Death By Supermarket (4 page)

This roller coaster operates for some people all day long.

You might think that since eating sugar facilitates an excessive rush of stored neurotransmitters in your brain, continually eating sugar is a permanent solution to keeping your brain supplied with happy neurotransmitters. But the fact is that brain neurotransmitters are finite and will eventually become depleted if you don’t eat the foods necessary to make more. Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t say to you, “Please feed me food so that I can make more neurotransmitters.” The brain is focused only on its immediate needs, and so it screams, “Give me sugar!” Thus you’re led around by what I call your dumb pet—your brain—which demands sugar (or stimulants). In a futile attempt to balance your brain neurotransmitters, your body desperately extracts whatever minute amount of nutrients it can from your factory diet. And your doctor will likely be happy to write you a prescription for antidepressant selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that supposedly inhibit the disposal of serotonin from the brain, thus leading to longer-lasting normal levels of serotonin. (Antidepressants have been shown to be nothing more than placebos, which I discuss in
Healthy, Sexy, Happy
.)
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Eating refined grains is the same thing as eating refined white sugar. A perfect example of how much we love refined white flour products is our
nation’s love affair with cereal. In fact, a new restaurant chain called Cereality Cereal Bar and Cafe is rolling out across the country, featuring dozens of cereals, milk and soy options, and toppings like marshmallows and M&Ms, which will be served by pajama-uniformed “cereologists” while the Cartoon Network plays on TV monitors. David Roth, a cofounder and the president of Cereality, said, “The ubiquity of Starbucks is what we aim for.”
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The fact that cereal franchises are springing up is alarming since young people already have so many strikes against them when it comes to building healthy brains. The brain isn’t fully formed at puberty but continues to develop and mature until the age of twenty-four.
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This means that college students who graduate after four years of eating cereal, sodas, chips, and other sugary garbage for breakfast, lunch, and dinner are going to have lesser brains than those who suck it up and figure out how to forage for real foods that contain brain-healthy nutrients.

Americans overeat refined grains not because we have a stupid gene that other cultures don’t have. Rather, our culture is oversaturated with these products. Consider that every single culture on the face of the earth has a version of fried dough (here it’s the doughnut). In Japan, where American
donhnatsu
franchises have proliferated, they also eat traditional
age pan
—a deep-fat-fried blob with sweet fillings. In Mexico it’s
churro
, fried dough in a long, serrated breadstick shape rolled in sugar. In India, it’s
papad
, a deep-fried, crispy, spicy, thin dough round. The difference is that in other countries real food is a prevalent part of the diet (although the world is rapidly catching up to the United States in factory food consumption). In the United States, refined grains are readily accessible; they’re easy to eat, good tasting, and addictive.

Grains weren’t part of the Paleolithic (hunter/gatherer) diet for millions of years and weren’t eaten by humans until 10,000 years ago when agriculture first developed. Prior to that time, humans consumed carbs in relatively indigestible forms in nuts, berries, and roots. In other words, grains are a relatively recent addition to our food chain and physiology,
and refined grains are brand-new.
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Ten thousand years seems like long enough for human physiology to adjust to whole grains as part of the diet. Food companies capitalize on the belief that whole grains are part of a healthy diet. For example, Post, which produces Honey Bunches of Oats, Pebbles, Post Toasties, and Honeycomb, and also makes “healthy” cereals like Shredded Wheat and Raisin Bran, actually bills their cereal company as “whole grain experts for over 100 years.” And refined grain products are accepted as “whole grain.” We’ve also been told by food manufacturers that products like Eggo Homestyle Waffles and Sunshine Krispy Saltines, and cereals like Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Post Banana Nut Crunch, and Rice Krispies are good for us because they are made from “enriched” grains (i.e., refined flour). In the immortal words of Adelle Davis, “Such flour is ‘enriched’ just as you would be enriched by someone stealing 25 dollars from you and returning 99 cents.”
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So-called enriched flour is typically made from genetically modified grain with its coarse outer husks, which are rich in vitamins, minerals, and fiber, removed. The resultant stripped flour is combined with synthetic vitamins and minerals that were created in a laboratory.

