The Beauty Detox Solution (16 page)

Now that you understand the Beauty Detox concepts, it's time to get to the heart of the program: the food itself. This chapter introduces you to the variety of mineral- and enzyme-rich foods that will help you boost your Beauty Energy, cleanse the toxic sludge and reach new levels of beauty! I'll walk you through all the different foods we talked about earlier, with helpful tips along the way for how to incorporate them into your Beauty Detox.

To understand the foods that boost beauty, we're going to revisit the traditional nutrition categories. Remember to open your mind and forget all the mainstream nutrition talk you've heard over and over again. You know now that it isn't working! This chapter will introduce you to a new way to think about food and how your body uses it so that you can eat your way to a more beautiful you.

PLANT PROTEIN IS BEAUTY PROTEIN

Protein is a macronutrient composed of building blocks called amino acids, which link together to form protein chains in different combinations. Proteins perform many different functions in our body. To name a few, they maintain and foster the growth of our cells, make antibodies and hormones, and help regulate our fluid and electrolyte balance.

Protein is probably the most poorly understood category of foods there is. And no wonder! An ever-growing number of confusing studies and statistics are put out about protein. And while we have traded cutting out carb grams and fat grams during different dieting fads over the last few decades, it has never been suggested that we cut back on the highly touted, “royalty” macronutrient called protein. In fact, we are often led to believe that we can never consume too much protein!
Protein helps us lose weight, gives us muscle and skin tone…so cut back on calories, carbs, fat grams, yes, but never protein!
Does this sound familiar?

One of the first things that a vegetarian is asked is, “Where do you get your protein?” This highlights the misconception in our society that
only
meat and animal products contain protein, and if we do not eat it, we are at risk for protein deficiency. I admit that I used to wonder if I was getting enough protein when I stopped eating animal products altogether. I used to supplement my diet with protein powders and was sure to eat a certain amount of nuts a day. But I stopped these practices years ago, as I now know that I get more than enough protein from my plant-based diet, without trying to supplement protein. I feel better than ever, and my body is more toned than it has ever been!

Let's back up for a minute to get a wider view of this protein issue:
Our bodies do not use protein per se. It uses amino acids.
Long chains of amino acids make up proteins. These chains wear out and do need to be replaced. We furnish replacements for these proteins by consuming foods with
amino acid
building blocks.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell uses the great example of strings of multicolored beads in his book
The China Study
to explain how our bodies use amino acids. Say we lose a string of colored beads, and someone gives us another string of colored beads to replace it, but the beads are in a different order in terms of their color. In order to be able to use the new beads, we have to cut apart the whole string, then restring the beads in the right order.
¹

This is the basic concept we have to understand with protein: the amino acid chains need to be broken down so we can reconstruct their order in a specific way for our bodies.
Our bodies cannot use a complex amino acid chain without rebuilding it first. Make sense? So while all organisms and plants have the same basic amino acids, the usable pattern is specific to each organism. We don't just eat chicken or beef and instantly absorb “protein” into our bodies. Instead, our body has to break down the amino acids from the chicken or beef that we ate, and then restring the amino acids into protein chains specific to humans.

Animal protein is defined as beef, chicken and all other fowl, venison, lamb, pork, rabbit, fish and other seafood, eggs and so on. We cannot just eat animal protein, which is really the muscle of the animal, and expect that to turn directly into muscle in our bodies. If that were the case, how does the cow itself, the source of big protein steaks and burgers, build muscle when it naturally eats only grass? The cow builds its large muscles from the
amino acids
in the grass it is eating!

Remember from our first discussion about the animal kingdom that many of the largest, most muscular animals on earth are vegetarians—gorillas, wild horses, hippos, rhinos. They efficiently build up the protein and muscles in their body from the amino acids in the greens they eat. The false idea of having to eat exclusively protein-dense food, namely animal protein, to build muscle has been popularized by mainstream nutrition and the media.

We have established that before muscle or tissue can be built up in the body, protein has to be digested and split into amino acids. There are twenty-three different amino acids, fifteen that the body manufactures on its own and eight that cannot be manufactured by the body and must come from our diet alone. When a food contains all eight of these amino acids—known as the essential amino acids—it is called a complete protein. These eight essential
amino acids are found in abundance in fruits, vegetables, seeds, sprouts and nuts. Some examples of great plant-based food sources of amino acids are all nuts and seeds, spinach, kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, summer squash and asparagus.

