Picture your average supermarket or drugstore: processed foods, made with ingredients most people can’t pronounce, sit at the front of the store. The marketing of these foods is the best of the best, and people are easily enticed into buying them. Unfortunately, they also tend to develop health symptoms as a result of consuming these products, most commonly weight gain, headaches, heartburn, fatigue, and joint pain. Their doctors write a prescription for these symptoms, often sending them back to the same store, but this time to the pharmacy section to pick up the medication for the symptoms caused by eating the processed food. The healthcare industry turns symptoms into sales and diseases into dollars. It’s a brilliant business model!
The sad truth is that a cured patient is a lost customer. I’m not a cynical person, but I am a realist. I know some amazing doctors truly care, but the healthcare system they are working in is broken. It’s corrupt, it’s not healthcare, and it’s designed for sick care. Big Pharma has been selling us sickness for decades, and it’s even reached a point where they are now creating sickness for us. This is because medication doesn’t get to the root cause of why someone doesn’t feel well, and often even makes that root cause worse.
We know we’re heading in the wrong direction, and yet we struggle to find solutions. The issue isn’t a lack of information; in fact, it’s too much information. We’re drowning in information but starving for true wisdom. Information alone will not change your life—if it did, every librarian would be a multimillionaire or celebrity. It’s the application of the right information in a step-by-step system that will change your life. As you’ll see in the pages ahead, despite the dire state we’re in now, there’s hope—but we need to make the right choices.
To achieve metabolic freedom, you must take sovereignty over your health information and the choices you make. If you treat your health casually, you will end up a casualty. In this chapter I’ll strip the power away from Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Gov, and give it back to you with the truth about processed foods and the real havoc they’re wreaking on your body. Once you understand that the greatest physician and pharmacy you’ll ever find is within your own body, you’ll be able to take control over your health.
Next time you watch TV, notice how many of the commercials are filled with pharmaceutical and food messages. I did some research and discovered that 75 percent of all television commercials in the United States are funded by Big Pharma!1 Out of the 195 countries in the world, only two of them allow Big Pharma to market directly to the consumer on television: the United States and New Zealand.2 Big Food is all over television too, comprising up to 29 percent of advertisements!3 This means if you have the television on, you’ll see medication after medication followed by fast food and more medication. This is intentional brainwashing of our conscious and subconscious minds—we don’t have symptoms because of a lack of medication!
It gets worse. Why are fast food restaurants allowed to open shops inside hospitals? Hospitals should be a healing environment. It’s corrupt, and it’s designed to turn symptoms into sales and diseases into dollars.
The U.S. healthcare system ranked last overall among 11 high-income countries in an analysis by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund.4 Additionally, the United States spends 4.6 trillion dollars on healthcare every year. If this were a country’s gross domestic product (GDP), it would be number four in the world!
Obesity is expensive, too. In 2008, the estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was $147 billion, and the medical cost for people who have obesity was $1,429 higher than those of healthy weight.5The Economic Report of the President, which is published every five years, found that the total annual cost of diabetes in 2022 was $412.9 billion, including $306.6 billion in direct medical costs and $106.3 billion in indirect costs. People with diagnosed diabetes now account for one of every four healthcare dollars spent in the United States.6 The average cost of treating a patient with type 2 diabetes is $14,000 per year.
Why is our (lack of) healthcare costing us so much? Why have the costs of obesity and diabetes skyrocketed? Because of the foods we are consuming.
Our supermarkets and convenience stores are riddled with processed junk food. If I smoked a cigarette in public, most people would think dude, smoking kills, yet if I consumed processed junk food loaded with sugar, they wouldn’t have a second thought about it. But processed foods kill more people than cigarettes, and there’s a drug dealer on every corner. Human beings are the only species smart enough to create their own food and dumb enough to eat it.
A 2024 meta-analysis revealed that a diet high in ultra-processed foods showed some alarming statistics. Ultra-processed foods are heavily altered with additives and unhealthy ingredients, posing greater risks to metabolic health than minimally processed foods, which retain more of their natural nutrients. This study showed that ultra-processed food may increase the following:
Such “foods” are destroying our metabolic health. They negatively impact our metabolism in five key ways:
Let’s look at each of these in detail.
The food scientists working behind the scenes for big food companies are brilliant. They manufacture these food-like substances called frankenfoods and test them several times to ensure they hit all the reward centers in your brain. Take Doritos, for example: The premise behind Doritos Roulette is that the bag contains a mix of regular Nacho Cheese Doritos and a few extremely spicy chips, which are indistinguishable from the regular ones. These spicy chips measure about 78,000 Scoville heat units, making them significantly hotter than a typical jalapeño. This unpredictability adds a thrill to the snacking experience, as consumers never know when they might encounter one of the fiery chips.8
Recent research has highlighted the startling similarities between sugar and addictive drugs like cocaine. Studies conducted on rats have shown that sugar can be more addictive than opioid drugs. These studies found that sugar triggers responses in the brain comparable to drugs, including binging, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, dependence, and reward.9
Dr. James DiNicolantonio, the lead author of a review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, explains that sugar affects the brain’s dopamine levels, leading to symptoms like depression and ADHD when consumption is suddenly reduced. This dopamine deficiency can drive the urge to consume more sugar, similar to the “fix” that drug addicts seek.
Unlike salt, which has a natural aversion signal preventing overconsumption, sugar lacks such a mechanism, allowing people to consume large amounts without feeling the need to stop. This continuous consumption can lead to various metabolic health issues, including weight gain, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and some cancers.
