pyramid guidelines recommending Americans radically reduce fat and increase their consumption of carbs—foods like pasta and bread. The USDA advice to eat more pasta and bread was eagerly embraced by Americans and it led to binges on cereal, pizza, pretzels, bagels, and low fat cookies.

Here’s where the long-term problems occurred. Since carbs are energy food and should be eaten in quantities that match a person’s individual metabolic health and activity level, when you eat more energy than you
are currently burning you’ll gain weight. But Americans weren’t given this message. They were virtually badgered into eating more carbs.

The most damaging result of our radical increase in the consumption of carbs was that Americans were now suffering with chronic high insulin levels. This is not a condition that creates immediate alarm. A person doesn’t feel any different when insulin levels soar and remain elevated. But the damage occurs within, insidiously and inexorably. Chronic high insulin levels are implicated in every single degenerative disease, including type 2 diabetes (explained below), cancer (insulin is a growth factor for cells), and heart disease (high insulin levels encourage coronary artery plaquing).
²⁵¹
In fact, studies on insulin and arterial plaque date back to the 1960s. Researchers actually infused insulin into the femoral arteries of dogs and arterial plaque occurred in every dog.
²⁵²
(High insulin levels are also caused by stress, dieting, caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, aspartame, steroids, sedentary lifestyle, recreational, and OTC and prescription drugs, but our focus here is sugar.)

Here’s how it works: Hormones are the chemical communicators between cells. For the body to function well, they must be kept at normal levels, as hormones depend on each other to do their jobs. Because all the systems of the body are interconnected, one hormonal imbalance causes another. A key hormone to keep balanced is insulin, which is secreted by the pancreas. Insulin’s major function is to regulate blood sugar levels, thereby protecting the brain and other vital organs from receiving too much sugar, which damages cells. When you eat carbs they turn immediately into sugar in your system, and when too much sugar is in your blood stream, insulin binds to insulin receptors on your cells so that they will open up and accept that extra sugar.

Years of eating too many carbs mean that your cells will be clogged with sugar. When they’re filled to capacity and can’t fit another sugar molecule, cells reduce the number of insulin receptors so there are fewer receptors for insulin to activate. This is insulin resistance. If you live long
enough, you’ll likely develop at least some degree of insulin resistance, which is a condition of aging. What’s not normal is that elementary school children are now developing insulin resistance. The recent fashion trend of low-rise jeans (prehistorically known as hip huggers) has revealed a population of young American women with fat tummies. Today, because girls are raised on sugar, they’re insulin resistant, with expanding middles, by the time they reach adolescence. The reason for this weight gain around the midsection is that when cells refuse to accept sugar, extra sugar in the bloodstream is diverted into fat production, and fat accumulates around the waist first.

When cells become insulin resistant, alarm bells go off in your body. Your pancreas will secrete even more insulin in an attempt to overcome this resistance. So now you have too much insulin in your bloodstream, which is called hyperinsulinemia. Your cells are being bombarded with insulin, which is like a frantic knocking, pleading to allow the excess sugar to enter. But stuffed as they are to capacity with sugar, your cells react by further reducing insulin receptors, which is increased insulin resistance.

If you continue putting too much sugar into your system until your cells have closed down all insulin receptors, the sugar has nowhere to go and remains in your bloodstream. You now have high blood sugar levels
and
high insulin levels, i.e., type 2 diabetes, an ugly progressive disease that causes blindness, kidney disease, nerve disease (leading to amputations), heart disease, stroke, and premature death.
²⁵³
One in ten Americans has type 2 diabetes, and it’s the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.
²⁵⁴
By the year 2050 the CDC predicts one in three Americans will have type 2 diabetes. We now have a generation of adults who are very likely to outlive their children, and in fact, experts predict that we will see teenage deaths of heart disease on a regular basis within the next decade.
²⁵⁵

Aside from those who binge to overweight or obesity on carbs and consequentially suffer from chronic high insulin diseases, there are also thin people who eat very little, but everything they eat is carbohydrate. A person who has a teeny weenie piece of crumb cake with coffee in the
morning (the no-calories-if-nibbling-while-standing-up mentality), a few bites of quiche in a white flour crust and a chocolate bon bon for lunch, and one egg roll, two Dim Sum, green tea ice cream and a fortune cookie, washed down with white wine for dinner, is a walking insulin factory. If you are able to control your portions but those portions are mostly sugar, you are cruising the danger zone as far as chronic high insulin levels are concerned and an insulin-related disease might lurk in your future.

Contrary to the absolute science that high sugar consumption leads to insulin resistance, back in 1992 the USDA’s prioritizing of foods (urging more carbs) was wholeheartedly endorsed by doctors. So on top of all the carcinogenic, heart-disease-causing oils that people were consuming, they dumped in loads of simple carbs into their systems. It was logical. If you can’t eat eggs, meat, butter, cheese, or cream, then you have to fill your diet with something else.