By consuming a wide variety of foods from these various plant groups, you will receive the essential eight amino acids in abundance. Furthermore, you do not need to carefully combine foods to get all eight essential amino acids at each meal. A best-selling book in the 1960s called
Diet for a Small Planet
popularized the idea of “protein combining.” But in 1981 the author herself, Frances Moore Lappé, rewrote the book to reflect that her previous theories of protein combining had been misinformed. Our bodies store and release the amino acids needed over a twenty-four-hour period to supplement our daily amino acid intake and ensure we get all the amino acids we need.
²

DANGERS OF HIGH-PROTEIN DIETS

Over the past decade or so, a number of high-protein, low-carb diets have become increasingly popular. What you've read so far in this book points to exactly why these types of diets age us at an accelerated rate. These diets are based on extreme calorie restriction and focus on foods that lack fiber and nutrients. There are many potential health risks associated with these diets, as well.

A study published in 2002
³
and funded by the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine researched fifty-one obese people that were put on the low-carb Atkins Diet.
⁴
Over six months forty-one subjects maintained the diet and lost an average of twenty pounds. Sound good? The participants in the study were consuming an average of only 1,450 calories per day, which is 35 percent less than the average American consumption of 2,250 calories a day.
⁵
On any kind of diet, if anyone were to restrict daily calories by at least 35 percent, he or she would lose weight, at least for the short term.

In the same study the researchers also stated that “at some point during the twenty-four weeks, twenty-eight subjects (68%) reported constipation, twenty-six (63%) reported bad breath, twenty-one (51%) reported headache, four (10%) noted hair loss, and one woman (1%) reported increased menstrual bleeding.” Another frightening figure from the study is that dieters had a 53 percent increase in the amount of calcium excreted in their urine, which is a big problem for bone density and health.

One study published in the
Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition
focusing on the short- and long-term effects of high-protein and low-carb diets found that “complications such as heart arrhythmias, cardiac contractile function impairment, sudden death, osteoporosis, kidney damage, increased cancer risk, impairment of physical activity and lipid abnormalities can all be linked to long-term restriction of carbohydrates in the diet.”
⁶

So don't be tempted by the low-carb diet craze—diets high in animal protein are simply
not
going to promote our beauty and health.

Since our body uses amino acids to construct the protein it needs, it is vital that we look not only at how many grams of protein we are eating but also at the
quality
of our foods' amino acids and how readily available they are. Amino acids are delicate entities. Most animal protein is cooked, which can denature the amino acids and can make them largely unavailable for our body's use.
⁷
The Max Planck Institute for Nutritional Research in Germany discovered that cooking destroys about 50 percent of the bioavailability of protein for humans.
⁸

Even if one wanted to put up an argument for eating animal protein, the meat would have to be eaten raw, the way wild animals eat it. They do not heat it over a fire and cook it until it changes color from pink to dark brown. Dark brown flesh is destroyed and denatured protein. Logically speaking, we can see that this is
not
the matter that builds vibrant, beautiful new tissue!

The truth of the matter is that there is an abundance of
usable
amino acid content found in plants and we do not need to seek out protein from concentrated animal protein sources to make sure we are getting enough. The American Dietetic Association states that “plant protein can meet protein requirements when a variety of plant foods is consumed” and “research indicates that an assortment of plant foods eaten over the course of a day can provide all essential amino acids and ensure adequate nitrogen retention and use in healthy adults; thus, complementary proteins do not need to be consumed at the same meal.”
⁹

Vegetarianism is supported by the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. For those of us eating
real
plant food—greens, other veggies, sprouts, fruit, seeds and nuts—in abundance, protein deficiency is not a problem. Athletes can supplement their diet with hemp protein, chlorella, hemp seeds and other concentrated forms of plant protein if they are interested in getting a larger dosage of protein.

We just discussed how denatured animal protein's amino acids become toxic and unusable material that the body has to contend with and break down. But that is only the beginning. Animal protein is the most complex of all foods: it takes about twice as long as other foods to pass through our digestive system.
¹⁰
As you know from earlier chapters, this provides plenty of time for it to bake in our system into toxic, putrefied sludge as it sucks more of our Beauty Energy!

Moreover, the digestion of meat leaves a large amount of acidic residue in our bodies, including uric acid, purines and ammonia by-products. Let's also not forget the extremely unhealthy and unbalancing overgrowth of
unfriendly
bacteria in our colon, which comes about as a result of the putrefaction process from digesting excess animal proteins.