Cheerios, Raisin Bran, and Corflakes the Breakfast of Heart Disease and Diabetes PART 1

Today I was asked the question, “why do you think America is so unhealthy?” The answer is crystal clear to me, we currently eat a diet that is not congruent with our genetic blueprint. We don’t move as much as we were genetically designed to move. And finally our emotional, social, and stress patterns are totally different than we were designed. How did this happen? I’m appalled at the current marketing that takes place when it comes to “healthy” food. The food industry has developed over 100,000 new processed foods since 1990. Understand the implications of the fact that fully a quarter of these foods are "nutritionally enhanced" products that can claim endorsements of health by virtue of being low-fat or cholesterol-free or higher in calcium. Try to comprehend the scale of this: food companies spend $33 billion a year in advertising. What they put their money on is the lowest cost, highest priced items-the unmitigated junk-that they can now market as "heart-healthy" since they're all sugar and no fat. Pepsico alone spends over a billion dollars a year pushing sugar and hydrogenated vegetable oils on the US American public, including children. When I ask my patients if cornflakes, cheerio’s, and raisin bran are healthy foods I get a resounding yes from 90% of them. Then they proceed to tell me about how cornflakes, cheerio’s, and raisin bran are low in fat and good for their cholesterol and then I beat them with a stick until they learn that what they have been lead to believe is wrong. This is totally absurd but we can thank our government for giving us the holy food pyramid that promotes a diet that is literally deadly (which is verified by data: currently 7 out of 10 deaths are caused by a chronic preventable disease). The USDA currently states that we should be eating a diet that is 60% carbohydrate. This is the equivalent of two full cups of sugar and if your body didn’t have a way to deal with all of this sugar you would literally be in a coma or dead. Luckily your body has a mechanism to deal with all of the sugar that we get from our low fat high carbohydrate diet. Elevated sugar levels stimulate the pancreas to produce a hormone called insulin. When most people hear the word insulin they think of diabetes. Well if you didn’t have insulin you would also be dead. Insulin is anabolic, meaning it is very important in nutrient storage. It not only stores sugar but it gets amino acids and fats out of the blood and into your cells. For a species that could not always guarantee a steady food supply this ability to store sugar, fat, and amino acids determined our survival. The problem lies in the fact that we live in a world with excess calories and reduced calorie expenditure. Hence we have a lot of sugar, fats, and amino acids floating around that need to be stored. Where do they get stored? Some get stored in the muscles and liver as glycogen, but the reality is that we fill those stores up very quickly. In fact all of the glycogen stored in your liver and muscles isn’t enough to last you one full active day. So how and where do the rest of the sugars, fats, and amino acids get stored? FIND OUT IN PART 2