Today much of the food we eat is nothing like what our ancestors ate, which basically means we are not eating what we are genetically programmed to. A healthy natural diet comes from eating predominantly fresh meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds together with clean water. However hundreds of millions of people all over the world buy convenience, packaged food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases. They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to their health and the massive profits made by the people selling it. Its time people woke up and started to understand what the food they are eating is really made of and how it’s affecting their health. As the old saying goes: “You are what you eat”.
Why is food important?
When you understand that within a year practically every one of your 100 trillion cells will be renewed the importance of what we eat becomes apparent. That’s right, more than 98% of all your cells inclusive your organs, muscles, teeth etc are changed every year. Every month you received new skin and cell membranes. Every 3 months you have a totally new blood supply and every 6 months every protein cell in your muscles is renewed. Out with the old and in with the new. There is no getting away from the fact – You are what you eat. Therefore what part of your body would you like to trade for your next Big Mac, your little finger or big toe perhaps?
Now open your refrigerator, your freezer, your kitchen cupboards, and look at the labels on your food. How many of the foods are fresh and natural? How many come in packages or cans with long shelf life’s? How many have ingredients that you don’t understand? The initial purchase of a food item may be driven by its packaging or appearance, but subsequent purchases are determined mainly by its taste. It is estimated that up to 90% of the money that we spend on food is used to buy processed food. But the canning, freezing and dehydrating techniques used to process food destroy much of its flavour. To make processed foods palatable food manufacturers add dangerous chemicals. Since the end of the Second World War, a vast chemical industry has arisen to make processed food palatable.
You may be thinking, “I don’t eat that many food additives,” but I have news for you. The government doesn’t require food additives that they believe are safe to be put on an ingredients label. Instead, all that is required are the words “artificial flavour” or “artificial colouring” or “natural”. The fact is, in the western world the average person eats approximately his/her body weight in food additives each year, or approximately 75kg per year. Even worse, there is no independent body to test whether these ingredients are safe – the food manufacturers are allowed to provide their own evidence to support their safety claims. Think about that for a moment. Having the chemical manufacturers provide their own research showing a given chemical is safe is like asking a cigarette manufacturer do their own research showing cigarettes are safe! The fact of the matter is food additive manufacturers, like drug manufacturers, are running the largest study ever run in the history of the human race – and you are the guinea pigs!
The history of the food flavour industry
The flavour industry emerged in the mid-1800s, as processed foods began to be manufactured on a large scale. Recognising the need for flavour additives, the early food processors turned to perfume companies that had years of experience working with essential oils and volatile aromas. The great perfume houses of England, France and the Netherlands produced many of the first flavour compounds. In the early part of the 20th century, Germany’s powerful chemical industry assumed the lead in flavour production. Legend has it that a German scientist discovered methyl anthranilate, one of the first artificial flavours, by accident while mixing chemicals in his laboratory. Suddenly, the lab was filled with the sweet smell of grapes. Methyl anthranilate later became the chief flavouring compound of grape “foods and drinks”.
After the second world war, much of the perfume and flavour industry shifted from Europe to the US, settling in New York. Man-made flavour additives were used mainly in baked goods, sweets and soft drinks until the 1950s, when sales of processed food began to soar. The invention of gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers – machines capable of detecting volatile gases at low levels – vastly increased the number of flavours that could be synthesised. The flavour industry now has annual revenues of about $1.4bn. Thousands new processed food products are introduced every year all over the world. Almost all of them require chemicals to give them a long shelf life, make them look like and taste like real food.
The secrets behind the industry that’s flavouring your food
The flavour industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies will not divulge the precise formulas of flavour compounds or the identities of clients. The secrecy is deemed essential for protecting the reputation of beloved brands. The food manufacturers, understandably, would like the public to believe that the flavours of their food somehow originate in their kitchens or from the food itself, not in distant factories run by other firms. However, the truth is, the flavour in your favourite convenience food was made in a lab by people who despite the fact they are clever scientists have no regard for your health. If you open the glass bottles in their labs and you can smell every food imaginable. Fresh cherries, black olives, onions, grilled hamburger etc.
