CancerAN OLD PROVERB SAYS THAT A MAN DIGS HIS OWN GRAVE WITH HIS fork and knife. It’s absolutely true! Today in America, we are one of the most overfed and undernourished societies that ever lived.
Facing the Terrible Truth About the American Diet
Most of America’s health problems today are caused by dietary abuses. Elizabeth Frazao of the US Department of Agriculture reported poor eating habits are linked to more than half of the deaths in the United States.
Diet is a significant factor in the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD), certain types of cancer, and stroke—the three leading causes of death in the United States, and responsible for over half of all deaths . . . . Diet also plays a major role in the development of diabetes (the seventh leading cause of death), hypertension, and obesity. These six health conditions incur considerable medical expenses, lost work, disability, and premature deaths—much of it unnecessary, since a significant proportion of these conditions is believed to be preventable through improved diets.1
For starters, we’re a nation of sugar addicts. The average American consumes 11,250 pounds of sugar during his or her lifetime, which is about 150 pounds of sugar per person per year. That’s half a truckload! That means that we’re shoveling a small mountain of sugar into our bodies throughout our lifetimes.2
Processed foods are convenient and inexpensive: for example, white bread, hot dogs, bologna, and so on. However, the price you will be paying in the future does not justify the short-term convenience. We really end up robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Processed foods are another method of dietary abuse of our bodies. They generally are so manipulated to prolong shelf life that they are grossly deficient in nutrients. They usually contain food additives, sweeteners, flavorings, coloring agents, preservatives, bleaching agents, emulsifiers, texturizers, humectants, acids, alkalis, buffers, and other chemicals. As a result of ingesting processed foods, our tissues and organs must continually draw from our bodies’ stored nutrient reserves, setting us up for nutrient deficiencies. No wonder we are overfed with processed foods yet undernourished. Such foods provide loads of calories with little nutrition.
Devitalized food is another way of abusing our bodies instead of nourishing them. When foods have been grown in nutrient-poor soil, they end up looking pretty, but that’s about all. When our soil has been robbed of important minerals and nutrients, the food it produces will be nutritionally poor as well.
Hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated fats or trans fats are the most toxic of all fats and are present in most margarines, commercial peanut butters, shortening, soups, packaged foods such as cake and biscuit mixes, fast food, frozen food, baked goods, chips and crackers, breakfast foods, cookies and candy, toppings and dips, etc. These are very inflammatory fats that contribute to plaque formation in arteries. Deepfried foods—especially when fried in polyunsaturated fats—are also very toxic and inflammatory and contribute to a buildup of plaque in arteries.
Fast foods, fried foods, and eating way too much meat while denying our bodies healthful fruits and vegetables are, again, just more ways in which we abuse our bodies through our diets.
Genetically modified foods (GMOs)
The National Academy of Sciences released a report stating that genetically engineered products introduce new allergens, toxins, disruptive chemicals, and unknown protein combinations into our bodies. Pesticidal foods have been grown that are genetically engineered to produce their own pesticide. When we ingest these foods, we will also be ingesting the pesticide produced by the food. It’s too early to tell all the side effects and dangers of these foods. However, we are already seeing the allergic effects.
It’s easy to see why we’re overfed and undernourished. We gorge ourselves with increasing amounts of food to respond to our bodies’ cravings for nutrition. After we’ve eaten, our bodies, even though under a heavy burden of calories, still realize that they never received the nutrients they needed. So our brains send more signals, triggering hunger, which is interpreted by us as the need or desire for even more food. We end up spiraling down into a vicious cycle of overfeeding with empty foods, craving more nutrition and overfeeding again with even more empty processed, devitalized, sugary foods.
