You Are What You Eat: 7 Food Additives That Are Secretly Making Us FAT

I'm here to tell you that the food industry is lying to you. There are many "safe" food additives on the market that really are NOT SAFE!! Yes, you heard me right AND I will give you a small list of them below to prove it. These food additives are literally making you sicker, robbing you of your youth, and making you gain weight!

Food additives are man-made, synthetic chemicals used to preserve foods, make them taste better, add supposed nutritional value and get this... THEY BYPASS YOUR HUNGER MECHANISM MAKING YOU CRAVE MORE AND EAT MORE FOOD! Now, let's think like the food industry for a second... If people, eat more food and increase in size, then they will crave more food and then we can sell them more food! It's a great way to make money if you really think about it. Very unethical, but brilliant. BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THIS IS HAPPENING!Look around at the American population. Do you really think that it is coincidence that 70% of the US is obese? By 2030, the Journal of Obesity is predicting that 90% of the United States will be obese.

Will You Be A Victim Too?

The sad part about this whole situation is the fact that the general public has no idea that they are being lied to. This reminds me of a quote...

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it" - Adolf Hitler

The media is using psychological marketing tactics to make you believe that foods that are "fat free" are healthy and helping you to lose weight.

Please, please, please don't trust everything that you hear. Especially from the news, commercials, TV, radio, etc. Their job is to capture your attention and sell you things. Whether it be their belief systems or weight loss pills.

Alright, sorry about all the ranting and raving. I just get so emotional about this topic because I see people everyday in my office who suffer because they have been lied to.

The Worst Ingredients On A Food Label

High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS): This is a man made sweetener that is cheaper to produce and actually sweeter than sugar. There are actually new commercials touting how healthy HFCS is. They are trying to say that it is safe and natural.

Let me ask you this: Can you squeeze corn syrup from corn? Can mom make high fructose corn syrup at home? NO! It's a lie! Remember the quote above? HFCS is anything but natural and will actually shut off your hunger mechanism allowing you to eat without feeling full which will MAKE YOU FAT!

It is associated with blood sugar problems (ATTENTION Moms: Childhood obesity, and Juvenile Diabetes is on the rise! So is ADD/ADHD. HFCS is a huge culprit!) depression, fatigue, B vitamin deficiency, indigestion and tooth decay.

HFCS is found in soda, candy, condiments, cereals, breads, etc.

Mono Sodium Glutamate (MSG): MSG is a food flavoring that is notorious in Chinese foods. It is also hidden in a variety of other foods and goes by many different names: hydrolyzed vegetable protein, hydrolyzed plant extract, plant protein extract, sodium caseinate, yeast extract, texturized protein, autolyzed yeast, hydrolyzed oat flour, natural flavorings and calcium caseinate to name a few... there are dozens more names.

MSG is the MOST addictive substance known to man and makes you want to eat more and more! It is called an excitotoxin because it excites your brain cells to the point that it actually makes them explode and die. Sound like something good to put in you and your kids bodies?

Watch out.. it is found in everything from fast food, to kids snacks, drinks, chips, etc., allergic reactions. (80% of people are shown to be allergic to MSG)

MSG causes headaches, itching, nausea, brain, nervous system, reproductive disorders, high blood pressure.

Artificial Sweeteners: Splenda (sucralose), Nutra-Sweet (aspartame), Equal (aspartame), SweetNLow (saccharin) , sorbitol, maltodextrin, dextrose, and acefulsame are all falsely representing weight loss foods. They are very toxic to your body and will bypass your hunger mechanism, causing you to crave more food. Stay away from anything labeled fat free, lite, no fat, no calories, calorie free, sugar free, reduced sugar and reduced fat. Most of these foods have been filled with artificial sweeteners. READ YOUR LABELS! Is having no calories in your "diet" drink worth the risk?

By Dr. Michael Allen  -  Fitness Instructor & Fat Loss Factor™ Founder

Weight Gain in Midlife Cuts Odds of Healthy Old Age

Women who put on weight as they approach middle age could reduce their chances of enjoying a healthy old age by up to 80 percent, according to research from the University of Warwick.

The study, published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal, suggests that women who have a high body mass index in middle age are significantly more likely to suffer from major chronic diseases such as cancer and coronary heart disease and poor quality of life.

Dr. Oscar Franco, assistant clinical professor of public health at Warwick Medical School collaborated on the paper with researchers from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

The research team found that, for every 2.2 pounds gained in weight since the age of 18, the odds of healthy survival into old age decreased by 5 percent.

They also found that women who were overweight at age 18 and continued to gain weight as they grew older were most at risk of developing a major chronic disease. Obese women had 79 percent lower odds of aging without developing a chronic disease.

The research team used the Nurses' Health Study, which has gathered data from more than 120,000 female registered nurses living in 11 states since 1976. Follow-up questionnaires have been sent out every two years to update information on disease incidence and lifestyle factors.

Study participants who had reached the age of 70 and were free of major chronic disease had no major impairment of cognitive function and no major limitation of physical function were considered as examples of "successful aging," Franco said.

"In summary, this study provides new evidence that adiposity at midlife is a strong risk factor predicting a worse probability of successful survival among older women," he said. "In addition, our data suggest that maintenance of healthy weight throughout adulthood may be vital to optimal overall health at older ages."