International Flavours and Fragrances (IFF) is the world’s largest flavour company. Its snack and savoury lab is responsible for the flavour of crisps, corn chips, breads, crackers, breakfast cereals and pet food. The confectionery lab devises the flavour for ice cream, biscuits, sweets, toothpastes, mouthwashes and antacids. It comes up with the flavour for popular soft drinks, sport drinks, bottled teas and wine coolers, for all-natural juice drinks, organic soy drinks, beers and malt liquors. IFF also, manufacturers the chemicals responsible for the smell of six of the 10 bestselling perfumes in the US, including including Estée Lauder’s Beautiful, Clinique’s Happy, Lancome’s Trésor and Calvin Klein’s Eternity. It also makes the smell of household products such as deodorant, dishwashing detergent, bath soap, shampoo, furniture polish and floor wax. All of these taists and smells are made through the same basic process: the manipulation of volatile chemicals. The basic science behind the scent of your shaving cream is the same as that governing the flavour of your TV dinner or packaged ham sandwich. Scary isn’t it?
Today’s sophisticated spectrometers, gas chromatographs and headspace vapour analysers provide a detailed map of a food’s flavour components, detecting chemical aromas in amounts as low as one part per billion. The human nose, however, is still more sensitive than any machine yet invented. A nose can detect aromas present in quantities of a few parts per trillion. Complex aromas, such as those of coffee or roasted meat, may be composed of volatile gases from nearly a thousand different chemicals. The flavour additive usually comes last, or second to last, in a processed food’s list of ingredients. As a result, the flavour of a processed food often costs less than its packaging; buts effect on your long term health is devastating.
How do you get packaged food to look so appetising?
Studies have found that the colour of a food can greatly affect how its taste is perceived. Brightly coloured foods frequently seem to taste better than bland-looking foods, even when the flavour compounds are identical. Foods that somehow look off-colour often seem to have off tastes. For thousands of years human beings have relied on visual cues to help determine what is edible. The colour of fruit suggests whether it is ripe, the colour of meat whether it is rancid. Flavour researchers sometimes use coloured lights to modify the influence of visual cues during taste tests. During one experiment in the early 70s people were served an oddly tinted meal of steak and French fries that appeared normal beneath coloured lights. Everyone thought the meal tasted fine until the lighting was changed. Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill. This is the reason by you see so many E numbers, dyes and artificial colours in today’s food. All added to give what’s essentially dead food a life like appearance.
What about the mouthfeel?
In order to give a processed food the proper taste, a flavourist must always consider the food’s “mouth feel” – the unique combination of textures and chemical interactions that affects how the flavour is perceived. The mouth feel can be adjusted through the use of various fats, gums, starches, emulsifiers and stabilisers. Again more unnatural ingredients!
“Just Can’t Eat One” Syndrome
Have you ever wondered why when you open a bag of chips, a box of cookies or bar of chocolate you can’t stop eating until you’ve finished the packet? Well you most likely fell prey to one of the chemical tricks food manufacturers are playing on your body and your wallet! This is because food scientists have determined how to manipulate the part of your brain that controls food cravings called the appestat. The appestat a part of the pituitary gland in your brain monitors the blood for 51 nutrients that must be present at their proper levels for you to feel entirely full and satisfied. If any one nutrient is missing you will still feel hungry. These “clever” scientists have found that by adding or subtracting some of these nutrients, they can manipulate your sense of hunger and satiety. While the research is still incomplete, it’s believed that that adding excess fat, sugar and salt to a food tends to make people over eat. This is why both sugar and salt show up in some of the strangest places. For example, would you have expected to find sugar in sandwich meats or even cigarettes?
It is important to remember that the body’s hunger mechanism is affected by the presence of all nutrients, not just calories. Caloric intake is only one part of good nutrition. Dieters are especially prone to this mistake you need to count a lot more than calories, you need to supply your body with all its essential nutrients. If you eat foods filled with empty calories and devoid of nutrients you rob your body of the nutrients its store. Why, because the digestion and assimilation of food uses up nutrients and these need to be replaced from the food we eat. That’s one of the reasons why fat people, who eat poor quality food are often literally starving, because there body is lacking vital nutrients. Cravings – unusual desires for certain kinds of foods can often be a signal of nutrient deficiency.
Does this scenario sound familiar?. You are sitting down in front of the TV with a bag of chips and a can of cola. You start putting the chips in your mouth. Its salty flavour makes you want more, and before you know it half the packets been eaten. Meanwhile your body is getting hit by the old one two: lots of sugar to digest and no nutrients in the food to digest them. Your body then starts robbing its own stores of nutrients to help digest this lovely processed food. As nutrient content of your blood decreases, your appetite increases and your body starts screaming food, food, food. But you are not giving it food are you just eating more and more chips.