The research also points out that while the addictive behaviors seen in rats might not directly translate to humans, the high sugar intake, especially among children, is a cause for concern. Public Health England reports that sugar intake in the United Kingdom is nearly three times the recommended limit, contributing significantly to the overall energy intake.10 Sugar is processed in a way that causes overconsumption, since it does not activate the hormone leptin, which signals to your body and brain to put down the fork.
An estimated 80 percent of the food supply in the United States contains inflammatory seed oils. These oils are also called vegetable oils, linoleic acid, polyunsaturated fats, and omega-6 fats. The main problem with these fats is that they are chemically unstable. They contain many double bonds, which is where the term “poly” comes from, and the more double bonds a fat contains, the more unstable it is to heat and pressure. When food companies manufacture and process these oils, they add heat and pressure, which damages these fats, making them rancid. They cover up the rancid look and smell with chemical agents that include hexane, phosphoric acid, bleaching agents, steam, and others.
This means seed oils sitting on the shelf are already rancid before you even purchase them. When you heat them during cooking, these fats oxidize further. This creates cellular inflammation, blocking the hormones and nutrients from entering your cells. It’s similar to the oxidation that occurs after you’ve bitten into an apple and left it on the counter for hours. The browning is oxidation, and these oils create this “browning” at the cell level.
Health experts disagree about many things, but if there’s one thing we can all agree on it’s this: Healthy mitochondria are essential for metabolic health. When your mitochondria are healthy, your cells produce energy so that you thrive throughout the entire day, and this burns fat by raising your metabolic rate. Processed foods, however, are essentially mitochondrial poison.
Many of these processed foods contain high amounts of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which raises uric acid levels inside the body. This is a metabolic disaster, as elevated uric acid levels are linked to an increased risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Additionally, uric acid directly contributes to insulin resistance, further complicating metabolic health.
Our bodies tend to retain uric acid as an evolutionary survival mechanism, a trait inherited from our primate ancestors. Historically, higher uric acid levels helped conserve fat stores for periods of scarcity. In modern times, this mechanism has become outdated, as we do not hibernate or face prolonged food shortages. This retention can now be detrimental, because individuals with elevated uric acid levels are also at a higher risk of severe outcomes from illnesses such as COVID-19.
The human body can process a limited amount of fructose, approximately 5 grams at a time. Consuming fructose in higher amounts, especially from sources like fruit juice, can overwhelm the body’s metabolic capacity. Excessive fructose consumption is a primary contributor to gout, a painful condition characterized by high uric acid levels. In his book Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, Dr. Richard Johnson explains that animals in the wild consume large quantities of fruit before hibernation to gain fat. In humans, however, such dietary patterns can lead to the accumulation of fat in the liver, resulting in insulin resistance, diabetes, and increasing the risk of cancer and heart disease.
By understanding and managing uric acid and fructose intake, we can make significant strides in improving metabolic health and preventing related diseases. Consuming HFCS and rancid seed oils is like pouring sand into the engine of a finely tuned car. It leads to an increase in uric acid, which acts like grit, causing oxidative stress and inflammation. This stress hampers the mitochondria—the cell’s power plants—from running efficiently, reducing their ability to produce energy (ATP) and disrupting overall cellular metabolism. Over time, this “engine trouble” can lead to bigger issues like obesity, insulin resistance, and other metabolic disorders, underscoring the importance of a clean diet in keeping our cellular engines running smoothly and preventing chronic disease.
As we established, the two primary causes of weight gain and weight-loss resistance are cellular membrane inflammation and high levels of insulin. Processed foods are a metabolic nightmare because they create both of these problems. Processed carbohydrates, such as cereals, cookies, bread, and others, spike insulin after consuming them, which signals to your body to “store fat.” The artificial ingredients found in processed foods inflame cell membranes, making your hormones work harder to do their job of burning fat and producing energy.
Over time, hormones must work harder, leading to hormone resistance, as the inflammatory levels of a cell continue to increase. This increases the risk of obesity, weight gain, and weight-loss resistance.
Hippocrates nailed it a long time ago when he said, “All disease begins in the gut.” Fast-forward to 2020, and Harvard published a study titled “All disease begins in the (leaky) gut: role of zonulin-mediated gut permeability in the pathogenesis of some chronic inflammatory diseases” by Alessio Fasano.11 In this study, Fasano explores the role of gut permeability, specifically through the protein zonulin, in chronic inflammatory diseases. The research highlights how increased intestinal permeability, often termed “leaky gut,” allows toxins and antigens to enter the bloodstream, triggering inflammatory responses. The study underscores the importance of maintaining gut barrier integrity for overall health.
Processed foods disrupt the lining of your digestive system by creating inflammation and leaky gut. Leaky gut, or increased intestinal permeability, occurs when the tight junctions in the gut lining become loose, allowing harmful substances like toxins, microbes, and undigested food particles to pass into the bloodstream. This can trigger inflammation and immune responses, contributing to various health issues, such as autoimmune diseases, chronic inflammatory conditions, digestive disorders, metabolic disorders, and brain fog, since the gut is connected to the brain via the vagus nerve. Factors such as poor diet, stress, infections, and certain medications can contribute to the development of leaky gut, highlighting the importance of maintaining a healthy gut barrier for overall well-being.
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When you become aware of the hidden junk food that surrounds you, you can make better decisions that will serve your future self. Neville Goddard once said, “We are only limited by weakness of attention and poverty of imagination.” We do the best we can according to our level of awareness. This is why it’s important to become aware of the environment that surrounds you, which includes television commercials, billboards, your social media feed, and even your friends and family.
Now that you’re aware of the prevalence of processed foods and their dangerous effect on metabolic health, let’s dive into the next cause of metabolic dysfunction: environmental toxins.