TWELVE FOOD ADDITIVES TO AVOID3
| Additive | Source |
| Sodium Nitrate (also called Sodium Nitrite) | Bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meats, smoked fish, corned beef |
| BHA and BHT | Cereals, chewing gum, potato chips, vegetable oils |
| Propyl Gallate | Meat products, chicken soup base, chewing gum |
| Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) | Soups, salad dressings, chips, frozen entrees, restaurant food |
| Trans Fats | Restaurant food |
| Aspartame | Diet foods, low-calorie desserts, gelatins, drink mixes, soft drinks |
| Acesulfame-K | Baked goods, chewing gum, gelatin desserts |
| Food Colorings: Blue 1, 2, Red 3, Green 3, Yellow 6 | Beverages, candy, baked goods, pet food, cherries, fruit cocktail, sausage, gelatin |
| Olestra | Potato chips |
| Potassium Bromate | White flour, breads, rolls |
| Additive | Source |
| White Sugar | Baked goods, cereals, crackers, sauces, processed foods |
| Sodium Chloride | Salt |
The end result is ever-expanding waistlines, thighs, and buttocks. We get fatter and fatter, forcing our bodies to groan under the burden of extra pounds. But in terms of actual nourishment, we give our bodies less and less.
We may be actually starving from a nutritional standpoint, while at the same time becoming grossly obese. The end result of this merciless abuse of our bodies is disease and death. Sadly, we really are digging our graves with our forks and knives!
As a result of our overindulgences we have an epidemic of heart disease, atherosclerosis, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, allergies, obesity, arthritis, osteoporosis, and a host of other painful and debilitating degenerative diseases.
Eating Too Much of the Wrong Stuff?
Many people have the mistaken notion that they can exist on junk food day by day and then take a multivitamin or a multitude of vitamins a day and still maintain excellent health. Some people even do this trying to reverse degenerative diseases. Unfortunately, many doctors and nutritionists are pushing this fallacy, often out of ignorance.
Taking vitamins and other nutrients and continuing to eat poorly is similar to never changing the oil or oil filter in your car and yet continuing to drive it. Periodically you might add small amounts of oil to the car to keep the oil level in normal range. This is, in essence, what most people are doing in their mistaken belief that they can continue to eat junk food, yet take a vitamin a day or multitudes of vitamins and be healthy.
I’ve had patients who have brought in very large suitcases filled with supplements of all kinds. Unfortunately, these have been some of my sickest patients. That’s because they continued to eat whatever they pleased, foolishly believing that supplements alone could make up for whatever their diet was lacking.
How wrong they were! Some were literally spending thousands of dollars every month and getting sicker by the day.
Most chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and cancer, are usually associated with nutritional deficiencies. However, dieting and eating too much sugar, fats, processed foods, fast foods, and other devitalized and inflammatory foods are literally draining the life out of us as they constipate our bodies, make our tissues acidic, introduce toxins, inflame our tissues, drain us of our nutrient reserves, and accelerate degeneration. Americans have been duped into believing that we can continue to eat whatever we want and that simply taking a vitamin or a multitude of vitamins can neutralize or protect ourselves from whatever we have eaten.
When treating those with degenerative diseases, I began to notice a pattern. Most of these individuals weren’t underfed. In fact, most of them were big overeaters. They ate plenty—but they ate all the wrong things. They were overfed and yet completely undernourished.
This was particularly true of people with obesity, cardiovascular diseases, arthritis, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, a host of different allergic conditions, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus. In fact, to some degree, it appeared to apply to nearly all degenerative diseases.
For many of these people, medications won’t help. Nor can taking vitamins and nutrients eliminate the cause of these diseases. That’s because it’s not lack that causes many of these diseases—it’s eating too much of the wrong foods.
I began to realize that one of the main causes of these degenerative diseases is overconsumption of sugary, fatty, starchy, and high-protein foods—foods that have been processed, fried, and further devitalized. These are inflammatory foods that actually invite disease into our bodies. These people were taking in enormous amounts of empty, fattening calories, but they were not nourishing their bodies but inflaming them.
Taking some supplements such as a comprehensive multivitamin with minerals, omega-3 fats, and vitamin D3 is important. However, much more important are eliminating (or significantly reducing) consumption of the toxic fats, sugars, processed “dead” inflammatory foods, and eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and other “living” foods.
Taking in dead, man-made, processed food creates a trap. When your body realizes that it hasn’t received the nourishment it craves, even after you’ve eaten a large, calorie-laden meal, your brain sends a signal that it still needs nourishment. But when you answer that craving with more dead food, you start a cycle that leaves your body laboring under a devastating burden of too much sugar, starch, and fat, leading to chronic inflammation and degenerative disease.
This kind of burden creates enormous stress for your entire digestive tract. It overtaxes the liver and overwhelms your entire body with massive amounts of dangerous fats, chemicals, and other toxins.
