False health info to avoid, part II....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 8-18-2015

(This post begins by listing the things we had in Part I last Friday, 8-14.  We decided to leave it in part II for people who missed part I. 

                                          We also added key points and made it a bit easier to read.)

But if you read part I, feel free to scan down until you see: Start of Part II.)

There are quite a number of things that were once thought to be true that would be better or at least OK to use to protect your health.

So many of these turned out to be totally false or only true under certain conditions that it can help you stay healthy to know what now looks to be the correct information.

1.  We now know that for most people too much real sugar is bad for you. 

True.  Most people today are mostly sedentary and will be much healthier if they limit their calories from sugar to two % or less of total calories.  (This is added cane sugar in granular form or sucrose from raisins, or dates, maple syrup, or molasses, etc.  Sugars included in whole fruits and vegetables otherwise are not included in this calculation.)

People who take supplements for health that also help to process sugar such as cinnamon and alpha lipoic acid and people who are quite active or do vigorous exercise every day may be OK with up to 5% of calories as sugar.

Because the average American takes in far more than that, just eating less sugar is very important.  (Above that amount, sugar causes heart disease and type 2 diabetes, and obesity.)

But sugar tastes good; so many things have been thought to be OK to use as substitutes and still eat instead of eating less sugar.  (The idea was to be able to eat more sweet treats without the normal harms.)

Unfortunately many people still believe in one or more of those things and eat them instead of just eating way less real sugar.

Here’s a list of them. 

The very bad news is that they are all WORSE for your health than the sugar they replace NOT better.

a)  Agave nectar.  Despite having a promisingly low glycemic index, agave nectar is a slightly harsh tasting form of free fructose.  And, free fructose turns out to be MORE harmful than sugar and more fattening too!

 If you want to avoid type 2 diabetes and heart disease try hard to avoid ALL forms of free fructose from high fructose corn syrup to agave nectar.

Warning, many products in health food stores, even those with other ingredients that are much more carefully selected for being health OK use agave as a sweetener.  In fact, I found recently even their employees often don’t yet know agave is more harmful than sugar!

b)  A very similar sweetener also still in products in health food stores, even those with other ingredients that are much more carefully selected for being health OK use concentrated fruit juice.  This sounds OK because the fructose in real whole fruit is safe to eat. 

What this misses is that without the fiber and other nutrients in whole fruit, the fructose in fruit stops being safe to eat without those parts of the fruit.

Because of this even organic fruit juice of high nutrition fruits are harmful enough to limit as much or more than real sugar.

What about fruit juice concentrate as a sweetener?  BAD news:  It tastes a bit better than agave but is also free fructose; and you are far better off healthwise if you never eat any!

c) Artificial sweeteners.  Sugar has calories and too much of it slams up your blood sugar causing all kinds of health problems.

What if you found chemicals that tasted sweet or sweeter even than sugar that had no calories?

Wouldn’t that allow you to eat things taste as sweet as sugar added ones without the fattening effect and without the health harm?

OUCH!  It’s complicated exactly why and how this happens but foods sweetened with artificial sweeteners are MORE effective as fatteners and produce even more diabetes and heart disease than the sugar they replace! 

Part of it is basic biology in mammals.  The effect even happens in rats!  In people it’s even worse since people who use artificial sweeteners often eat other harmful and fattening foods too AND eat more of them believing they are protected by the sugar that they didn’t eat.

On top of that, the Center for Science in the Public Interest lists all the most used artificial sweeteners as mildly carcinogenic.

But if you drink five diet soft drinks a day for 15 years, the huge multiplier factor times something mildly carcinogenic once or twice a year becomes something that looks far more likely to be a significant risk factor for cancer. (5 X 365 X 15 = 27,375)

Many people still think the sugar substitutes listed above are safe and effective health aids. 

That’s NOT true!

Conclusion:  So, eat real whole fresh fruit, small amounts of real sugar on occasion, and eliminate all these other sweeteners if you want to keep good health. 

2.  Whole wheat.  

This one is slightly more complicated and is even more harmful due to how many people used to believe it and because some health professionals who by now should know better still believe it.

Real whole wheat does have more B complex vitamins than white, refined grain wheat.  And, it does have more fiber.

And, it’s quite true that fiber and B complex vitamins in your food are good for you.