The salt in the chips makes you thirsty so you take a swig of your cola. Bang an even bigger sugar rush and again no nutrients to digest the food. You now have an overload of sugar, causing your pancreas to produce insulin to store this excess sugar in your liver. Thus causes a fall in your blood sugar level.
The result being threefold, firstly despite the fact you have consumed a massive amount of calories your appestat isn’t getting the 51 nutrients it requires to tell your brain you are satisfied, secondly your low blood sugar tells your brain you need more sugar immediately and lastly your body’s nutrients stores have been depleted trying to digest this poison.
So what now food, food and more food and as you are starving your self control is zero! More cola, more chips, may be some cookies and definitely some chocolate. You eat and eat and eat until you feel so bloated you feel sick and tired. Despite eating all this food your body’s still starving as you have not supplied it with the nutrients it needs for good health!
We could have picked any process food as the example above. All would give the same result. Do the food manufacturers know what happens when you eat one of their products, yes of course they do. Worse still, they deliberately manipulate your body’s response to their product by manufacturing foods that are devoid of nutrients and have added sugar, salt chemicals etc to make you eat more of their poison. Why – money and its big money. If you don’t believe me then look at how the turnover and profits of these companies has grown in the last 50 years.
Profit, profit, profit!
Biochemist and food scientist, Paul Stitt who spent years with giant corporations, reveals in his book “Beating the food giants” how the food manufacturers maximise there profits. When working for Quaker his team was asked to design a nutritional breakfast bar. This they found easy, in fact they were so filling and satisfying, an adult could only eat one at a meal. This meant a box of these bars might last a family a week. That would be bad for sales. Quaker immediately dropped this project as people would not buy enough of the product to maintain a high profit margin. They wanted a cheap product with phenomenal sales!
Furthermore as we have already discussed above, many of the foods you eat today have been processed and sugar added, processed and salt added, chemically flavoured, colour dyed etc in order to make it taste nice. But why do the food manufacturers go to so much trouble? Profit. You see with most of food value removed (you are virtually eating dead food) and dozens of preservatives added, processed foods last practically forever. A long shelf life and the profits it brings is one of the food industry’s priority’s, its certainly much more important to them than your health. If you don’t believe me then go and look at the food you have in the house, much of it has a shelf life of over a year, sometimes even two years. Although there are a few exceptions such as dried fruit, spices etc, how can food be healthy for you or even alive if it sits in a box or plastic package for over a year before you eat it! The reason some foods have a long “shelf life” is that they cannot support even the life of a microbe? They are essentially dead and devoid of nutrients. Stitt’s backs up this by experiments with rats that showed, rats fed nothing live longer than those fed the puffed wheat contents of the breakfast box! As a general rule the longer the shelf life the worse a food is for you!
Diet Cola makes you over eat and fat!
Have you ever noticed how the people drinking the most diet drinks are often the fattest. Why this contradiction, because if diet drinks worked then we would all have a six pack?
Furthermore there is not one long term scientific study on Diet drinks (based on artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, NutraSweet etc) that have shown that they help people loose weight? In fact the opposite is true. As soon as your tongue tastes something sweet, your body converts blood glucose into fat, causing you blood glucose to drop. If the “sweet” food contains no carbohydrate or sugar then you will experience hypoglycaemia and get a strong craving for food. The result being you eat everything in sight whether it’s healthy for you or not. The artificial sweetener in the diet drinks tricks the body into thinking its getting something sweet and when the sugar doesn’t arrive its party time, causing you to pig out on everything in sight!
Non foods – much of what you are eating is essentially dead?
International health expert Paul Chek explains that what you see in most shopping carts today are “non-foods”. A non-food is, “Any food that costs more in nutrition to digest, absorb and eliminate than it delivers to your body.” Most people forget that there is a cost to metabolize anything you put in your mouth. Literally every cell in the body needs proper nutrition or it will die. There are billions of cells involved in the processes of digestion, absorption and elimination of foods, not including the nutritional demands of human movement. Approximately 90% of all the money spent on food is used to buy processed and fast foods. So where does that leave your health?