All the while, in a sense, you are starving. You are becoming depleted of what you really need: essential vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytonutrients, and enzymes. Eating in this way will make you feel fatigued and irritable, and over time you’ll begin to develop one or more of the degenerative diseases listed above.
Overnutrition is worse than undernutrition. In fact, animal studies have shown that getting too few calories, which is technically called calorie restriction, can actually increase longevity.4 Although I do recommend calorie restriction for some diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and obesity, I believe that as a nation we need to work harder at eating in a way that keeps us within a healthy weight range.
Why Conventional Medicine Can’t Help
Conventional medicine with its prescriptions many times cannot help. Thomas A. Edison said, “The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.”5 What we need is better prevention.
Stop and Think About How We Eat
Our prosperity as a nation has come at a price. After years of overeating and overindulgence, we are experiencing an epidemic of degenerative and inflammatory diseases.
Most of us eat a standard American diet. That means lots of fat, sugar, and highly refined wheat and corn products, including white bread, crackers, bagels, pasta, and cereals. Add other processed food, such as potato chips, corn chips, and white rice. Don’t forget the fatty meats such as T-bone steaks, ribs, bacon, pork chops, and processed meats including salami, ham, pepperoni, and roast beef usually loaded with salt, fat, nitrites, and nitrates. Now, top it all off with a large amount of saturated fat, hydrogenated fat, and processed highly inflammatory vegetable oil, such as most commercial salad dressings, most commercial cooking oils, and mayonnaise. They are typically high in inflammatory processed omega-6 oils. It’s no wonder we have an epidemic of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and arthritis as well as many other degenerative diseases.
Now for dessert. What could be more American than apple pie? Nevertheless, the absolute worst foods—and all-time American favorites—contain tons of sugar and hydrogenated fat. These include many baked goods, such as cupcakes, cookies, pies, Danishes, fudge, and brownies—and don’t forget the doughnuts and candy bars.
We didn’t always eat this way. Former generations were some of the healthiest on the planet. As an agrarian culture, many of our grandparents lived much closer to the land. But today, our lifestyle is much too stressed and fast-paced, and as a result our diet suffers.
Most of us are nearly drowning in stress. We live on the run, tossing down dinner from a “drive-thru” on our way to meetings or our children’s activities. On other days, we wash ashore at the end of the day with barely enough strength to make TV dinners. Or worse yet, we fill up on chips or whatever else we can find on the run.
We wear ourselves out working longer hours, and we enjoy our lives less and less. We exercise very little, if at all, and we keep up our hectic pace through stimulants such as coffee, tea, sodas, and chocolate. We stress our bodies even more by purchasing more “things,” bigger houses, and new cars, which means longer work hours to pay for our cravings. Our list of commitments grows while our endurance runs out.
Stressed-out America is on a path to degenerative disease and premature death. Many of us are dying in middle age. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose to relax, slow down, smell the roses, and choose a healthy diet.
Most of us have grown up eating the American diet and feeling pretty good about it. But to live healthier, longer lives, we must rethink what we’ve been taught about food—before it’s too late.
How do we change our thinking? We can start by changing the why of eating. Just why do you eat? Do you eat because something tastes good and your flesh is craving it? Or do you eat because you are providing your body with fuel to run? For most Americans, eating has become more of a recreation than a daily necessity based upon nutritional wisdom.
Now, I’m not trying to suggest that eating shouldn’t be enjoyed. God created all things for us to enjoy, and eating was one of those things. But when our dietary choices, which were designed to nourish and sustain our bodies, actually begin to make us ill, then we must change the way we think.
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said, “Our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food.” In other words, what we eat should be so good for us that it actually heals and restores our bodies. What a difference from the average American mind-set about eating!
Start thinking about more than just taste and pleasure when you eat. Begin to eat for your health’s sake!
So, here’s your new set of priorities: health first, taste and pleasure second. I guarantee that once you begin to satisfy the true need of your body—the need for genuine nourishment—you’ll begin to enjoy your food much more.
A health-first eating lifestyle begins by eliminating or drastically reducing how much fried food, processed foods, processed vegetable fats, saturated fats, hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated fats, and sugar you take in. It also means avoiding fatty cuts of meats and selecting smaller portions of the leanest meats. These include free-range chicken or turkey breast and free-range beef such as extra-lean ground round, tenderloin, and filet.
