What is The Most Toxic Food?
It is a popular point of view amongst the supporters of healthy eating that meat is very unhealthy. Unfortunately, meat is not the worst type of food nowadays.
The most dangerous foods are the ones that do not exist in nature and have artificial ingredients (chemicals) in them.
If we stop by a supermarket, we will discover that 90% of food represented there, contain some chemical ingredients or 100% consist of them.
To illustrate the above for the purpose of my research, I picked one of my daughter’s and my favourites from the shelf at a local supermarket – an ice-cream. According to the statistics, it is also one of the most popular daily buys by an average family in the UK.
Ms Molly’s Vanilla Ice Cream
£0.92 for 2 litres
Ingredients:
Reconstituted Skimmed Milk Concentrate, Partially Reconstituted Whey Powder (Milk), Glucose Syrup, Sugar, Dextrose, Palm Stearin, Palm Oil, Palm Kernel Oil, Emulsifier (Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids), Stabilisers (Guar Gum, Sodium Alginate), Flavouring, Colours (Carotenes).
Magnum Almond Ice-Cream 4x100ml
£3.20
Ingredients:
reconstituted skimmed MILK, sugar, cocoa butter¹, water, ALMONDS, coconut oil, skimmed MILK powder, glucose syrup, BUTTEROIL, glucose-fructose syrup, whey solids (MILK), cocoa mass¹, emulsifiers (E471, E442, E476), exhausted vanilla bean pieces, stabilisers (E410, E412, E407), natural vanilla flavouring¹ (with MILK), flavouring, colour (E160a). May contain: other nuts. Gluten Free. ¹Rainforest Alliance Certified™
The above examples demonstrate how wide-spread chemical additives are present in the food industry and how profoundly they have entered our life.
The ingredients that you do not recognise in the food that you buy are most likely to be chemicals.
Some 40 years ago those ingredients did not exist as food technologies were completely different. Food had straightforward ingredients, such as meat, milk, eggs, flour, etc and was processed in a straightforward way: boiling, frying , mixed or packaged. Then the food was delivered to a shop and sold to a consumer.
With globalisation, when it became essential to increase shelf life of a product and the geography of distribution, the food was complimented with the ingredients that stopped antibacterial activity. Naturally, the word “antibiotics” is not used by the food industry. Instead, the industry came up with the term of “preservatives”. However, these substances serve the same purpose of suppressing the growth of microflora.
As we know, chemical industry invented substances that improve products’s appearance, its flavour, smell, texture, colour, thickness, etc. It has a long list of substances that allow to manipulate the food’s ingredients in any possible way. In other words, the chemical and food industries were merged.
These days, foods are processed with a wide range of synthetic components added to them. For an average consumer, it is often hard to get his or her head around those substances. Food technologies made a revolutionary change in our eating habits and the requirements to food standards.
This way or another, most of us know that modern foods are toxic. Yet, we buy and eat them, because the choice is limited.
It is not an open subject for discussion as it is uncomfortable to admit the fact that the food that we enjoy so much every day, is mostly toxic. Such topics are often hastily declared to be one of those conspiracy theories that most people are too busy to have an interest in. However, most of us do not realise HOW MUCH toxic our foods are and the health consequences that they inevitably have on us.
Modern science, financed predominantly by major pharmaceutical companies who are the ones defining the way that conventional medicine operates, often puts the significance of nutrition far behind the importance of pharmaceutical means. These means are provided through the investments by the major pharmaceutical companies into the research and development in treatment of a disease.
The underlying reasons are fairly straight forward: absolutely all medications that exist today, are a synthetic equivalent of natural properties of a plant or a combination of plants. So, why not manufacture medications based on natural extracts of those plants instead of splashing hundreds of thousands or millions on synthetic formulas of the same thing? Because of the financial incentives behind it.
A patent cannot be granted for medications that have natural ingredients in their formulae and, therefore, exclusivity on manufacturing of such products cannot be achieved. It means that such product can easily be replicated devaluating the investment in research and development affecting future profits. It is, therefore, not commercially viable to invest in naturally formulated medications or in nutrition.
Some of us may think that such situation in the modern science presents pharmaceutical companies in a very negative light making them an evil puppeteer of the world healthcare. However, they are only part of the way the entire system works.
The representatives of the pharmaceutical companies, including their main shareholders, are hostages of this very system; its representatives and their loved ones get ill from the same diseases, are prescribed with the same medications, and die from the same diseases as everyone else.
Understanding of these reasons and of the functionality of the principles of the system is fundamental for good or ill health of every individual.
Keeping it in mind, good or ill health becomes the sole responsibility of each one of us. If this understanding became achievable one day on a bigger scale, it would inevitably affect purchase behaviour of the aware consumers, subsequently resulting in less patients, i.e. sources of revenue for the conventional industries.
It is worth going back to the fact about the place that nutrition has within the frames of conventional medicine. A former patient of the conventional medicine myself, I made an effort to enquire how many academic hours are included in the curriculum of the most prestigious medical schools worldwide. As it turned out, none.
