Food Quality

Our food has changed tremendously over time.  Food quality is hard to find.  The Standard American Diet consists of a lot of chemicals and food additives that have contributed to the rise in chronic diseases.  Our bodies have the unbelievable capacity to heal itself when it is under the proper conditions.  Those conditions require a body to not be overly burdened by toxins.  The diet that most American’s consume is highly inflammatory, chemical laden, and devoid of many of the nutrients required to nourish a healthy body.   If you are unsure of where to start on the path to healing or to losing weight starting with your food is essential.  Food quality first.  I tried to outwork a bad diet and failed miserably.  I am a recovered carb addict.  I no longer crave sweets and bread like I used to.  I have beaten food addiction which I didn’t know that I had until I had beat it.  Most people don’t realize that they have a food addiction.  But if you are consuming something that you know that you shouldn’t but can’t control yourself you have a food addiction.  I don’t know if it was the fact that I have changed my microbiome or the fact that I have trained myself to listen to my body and I have learned how certain foods make me feel and perform.  But whatever it was I have been given the gift of food freedom.  The gift of not being controlled by cravings or obsessing over food.  I know what foods nourish my body and give me energy to live a full life.  The main things that I changed were eliminating ultra processed foods, eliminating gluten, switching to organic, and cutting out industrial seed oils.  Making these changes has not only transformed my body, but also my mental health and energy.  My husband and I feel so good after making these changes that we feel that we need to tell people so they can feel the same way.  The solution is simple but not easy.  The New York Post shared an article saying how a California lawmaker is proposing a ban on certain foods. These include Skittles, Sour Patch Kids, jelly beans, and Campbell’s soup among others.  The chemicals that they are focusing on are propylparaben, red dye 3, brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate and titanium dioxide. Many of these ingredients are already banned in the EU for detrimental health effects but have been allowed to be sold here in the US.  I hope this helps more people to wake up to the fact that there are chemicals and ingredients in our food supply that have been found to be harmful to human health.  This is not speculation.  There have been respectable studies showing the causation between certain ingredients and health outcomes such as cancer, DNA damage, and harm to various systems in the body.  My dad was diagnosed with cancer a decade ago and after his surgery I asked the internal medicine physician that was doing the hospital rounds what he thought caused my dad’s cancer since he did not have any of the risk factors.  He told me that it was probably due to the modified foods that we consume.  I had a background in nutrition and this was the first time that I really had heard someone talk about genetically modified foods.  I knew about trans fats and the problems that they were causing but not about GMO’s.  This led me down the rabbit hole of the food industry.  I discovered that my generation was essentially the guinea pigs for this new type of food technology.  We slowly started transitioning to eating organic.  That combined with eating more whole foods resulted in weight loss for me and my husband and a complete reversal of health ailments that we had been dealing with.  My husband has had chronic migraines, acid reflux, insomnia, and had pre-diabetes. He also suffered from daily allergies.  All those conditions went away.  I was diagnosed with moderate acid reflux, had allergies, and had issues regulating my blood sugar if I didn’t eat frequently.  All our conditions have disappeared, and we are healthier now at over 40 then we were in our mid-twenties to thirties.  My husband had lost eighty pounds and I have lost 40 pounds.  The most important part is that we have been able to keep it off.