Real foods contain the perfect ratios of naturally occurring vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, enzymes, amino acids, and fatty acids that are necessary to maintain healthy metabolic processes. This perfect ratio is never duplicated by food manufacturers. Instead, synthetic vitamins are added to factory foods in arbitrary amounts.

And then most cereals are manufactured in a process called extrusion that subjects grains to extreme pressure at high temperatures, rendering the proteins in the grains into neurotoxins (brain cell damaging compounds), including in “health food” cereal.
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In the 1960s, the hippie, baby-boomer generation was into natural foods and nourishing grains like barley, brown rice, whole grain buckwheat, corn grits, couscous, millet, oats, polenta, quinoa, rye, whole grain semolina, whole grain wheat, wheat germ, and wild rice. These youthful idealists reintroduced Americans to cool recipes like granola. Factory-food
manufacturers immediately sensed a market like a shark senses blood in water. They glommed onto the concept of “natural” and hit the ground running with it. Since the first hippie girl made a batch of granola, factory-food purveyors have been offering their factory-food junk to a public eager for natural foods.

For example, today we have refined grain products that are marketed as healthy and have natural-sounding names like Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Yogurt Bars, which imply that the product is nutritious. The Nutri-Grain website proclaims, “Eat Better all Day” and “More of the Whole Grains Your Body Needs.”
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In addition to genetically modified enriched wheat flour, Nutri-Grain Yogurt Bars contain high-fructose corn syrup (highly addicting, man-made sugar), partially hydrogenated soybean oil (a trans fat), natural and artificial flavor (MSG), mono- and diglycerides (partially hydrogenated oils), and many other toxic ingredients.

The Cheerios campaign claims that whole grains (in Chocolate Cheerios, for example) are healthy for your heart. The website features “Video Love Stories” with attractive, sophisticated “real people” and exclamations like “Love your heart so you can do what you love!” and “Oats: Superfood for your heart.”
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In addition to their claims of “enrichment,” refined, sugary cereals are notorious for claiming to have fiber. In 1984, the Kellogg Company, with the endorsement of the National Cancer Institute, launched a campaign for All-Bran cereal, which supposedly reduced the risk for certain types of cancer. This campaign was the first time a factory-food company used a “health” claim to market a product. Since that time, food makers have had the assistance of the FDA and the American Heart Association (AHA), as well as other “health” agencies, in selling us on the merits of their refined-grain cereals. (The AHA is a national voluntary health organization whose mission is to reduce disability and death from cardiovascular diseases and stroke.) Claims like the one for Kellogg’s All-Bran—“A simple way to help your body work a little better”—sound convincing because we know that we need fiber.

Normal elimination is once or twice a day. Primitive humans likely didn’t have problems with constipation because their rough, fibrous foods stimulated peristalsis, which is the organized, rhythm-like movement that moves foodstuffs from the mouth through the digestive system to elimination. But since refined food products immediately turn into soft, smooth, slippery, sugary sludge upon entering your system, there’s no stimulation to get peristalsis moving. Refined-grain products contain toxins, such as the above-mentioned nerve-damaging protein fragments created by the extrusion process, and chemical additives and ingredients. Compounding this problem is the fact that many people today have undiagnosed sensitivities to the grains in these products because we have simply eaten too many refined grains and they have become toxins to our bodies. So you’ve got a double whammy. Toxins in the factory food you eat sit in your colon, where they can be reabsorbed through your intestinal walls, a condition called leaky gut. Those toxins must go somewhere. Fat cells are storage repositories for, among other substances, toxins. Since many toxins are fat soluble, they permeate and are stored indefinitely in your fat cells, where they kill and damage cells.

If you pay attention to your body, it will tell you that eating sugar doesn’t feel good. In his book
It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
, Lance Armstrong said, “In one of the first pro triathlons I entered, I made the mistake of eating badly beforehand—I downed a couple of cinnamon rolls and two Cokes—and I paid for it by bonking, meaning I ran completely out of energy. I had an empty tank. I was first out of the water, and first off the bike. But in the middle of the run, I nearly collapsed. My mother was waiting at the finish, accustomed to seeing me come in among the leaders, and she couldn’t understand what was taking me so long. Finally, she walked out on the course and found me, struggling along.”
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Lance Armstrong, who is arguably one of the most impressive athletes to have ever lived, was brought down by cinnamon rolls and Cokes.