Naturally, one would think that it does not make sense to expect a qualified opinion regarding the effect of nutrition on human health. Yet, we happily rely on an authorised statement of our family doctor that “there is no scientific evidence that nutrition or holistic methods can cure a disease”. No one ever questions why there is no scientific evidence. In my opinion and through my own “whys”, the answer to it is fairly straight forward.
There is no scientific evidence since modern medical science has never invested in any research on the subject. And there is a reason why there was no investment in such a research to confirm or deny the cure properties of natural substances, including certain foods. The reason is simple and has a commercial motivation behind it.
A patent (that requires a substantial financial investment) and, therefore, the monopoly on sales to the public cannot be obtained on natural substances. The formulae has to be developed in a pharmaceutical lab and be unique in order for a pharmaceutical company to be the monopolist (the only patent holder) in order to dictate the price.
In other words, the main claim against the effectiveness of the natural substances by the conventional science that there is no scientific evidence to support their effectiveness, is not because natural substances cannot cure a disease but due to the fact that no one really did any scientific research to support it or to prove the opposite.
Sadly, the organisations that have resources for the research are privately owned pharmaceutical companies who have responsibility towards their shareholders to make a profit. Unfortunately, if it was going to be proved scientifically, for instance, that 25g-75g of intravenous Vitamin C once a week for 4-6 months, combined with a certain diet regimen, cures a vast range of malignancies, with hardly any side effects, it would pose a financial threat to the chemo therapy industry. So, it is not in the financial interests of the pharmaceutical companies to let the research happen.
Now, there is a more important question, who to trust and what to do to ensure that we minimise our exposure to the financial interests of the system’s representatives, to preserve and maintain good health. I see it in the willingness of doing your own research and asking the question of who is going to benefit.
Once you start asking questions, you may actually find the answers.
It gives an individual a great advantage of being in control of his or her health rather than shift the responsibility on to some doctor, a hospital and the system whose interests do not always coincide with the interests of an individual.
When I hear about a natural remedy that helped someone, I can always try it on myself and see if the claimed properties are there. Meanwhile, it is never a good idea health-wise to experiment with the synthetic pharmaceuticals.
No one can deny the effectiveness of the pharmaceutical drugs and medicine in treating acute conditions – it is brilliant. However, when it comes to the cure of a chronic disease, the picture is not so encouraging.
When food industry merged with the chemical industry in the 1950s, it unintentionally became the supplier of the patients of the chronic diseases to the conventional medical industry.
Within the last 40 years, deaths from cancer moved from the thirtieths positions to the second positions. Deaths from heart disease are still at the top of the list, but cancer can soon lead the charts, given that the numbers of cancer patients are growing at a very high rate from year to year.
When we get ill and seek medical help, our doctor is never interested in our eating habits. The doctor usually asks us to describe the symptoms and prescribes medications that would suppress the symptoms, in most cases temporarily. When I asked my ontologist what I could and could not eat, given my diagnosis, his answer was that I was allowed to eat anything I liked. “Even ice-cream?”, I asked as it was one of my favourites, the doctor laughed and said: “As much as you like!” I have to mention that my oncologist was one of the leading UK specialists in his field and one of the most experienced MDs that a patient could wish for.
It was months later when I read one of the “must-read” books about the importance of nutrition The China Study by Colin Campbell, and discovered that milk and dairy products, especially if they are commercially produced, are the leading culprits of breast cancer and must be avoided.
Commercially manufactured food and the level of chemically created substances that it contains, became a norm. Most of the consumers prefer not to think about the accumulated damaging effect of those substances, following “enjoy while you can” principle. “Tastes good” and “affordable” reasons prevail and define the food choices.
Food industry invests a lot of money in getting us addicted to their foods and is very successful in it. Each of us, even those who try to eat healthy, can say that they would find it very difficult to exclude certain foods from their diet, as it will take away some of their little pleasures of everyday life.
The cult of food has been promoted through centuries. It has defined traditional cultures as we know them today.
Nobody in nature eats for pleasure or comfort. In nature, animals eat for the only reason: when they are hungry, full stop. Let’s see what makes us food junkies after all.
Since childhood, a child is encouraged by candies, sweets and chocolates for being a good girl, a good boy.
A child receives kind words of encouragement, such as “Well-done”, “Good boy!” , “Good girl!”, as a recognition of achieving something. A sweetie is associated with mummy’s love. As a result, a person acquires a strong subconscious link between a sweet taste and positive emotions, love and acceptance by the people around him or her. In adult life, it is much harder to achieve positive attention from other people. So, a person often craves for sugary foods when he or she is in need for pleasant feelings and the feelings familiar from childhood.
If you use certain foods as a comfort tool and would like to stop doing so, you may want to watch my video where I describe my own former comfort foods and how I managed to come off my unhealthy comfort food habits and replaced them with the healthy ones.
