Death By Supermarket (26 page)

Splenda (sucralose), a chemically derived, chlorinated molecule, is 600 to 1,000 times sweeter than sugar, with no added calories. It was FDA-approved for use in food and beverage products in 1998. Splenda has been heavily promoted in some of the most gorgeously produced and directed TV ads airing today, which would have us believe that Splenda will transform our dreary lives into a veritable fairyland of giddily surreal
Technicolor. The makers of Splenda assure us that their sweetener is “Made From Sugar, So It Tastes Like Sugar.” But the sugar industry has also been all over that claim in the courts, claiming false advertising, asserting that it is more like chlorine than sugar.

Just like aspartame, sucralose does not promote weight loss—and in fact, it can stimulate the appetite. All artificial sweeteners sabotage weight-loss efforts because when your taste buds register a sweet taste, your body’s natural ability to gauge food intake is flummoxed. This results in overindulging in sweet foods and beverages.
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And so your risk of obesity goes up 41 percent if you drink diet soda.
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Testing of sucralose has demonstrated that it causes shrinkage of the thymus gland, which is crucial to your immune system, as well as enlargement of the liver and kidneys.
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Although makers of sucralose claim it’s not absorbed into the body, scientists report that 20 to 30 percent is absorbed and that it accumulates in organs and causes DNA damage in gastrointestinal organs.
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If you have chosen to ingest this chlorinated sugar, which happens to carry the same risks of regular old chlorine exposure (such as cancer, immune function malfunction, birth defects) you have to ask yourself, is it worth the risk? Serious illness changes your life forever.

“Net carbs,” “net impact carbs,” or “effective carbs” are arrived at by ignoring the fake sugar and subtracting the grams of fiber from the total carb count. If a product has 30 grams of carb and 16 grams of fiber, its net carbs would be 14. Factory-food producers have foisted this low net carbs concept on a pubic eager for gluttony with impunity. The net carb concept only serves your body well when you eat real foods that contain fiber. For example, you can have a piece of stone ground, whole grain bread that contains 24 grams of carb and essentially cut that number in half. That is why you can eat plates of nonstarchy vegetables and count them as zero carbs.

Since none of us slimmed down on SnackWells low fat cookies it is not likely that we will slim down on SnackWells Carb Well Fudge Covered Grahams either because any type of dieting is starvation to human
physiology, which is designed to operate on a balanced, varied diet of real whole foods that provides enough quantity so that all the vital nutrients are onboard every single day. When you combine starvation with diet factory-food, you’re not going to produce a good-quality human being. Going on any kind of “healthy diet” that includes factory-food products is like saying you’re quitting smoking while you have a smoldering cigarette dangling from your lips.

Reclaiming your genetic gifts is possible if you stop dieting, stop eating factory food, and start give your body the necessary building blocks of nutrition. If you are unhealthy, you can radically improve every aspect of your health, including balancing your hormones and brain neurotransmitters, in a cell-by-cell process by eating real food.

WHEN I REFER TO
a historic real, living food diet, I’m not talking about “health food.” If you’re old enough, you might recall the TV commercial for Post Grape-Nuts in which Euell Gibbons asked, “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are eatable,” which was famously spoofed as, “Ever eat a picnic bench? Many parts are eatable.” A common misconception is that eating “health food” is comparable to eating a pine tree or picnic bench. Another misconception is that health food is esoteric stuff found in health-food stores. In the episode of
Nip/Tuck
referenced earlier, one of Julia McNamara’s friends informs her, “Health food is the new plastic surgery.” Julia resolves to transform her family’s eating habits and serves them Chinese mushrooms and seaweed for dinner. The kids storm off to their rooms, slamming doors.

If you go into any store advertising real, whole food you’ll see there is more than mushrooms and seaweed. But you’ll also see that the health-food industry is peddling similar products as supermarkets. The differences are that efforts are made to provide organic products or products that claim to be organic, to eliminate additives, to add a lot of soy substances, and to make health-food claims on the packaging.