Source: NewsMax Health

Posted: True Health Is True Wealth

Michael Pollan's prescription to President Barack Obama — and you: ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants’

Michael Pollan visited the UBC Farm recently.

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER — He’s not as famous as his brother-in-law, actor Michael J. Fox, but Michael Pollan has a captivated audience that can change a nation. One, in particular, is Barack Obama.

Last October, Pollan wrote an open letter to Obama in The New York Times Magazine, citing how the presidential candidate could put the nation’s food system on the right track if he became president. In short order, an Obama aide phoned requesting a summary, but Pollan declined, basically saying if the story could have been shorter, it would have been. Undeterred, Obama quoted Pollan’s article at length in an interview with a reporter from Time magazine.

At the consumer level, Pollan is changing the way people eat, first with Omnivore’s Dilemma, which stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for 91 weeks. In his latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, he coined a phrase, summarizing the book’s message: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” (Perhaps Obama should have asked for a seven-word summary.) Anyway, the phrase has legs and is working its way onto T-shirts, coffee mugs and the bottom of e-mail signatures. Some Pollan fans have created a web petition, appealing to Obama to appoint Pollan as secretary of agriculture (www.thepetitionsite.com).

Pollan’s shorthand summary of the book is like a semaphore for eating whole, local, mostly vegetarian foods in lesser amounts (like the French, eat less, but more sensually). But the background history, politics, culture and science woven into the book are what makes you sit up. “Food” in his mind does not include “food-like substitutes,” the 17,000 new ones that appear on grocery shelves every year.

I had a chance to sit down with Pollan when he was in Vancouver on a speaking engagement recently. (About 700 people showed up at the University of B.C. Farm.)

“I spent two years looking at the whole question of what we really know about diet and health,” said Pollan, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., where he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Usually, the deeper you drill into questions like that, the more complicated and ambiguous things become and it’s not as simple as you thought. With this question, the opposite was true. The further I went, the simpler it got. After two years of research, I had seven words: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

That’s his prescription for health and well-being.

When Pollan talks about food, he means the kind our grandparents and great-grandparents used to eat.

“The modern way of eating leads to chronic diseases. As soon as you get away from the Western diet, you are going to be healthier.

It’s the elephant in the room that the food industry would rather not pay attention to,” he says.

In his book, he raises the irony of North American orthoexics, referring to an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

“The chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food,” he says in the book.

“The rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the super-abundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn and soy.

These changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted: lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything — except vegetables, fruits and whole grains.”

Humans, he says, have adapted to a multitude of diets around the world. The Western diet, however, is not one of them and we have higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity than people on culturally traditional diets. By the 1960s, he says, it was all but impossible to sustain our grandparents’ way of eating. Synthetics had entered the food chain, as had meats raised on grains (not pastures) and pharmaceuticals.

The thing is, the big profits are made in cheap, easy, processed food. “It’s easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or carrot.”

However, those health claims often crumble like vanilla wafers. “The low-fat campaign,” he says, was an abject failure after 30 years of linking dietary fat with heart disease and cancer and weight gain.

“It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences,” he says in his book. He points out that the human brain is about 60 per cent fat and every neuron is sheathed in a protective layer of fat.

Ironically, Americans got fat on low-fat diets because they turned to carbs to avoid fat.

There’s evidence that carbs interfere with insulin metabolism in ways that increase hunger and promote overeating and, thus, fat storage in the body.

Grandma food, the simple, unadulterated food made of vegetables, fruits and grains, can’t be broken down into reductionist science, he says.

These whole foods are a wilderness of chemical compounds and interactions that science doesn’t understand, just like the workings of our digestive system which has as many neurons as our spinal column.

“But,” he says, “you don’t need to fathom a carrot’s complexity to reap its benefits.”

Pollan is optimistic. “There’s a revolution going on and I’m very encouraged. The fastest growing segment [in the food sector] are farmers’ markets and organics. It’s important on the health level because there are no processed foods at farmers’ markets. Anything that gets people to cook more tends towards a healthier diet.”

And that, he says, is happening despite $32 billion a year spent marketing processed foods in the U.S.

BY MIA STAINSBY, VANCOUVER SUNJUNE 23, 2009

Sorry for the bad fit - full story - vancouversun.com

Click here to listen to the interview with food author Michael Pollan

Related Resources:

• In Defense of Food
• The Omnivore's Dilemma

Splenda Linked to Weight Gain

The sugar replacement Splenda has been linked to weight gain by a study conducted by North Carolina’s Duke University. In addition to weight gain, Splenda, which is used by millions of dieters and also in numerous diet versions of popular products, has also been alleged to hamper the effect of some medications.

Splenda (generic name: sucralose) is made from sugar, giving it a more “natural” appeal to consumers. However, the controversial new study, which was partially funded by the Sugar Association, showed that rats fed varying doses of Splenda over a three-month period gained more weight than a control group which was not given Splenda. Further, the researchers noted “significant reductions” in beneficial bacteria in the rats’ digestive tracts, as well as additional changes in the gut which could likely interfere with the absorption of some medicines.

A spokesman for McNeil Nutritionals, the company that markets Splenda, said, “Splenda is suitable for everyone—it’s undergone a thorough safety evaluation as required by regulatory agencies around the world. They all agree sucralose is safe.” Splenda, which is 600 times sweeter than sugar and twice as sweet as saccharin, has a 62 percent share of the low-calorie sweetener market in the U.S. and abroad.