Eat three to five servings (no fewer than three) of living, organic vegetables and two to four servings of fruit every day. That means fruits and vegetables should make up a large percentage of your diet. This is the recommendation of the United States Department of Agriculture, and mine also.
I did my internship and residency training at Florida Hospital, which is run by the Seventh-Day Adventist church. The Seventh-Day Adventists avoid alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and pork. They are also taught to refrain from eating eggs, meats, and even fish. Many are strict vegetarians. While I was there as a resident, the cafeteria served vegetarian foods only. Adventists who are vegetarians live about thirteen years longer than the average nonsmoking American.6
One such Seventh-Day Adventist was the physician Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. He was a vegetarian who, together with his brother, built a factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, to produce various health foods, including whole-grain cereals. That’s where your box of Special K comes from. However, Dr. Kellogg didn’t process his cereals as the majority of them are processed today to extend shelf life. Dr. Kellogg believed that 90 percent of all diseases were caused by improperly functioning colons.7
One of Dr. Kellogg’s patients, C. W. Post, was also an employee. He later developed Post Cereals.8
The Bible does not recommend vegetarianism, so neither do I. Adam and Eve were vegetarians in the Garden of Eden, and some prophets, such as John the Baptist, Samson, and others who had taken Nazirite vows, were vegetarians. Still, Jesus Christ was not.
Nevertheless, most Americans eat far too much meat—and over 95 percent of our exposure to dioxins comes from eating commercial animal fats.9 The health risks of dioxins include cancer, reproductive and developmental disorders, and mild liver damage. When eating beef, I recommend those which are organic grass-fed rather than grain-fed, as grass-fed beef contains three to five times more conjugated linoleic acid, a beneficial fat, and more healthy omega-3 fats and significantly less saturated fat and omega-6 fat than grain-fed beef. However, practice moderation and only consume at most 18 ounces of red meat a week.
I recommend that women eat only 2 to 3 ½ ounces of lean, free-range meat, preferably only once daily, or at the most twice daily. Men, limit meats to only 3 ½ to 6 ½ ounces of lean, free-range meat, only one or, at the most, two times a day. I also recommend rotating your foods and eating different protein sources, starches, fruits and veggies daily and rotating every four days. For example, for meat, turkey one day; chicken the next; fish the next; and red meat the next. Then rotate back to turkey. You do the same for starches, veggies, and fruits. If you eat meat twice a day, then eat the same meat for lunch and dinner. Patients who practice this are usually much healthier and have fewer food allergies and sensitivities.
It’s important to be careful when consuming fish. Most fish stocks around the world are contaminated with heavy metals, particularly mercury, which can be very dangerous to your body. Health problems linked to metal toxicity include:
Cancer
Neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease
Fatigue and fuzzy thinking
Decreased production of red and white blood cells
Abnormal heart rhythm
Damage to blood vessels10
Keep in mind the general rule that the larger the fish, the higher its mercury level and toxic potential. Also, I highly recommend the consumption of wild Alaskan salmon—or, to be safe, the regular intake of a high-quality fish oil—rather than farm-raised fish, as farm-raised fish usually contain antibiotics, hormones, PCBs, and other chemicals.
More and more people are going on high-protein diets such as the Atkin’s Diet. Yes, they are losing weight. But the long-term effects of this diet can be very dangerous and may lead to many degenerative diseases.
If you are on this diet, limit your protein portions to 6 ½ ounces or less for men and 3 ½ ounces or less for women once or twice a day. For more information on this subject, refer to my book What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You (Siloam, 2004).
If you see yourself in this chapter, be encouraged. Even if you’ve spent a lifetime digging your own grave with your fork and knife, it’s never too late to change. You will make many choices about your destiny by what you choose to eat. Choose now to reap health, happiness, and a long life. You hold the key to your own future health.
Let’s turn now and look at what I believe is the single most effective answer to overnourishment—fasting! More than anything else, fasting is a dynamic key to cleansing your body from a lifetime collection of toxins, reversing inflammation and overnourishment and the diseases they bring, and ensuring a wonderful future of renewed energy, vitality, longevity, and blessed health.