From ages fifteen to twenty-two, I lived in Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Spain, and Switzerland. Right after I returned to the United States, I remember attending a birthday party, taking a bite of Duncan Hines cake, and saying, “This cake makes my mouth burn.” Once you’ve eaten real food
as I did all those years, factory food tastes science-fictiony, leaves an icky taste in your mouth, and we won’t even go there with what it does to your G.I. tract. You just have to give up factory food for a while to allow your taste buds to reboot, and you’ll see what I mean.

Maybe you haven’t eaten real food all your life, but you can still provide your body with the materials it needs to repair so that it can shrink down to your ideal body weight. A balanced diet of real, living food won’t result in a skin-and-bones fashion model look. The only women I’ve known who achieved that look were either bulimic or were some of the actresses and models I worked with in the film industry who lived on cigarettes, candy bars, and amphetamines combined with several hours of extreme exercise per day. Eating a balanced diet of real food will, over time, produce a muscular, attractive body as your body changes on a cellular level. Your ideal body weight means that you have arrived at a metabolic set point, and you can stay there by eating three balanced meals every day.

A balanced diet means eating proteins, fats, nonstarchy vegetables, and carbs together, three meals a day.

By providing your body with adequate fats and proteins, your body will be able to break down and rebuild lean body mass (muscle and bone). An amplified example of the internal breaking down and building up phenomenon that continually occurs within our bodies was demonstrated by Hilary Swank when she trained four hours a day for two months to prepare for her Academy Award-winning role as female boxing champ Maggie Fitzgerald in the 2004 film
Million Dollar Baby
. Swank put on 15 pounds of muscle prior to shooting. Because extreme training causes muscles to break down and build up in an accelerated fashion, more protein is needed for the rebuilding process. The actress (who needed to sleep nine hours every night) actually awoke in the middle of every night to down an extra protein drink to provide her body with enough supplies to keep up the accelerated rebuilding process. This is not to say that American women should “bulk up.” But only that a beautiful body can be achieved
by ignoring the number on the scale and focusing more on what you look like in the mirror.

Americans direly need to eat as many raw and cooked organic non-starchy vegetables as humanly possible every day to obtain the micronutrients necessary to utilize proteins and fats. Remember the bite-chew-glug people who can down a thousand calories and hundreds of carbs in a burger, fries, and sodas in a few bites, chews, and swallows? Americans need to learn to chew. Studies prove that a fiber-rich diet is a crucial factor in weight management. Indigestible fiber was the main component in the hunter-gatherer diet. Hard to chew and digest raw meat, nuts, seeds, roots, and other plant materials kept primitive humans’ digestive systems working overtime. (Lathering veggies in butter helps immensely with the chewing and will facilitate the assimilation of fat-soluble vitamins. And eating meat, fish, and poultry along with veggies creates an appetizing meal.) Current research points to tissue inflammation as a cause of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease. Both vegetables and fruits have anti-inflammatory properties.

Examples of nonstarchy vegetables are amaranth leaves, arugula, asparagus, bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, beet greens, bell peppers, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, raw carrots, cauliflower, celery, chicory greens, chives, collard greens, cucumber, dandelion greens, eggplant, endive, fennel, garlic, ginger root, green beans, hearts of palm, jicama, jalapeño peppers, kale, kohlrabi, mushrooms, mustard greens, onions, parsley, radicchio, radishes, shallots, snap beans, snow peas, spinach, summer squash, Swiss chard, turnip greens, and watercress.

Fear of carbs has become as extreme in our culture as fear of fat. In
The Devil Wears Prada
, Emily (Emily Blunt), fashion-slave gopher to
Runway
magazine editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), is mystified by the fact that “the fat smart girl” Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has scooped her to accompany Priestly to Fashion Week in Paris, lamenting, “You eat carbs!”

But carbs are not all bad. Carbs are necessary to feel happy and to not feel unnaturally hungry, as the release of the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin is stimulated by eating carbs. We need carbs as part of a balanced diet, yet balance is the key. Keeping meals balanced means that you’ll have balanced insulin levels throughout the day—and you’ll eliminate the risk of developing diseases associated with chronic high insulin levels. Therefore, to your balanced meals of protein, fats, and nonstarchy vegetables, add a sensible portion of real, whole, living carbs.