Chek points out, “you don’t need to be a doctor, nutritionist or research scientist to figure out what’s going on. We can use a simple accounting analogy to get a clear image of the blunder we have purchased our way into. Consider your body as a business. It costs money to run a business – you must purchase goods and services such as supplies, electricity, water, waste disposal and you must pay your workers. If your business doesn’t bring in enough money to pay your expenses, including adequate money for you to make a living, the business will go bankrupt! Your body is just like any business. You have about 100 trillion cells, all of which are like little employees working for you around the clock. To keep your body running, it too needs water, air, energy and supplies in the form of nutrition. The business of running a body is also a little tricky because while you may have an unproductive employee now and then in a business, you can always lay them off or fire them. In your body, you can’t lay your cells off, you can’t fire them, and if you don’t supply them with adequate nutrition to repair them selves, they get sick and start to die. If this goes on long enough, you too will go bankrupt and you will die!”
Tips to stop your body turning into a chemical experiment:
• If you ancestors didn’t eat it 10,000 years ago then neither should you.
• Longer the shelf life the worse it is for you
• If you don’t understand a word on the label then don’t eat that food
• If what you’re eating’s not meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds it’s probably a non food – don’t eat it!
• Avoid eating anything that has been genetically modified or genetically engineered!
• Never eat anything with “hydrogenated” fats” in it – it contains the unnatural deadly trans fats
• The more money companies spend to market any food, the worse it is likely to be for you! Good healthy food requires little marketing because people know it’s healthy. That’s why you never see healthy foods such as fresh fruit and vegetables advertised on TV
• Follow the 80:20 Rule. If 80% of what you are eating is what Mother Nature designed you to eat. Then there is 20% left for fun!
Conclusion
What people eat (or don’t eat) has always been determined by a complex interplay of social, economic, technological, and ever increasingly since the invention of television large marketing campaigns. The power of advertising can be seen by the fact that In Australia where the number of fast food restaurants has tripled in the 1990’s, a survey found that half the nation’s 9 and 10 year olds thought that Ronald McDonald knew what kids should eat!
During a relatively brief period of time, the fast and processed food industry has helped transform not only our diet, but also the landscape, economy, workforce and popular culture. However not a single scientific study has been done to determine how these chemically enhanced “foods” affect the health of humans of even whether they are safe to eat. Processed foods are foods that have been artificially changed – they are unnatural non-foods. They are terrible things for you to eat for three reasons, firstly they contain no nutritional value and as a result deplete your body’s vital nutrients, secondly they are often poisoned with sugar and harmful chemical additives, that are dangerous for your health and lastly they often are designed to make you over eat.
People need to realize that a lifetime of careless eating habits cannot be cured by any doctor’s prescription. Or by a “magic pill”. There are real health consequences to what you are or are not putting in your mouth. The best way to preserve your health is to make a clean break. Go through your cupboards and refrigerator, throwing away everything containing sugar, white flour, products with ingredients you don’t understand and artificial additives. And replace this with fresh meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds together with clean water. Follow the 80:20 rule of 80% healthy and 20% left for enjoying that special treat and you will be well on your way to better health and fitting your favourite jeans.
Next listen to your body and the signals it sends you. What foods give you energy and make you feel satisfied for hours? What foods make you hungry and sleepy? How much should you eat at each meaI? Do you need to snack between meals? Try to modify your diet to maximize the things that make you feel good and avoid the things that give you trouble. Your craving will soon disappear, your instincts will tell you what and how much you need and your body will develop the optimal diet for you!
Fast food may give you the perception of being cheap, and value for money, but it’s not! Eating healthy organic food is actually cheaper than living on fast food – why? Firstly organic food contains many more vitamins and minerals etc than “normal food”, so you need less of it to get the nutrients your body needs. This has the added benefit of satisfying your hunger faster. As a positive side effect if you have to eat less food and therefore less calories to be full then you are less likely to put on weight! Secondly there are the health benefits of eating healthily. How much is avoiding, diabetes, cancer or heart disease worth to you. Lets look at that another way, how much would you pay to have more energy, sleep better at night and look younger in the mirror! You can achieve all of this and more by eating the majority of the time organic meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds washed down by fresh water. The choice is yours?
References:
1. Chek, P. “You are what you eat Audio seris” A C.H.E.K Institute Publication, 2004.
2. Chek, P. “Eat move and Be healthy” A C.H.E.K Institute Publication, 2004.
3. Schiosser E. “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal”. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
4. Stitt, P. “Beating the Food Giants”. Natural Press; 1993.
5. Chek, P. “Under the Veil of Deception”. A C.H.E.K Institute Publication, 2002.
6. Price, Weston. “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration“. Price-Pottenger Foundation, 1945
7. Fallon S and Enig M. “Nourishing Traditions.” 2nd ed. Washington DC: New Trends Publishing, 1999.
8. Simontacchi C. “The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children”