So intuitively it looks like whole wheat should be good for you.

B complex vitamins from supplements or from egg yolks or liver from animals fed only their natural foods from unpolluted sources are not just good for you, they are vital to good health.

And, enough fiber helps you feel full and helps you digest your food and eliminate the rest with no extra problems.

That means that if whole wheat is bad for you – and it’s extremely harmful – something else must be going on.

There most certainly is!  Here’s the long list!

a)  Most foods labeled as whole wheat aren’t. 

They contain a bit of it to avoid being totally false labeled; but most of the flour is brown color added refined grain white flour which does NOT have the extra fiber and B complex vitamins.

b) Slamming your blood sugar too high when you eat a food is both fattening and tends to cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  That’s why limiting even real sugar so strongly is so important to staying lean and in good health.

Even real whole wheat, just like refined grain wheat, does this fifty percent MORE than sugar!

How often is safe to eat that kind of food?  If you eat the 2 to 5 % of your calories as sugar already, the right answer is never or once or twice a year at best.

c)  But the wheat and whole wheat in stores isn’t the same wheat people ate in biblical times.

So eating it today is even more harmful still!

Hybrid wheat was developed many years ago.  The idea was that wheat was then thought to be a safe, staple food to eat; but people were going hungry because there wasn’t enough food.  So the hybrid wheat they developed would grow remarkably more wheat per acre.  And that did allow enough wheat to be grown to feed more people less expensively.

Did they think to monitor the hybrid wheat for harmful health effects at that time?  Nope.

The problem now is that all this wheat people think is safe to eat is hybrid wheat today. AND, hybrid wheat has a new component that causes allergies to wheat in some people and worse, severe allergic reactions to gluten in some people.

Gluten allergies produce all kinds of nasty but hard to diagnose symptoms if you don’t know where they are coming from.  And, as a result, thousands of people feel like hell and don’t know why because they have been eating hybrid wheat in large amounts.

If you know that, it’s easy to avoid the problem, stop considering ANY food that contains wheat a food.  At best, it’s a semifood that is only safe to eat a few times a year at most.

d)  Over 90 % of the wheat in stores today was grown using GMO seeds.  You’ve almost certainly eaten some and are reading this, so GMO wheat is clearly not as toxic as cyanide. 

Is GMO food of any kind safe to eat longer than 6 months in terms of its long term effect on your health?  If you have or plan to have children and grandchildren and descendants beyond that, will they be able to have kids and if so, will they be healthy?

The studies done on this that I’ve seen reports on say no it isn’t safe in both of these two ways.

In the rest of the world GMO foods are banned or at least it’s mandatory to label them.

In the United States, the people who make money by using or making the chemicals for GMO foods are working very hard and spending some of that money on lobbying in an effort to keep you from knowing if anything you eat has GMO ingredients.

My hope is that their DARK act will be killed in the US Senate and that effort will fail.

But whether or not the DARK act passes, there is a SURE way to avoid GMO wheat, as harmful a food as wheat is, you can do that by no longer eating ANY wheat.  And regardless of GMO issues your health will be better because you did so.

Start of Part II

e)  With that lead-up, can you imagine there is yet another reason to never eat wheat or eat it very rarely because of its negative health effects?

Unfortunately there is! 

And, it’s an important reason because the effects include helping to cause heart disease, most cancers, and likely Alzheimer’s disease and autoimmune diseases too.

In Part I we wrote.

Slamming your blood sugar too high when you eat a food is both fattening and tends to cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  That’s why limiting even real sugar so strongly is so important to staying lean and in good health.

Even real whole wheat, just like refined grain wheat, does this fifty percent MORE than sugar!

The higher levels of blood sugar and the higher average level this leads to cause serious diseases TWO ways.  

* The extra sugars get stuck on to your blood cells and make them like spikes that tear up the inner surface of your blood vessels including the capillaries.

* The extra sugars also interact with your LDL cholesterol and make it split up into tiny pieces that are so small they begin to line the inside of the surface of your blood vessels and gradually reduce circulation and make any clots traveling by get stuck and STOP blood flow resulting in a heart attack or an ischemic stroke. 

This is reflected in low HDL levels and very high triglyceride levels and increased LDL levels.

So the extra blood sugar surge from eating wheat is scary harmful because it tends to do these two things.