Basic physiology dictates that weight management is determined (in part) by how much energy you put into your system versus how much energy you expend. Any carb, whether it’s an apple or a candy bar, turns into energy (sugar) in your body, which is used as fuel. Since carbs are fuel, if you’re unhealthy and fat and are lying in bed reading the paper, you obviously need far less fuel than someone in the third stage of an Iron Man competition. But if you’re that same fat, sedentary, unhealthy person who is working harder than normal, you need to take in more fuel. It’s common sense. If you are overweight and sedentary, you need proteins, fats, and nonstarchy vegetables to fuel ongoing metabolic processes and for internal repair, but you need very little energy food. If you are active, you need a moderate amount of carbs. If you are an extreme athlete you need more energy. (See
Healthy, Sexy, Happy
for a complete breakdown of set points and carbs.)

Examples of healthy real (as opposed to factory-refined) carbs are fruit, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, sugars such as honey and molasses, milk, kefir, and yogurt, as well as starchy vegetables, such as acorn squash, artichokes, beets, butternut squash, cooked or juiced carrots, corn, green peas, leeks, lima beans, okra, parsnips, potatoes, rutabagas, sweet potatoes or yams, and turnips. (See
Healthy, Sexy, Happy
for a complete list.)

Like caffeine, refined white sugar, cocaine and heroin, salt is a white crystalline compound and, second to sugar, is the most seductive ingredient in factory food. Salt is used to increase the heft by binding moisture; this is a cheap way to increase profits for manufacturers. Salt is also used
to make consumers thirsty and, like MSG, to make otherwise unpalatable fake fare taste good.

Still, salt is essential to life. Human blood plasma and lymphatic fluids closely resemble the electrical balance and chemical composition of ocean water. Salt and water comprise the inorganic or mineral elements of your body and play specific roles in the functions of cells. Salt helps carry nutrients into cells and pump waste materials out. Salt helps regulate blood pressure and fluid volume, keeps the pressure balance normal in the lining of blood vessels, and is necessary for absorption and digestion of food, to name just a few of the important functions dependent on salt.

Seventy percent of supermarket salt is stripped of minerals through chemical processing, which is then sold to the chemical industry for other purposes. The stripped salt is adulterated with anti-caking agents—often aluminum compounds that pose serious health risks. The FDA had synthetic iodine put into our processed salt supply some generations back to prevent goiter (enlarged thyroid), which leads to childhood mental retardation and dwarfism. Dextrose (sugar) is added to stabilize the volatile iodine, which dyes the salt purple. To make it nice and pretty, the salt is bleached white. The resultant salt pours freely out of your saltshaker but should really only be used to melt the ice on your driveway.

Natural sea salt crystals are hand-harvested worldwide from shallow, evaporated tide pools. These salt crystals contain more than 80 minerals and trace elements, including iodine. There are varied flavors in sea salt—you just have to experiment to find the ones that suit certain cuisines. A natural diet seasoned with sea salt is not likely be an overkill of sodium.

In addition to sea salt, non-GMO and nonirradiated spices lend delicious flair and a distinctive edge to flavors, as well as provide antioxidants to your diet.

In the United States, for numerous reasons—our frantic lifestyles, the cheapness of factory food, and our belief that real food is deadly—we’ve lost the art of food. I believe that anyone, at any age, can change his or her diet and that those changes will have positive impacts on the person’s
health and happiness. Even if you were raised exclusively on factory food—as I was—you can still do a complete about face. My mother went grocery shopping once a month at the Navy commissary, so you can imagine the shelf life of the food items I grew up on. Thankfully, the desire to rekindle the art of food is immerging in our collective consciousness. And in the wealthiest society on earth, Americans really owe it to ourselves to make eating a delightful experience—every day, not just on special occasions.

In our artless food culture, people grab a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast with several cups of aspartame-dosed coffee. Lunch is a Jack-in-the-Box Bacon Cheeseburger with onion rings and a large Diet Coke. Dinner is DiGiorno pizza, an iceberg salad with Kraft Light Done Right! Ranch Dressing washed down with Bud Lite.