Sugar is sugar, whether you eat a candy bar or a bowl of cereal. But there is a worse addiction than sugar and refined grains. On January 31, 2004, a
New York Times
article proclaimed, “The Last Grain Falls at a Sugar
Factory.” American Sugar Refining, an operation that had been in business since the 1880s in Brooklyn, New York, was closing. But the closing of that sugar plant was like closing down a marijuana farm (sugar) because of an increased demand for heroin (high-fructose corn syrup). In other words, we went from a bad habit to an out-and-out lethal addiction, as you’ll read next.

“IN MY OPINION,
Shape Up! products can play an important role in the support of an individual’s physiology, which is often disrupted during the nutritional changes associated with weight loss,” TV psychologist Phil McGraw said on his now-defunct website
shapeup.com
. “Thirty years of work with obesity have taught me that psychological, lifestyle, and physiological balance are all essential to lasting success. Shape Up! can contribute to that balance.”
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Dr. Phil entered into a licensing deal for Shape Up! products in 2003 with CSA Nutraceuticals
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and made so much money that in the fall of 2004 he was able to purchase a Beverly Hills home for $7.5 million in cash.
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He writes in his book
The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom
, “So if you truly want to manage your weight, you must program your environment in every possible way to avoid difficult foods, binge foods, and reminders to eat … toss this stuff out, feed it to the garbage disposal, take it to the Dumpster, or at least get it out of your sight. Do this now, do this right away, so that it is impossible to fail. Begin today to reprogram your environment and set yourself up for success.”
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Nevertheless, in the two years that his Shape Up! Chocolate Peanut Butter, Oatmeal Raisin, Fudge Brownie, and Chocolate Toffee Crunch bars were on the market his followers consumed high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a factory-made sugar that’s not found in nature and that can provoke a binge-prone person
to frenzied binging. The products were quietly removed from the market as the rumblings of discontent grew over the bogus claims.
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Likewise, since more people have become aware that HFCS creates health problems, there’s been a significant decline in overall consumption. It appears that the closing of American Sugar Refining may have been premature, as people aren’t actually eating less sugar but rather are now eating more refined white sugar instead of HFCS. In response, the HFCS industry is frantically trying to change public perception about HFCS and has even petitioned the FDA to be allowed to market it as “corn sugar,” in hopes of duping people into believing that it’s “natural,” so OK to eat. They’ve launched “Sweet Surprise” propaganda, and if you Google HFCS you’ll see the tag line, “HFCS is nutritionally the same as sugar.” In one of their commercials, a lovesick guy fumbles around for words when asked by the attractive object of his affection why he’s so afraid of HFCS. The message is, “You dummy, HFCS isn’t bad for you. It’s just sugar!”
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Just in case anyone ever implies that you’re dense because you don’t want to consume HFCS, here are the facts.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) registers to the taste buds exactly like cane or beet sugar in sweetness and taste. Eighty percent of HFCS is extracted from genetically modified corn and is made in 16 chemical plants in the corn belt (Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, most of Illinois, and parts of Kansas) using enzymatic fermentation, fungus, and chemicals. It’s then pumped into tanker trucks and dispersed to manufacturing plants that make factory-food products. Since its introduction in the 1970s, the consumption of HFCS has risen more than 1,000 percent.

Like sugar, fructose has no nutritional value, and so it must rob your body of nutrients in order to be metabolized (so it’s true that HFCS is nutritionally the same as sugar!). However, fructose is more rapidly metabolized than sugar and ends up stored in the liver, which is why researchers are recognizing that HFCS produces exactly the same results as the force-feeding of geese: fatty livers analogous to
paté de foie gras
, clinically referred
to as “non-alcoholic liver disease.” The introduction of HFCS in the 1970s parallels the 47 percent spike in type 2 diabetes and the 80 percent increase in obesity in that same time period. Lab rats given access to HFCS gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same. The HFCS-fattened rats grew fat tummies and had increased triglycerides—both of which are symptoms of the “metabolic syndrome” (insulin resistance/obesity/type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and abnormal blood lipids).
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But we’re not lab rats with measured caloric portions, and HFCS is hard to eat in moderation because it confuses natural satiety.