Can you imagine there is yet another reason to never eat wheat or eat it very rarely because of its negative health effects?

The oil in the wheat is very high in omega 6 oil. 

Unfortunately humans evolved in conditions where the foods provided them with about an equal amount of omega 3 oils from fish or tree nuts or fats in animals fed only their natural foods and some omega 6 oils.

The result was a balance of omega 3 and omega 6 oils.

But as described in the book Anticancer: A New Way Of Life  by David Servan-Schreiber MD,

when you eat lots of wheat and other grains and fat from animals fed corn and soy both also high in omega 6 instead of their natural foods, you wind up with less omega 3 oils and LOTS more omega 6 oils.

You quite literally wind up with ten to twenty times too much omega 6 oils in the ratio between them instead of one to one.

But there’s more.  That condition is EXTREMELY HARMFUL if it goes on very long.

The problem is that while inflammation is useful when you first get an injury or minor injury it’s only safe if it stays below a certain level AND if it goes away when its healing purpose of calling in the repair team is done.

When your omega 3 oils and omega 6 oils are balanced, that’s what happens.

There is enough pro-inflammatory omega 6 the inflammation and warning happens.  Then when that’s done enough there is enough anti-inflammatory omega 3 to turn it back off again to a normal setting with no inflammation.

But people who don’t get much omega 3 and eat wheat, even real whole wheat, as a staple – several servings a day food, have something much worse happen.

Their inflammation is high and too high all the time!   (The doctors measure this with something called HSCRP, high sensitivity C- reactive protein.  When that measure is above 3.0 or 5.0 and never 1.0 or less, that’s what it reads – high inflammation all the time!)

Is a high HSCRP level of inflammation like that safe?  No. Not if it’s always that high!

Do we know what high chronic inflammation tends to cause that is unsafe and undesirable to have?  Yes.

Unfortunately we do --from the painful to the deadly and very expensive to treat -- after people get them:

Many cancers, osteoarthritis, heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer’s disease.

So is whole wheat a health supporting food?  No.  Those conditions are what people in good health AVOID getting!

Note that the ratio is key. 

This means that besides never eating wheat -- or corn or soy fed animals -- and hardly ever eating other grains, you can also BOOST how much omega 3 you get.

You can take omega 3 supplements  and the most effective omega 3, DHA, as a supplement and eat wild caught fish low in mercury but high in omega 3 oils to get more omega 3 oils.

3.  There is also a plant based omega 3 that is in walnuts and a European salad green, purslane and flaxseed oil and some other foods.  For vegetarians those can be good foods to eat.

The plant based omega 3 is also in canola oil. 

So some people thought canola oil might be a health supporting food.

As a result, canola oil is used in many foods instead of soy or corn oil.

Much to my shock, Whole Foods still uses canola oil heavily in many of its deli and canned foods.

But the data show canola oil is nearly as high in pro-inflammatory omega 6 oil as soy and corn oil are.

Worse, to process the rape seed oil bitterness out to make canola oil, the oil is heated enough to harm the omega 3 oil and make it more harmful than health supporting AND turn some of canola oil’s omega 6 oils into the very harmful trans fats.

And, over 90% of canola is from GMO plants.

You don’t have to do without oil because the neutral monosaturated omega 9 oil that extra virgin olive is mostly made of IS  MUCH safer to eat in moderation. 

In fact monosaturated oils and the micronutrients in extra virgin olive oil are health PROTECTIVE!

But canola oil is so much cheaper than extra virgin olive oil, as long as people don’t know to avoid canola oil, food companies will still use it.

True some canola oil is likely less harmful than lots of corn or soy oil.

But using less oil and adding only extra virgin olive oil yourself is far better for you.

Conclusion:

1.  Eat whole fresh fruit and small and occasionally eat real sugar. 

Avoid ALL other sweeteners.  They turn out to be NOT safe or even health protective and they are MORE fattening!

(Stevia may be one exception; but it tends to have a bitter taste.)

2.  Never eat ANY wheat, whole or refined.  And eat very few other grains.

3.  Avoid almost all oils except extra virgin olive oil.  For sure eat no corn, saffola, soy, or canola oil. 

(Organic coconut oil and butterfat from animals fed only their natural foods may be safe in moderation.)