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Do you know why fast and processed food, from french fries, hamburgers, ice cream and chicken fingers to microwave popcorn, flavoured yogurts, baked goods, breakfast cereals, fruit drinks and beer all taste so good? The chemical wizardry behind the artificial and natural flavours added to the processed food adds back the flavour that was taken away during the processing and storing of the foods. The long list of chemicals that make up the flavours is hidden behind the words “artificial” or “natural” flavours. As long as the chemicals are on the GRAS list (Generally Regarded As Safe), the FDA does not require the ingredients of the additives to be listed. The items on the GRAS list have not necessarily been tested for their safety – the only way to get something removed is through proof of harm. (That said, one would think that there would be enough evidence of harm to have aspartame removed from the GRAS list, but it is still there.)  Vegetarians are unsuccessfully demanding to know whether or not a flavouring or colouring in a food is from an animal source.  Appropriate labels would also assist people in avoiding allergic reactions.  Frequently the same colours (like titanium dioxide) used in foods are also used in cosmetics and in oil and house paints.

Our sense of taste is actually quite crude – we can only discern sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and astringent tastes, whereas our sense of smell is extremely sensitive, and is believed to be responsible for up to 90 percent of the flavour we taste. When we chew our food, volatile gases are released which we smell.  Complex combinations of volatile compounds make up the tastes in the foods, with one compound being the dominant one, and others rounding out the flavour desired. If you want something to taste like marshmallows, you add ethyl-3-hydroxybutanoate for example.  The number of chemicals that make up the typical artificial strawberry flavour in a strawberry milkshake is about 50, yet all those ingredients will be hidden under the term "artificial flavour". If we don’t really know if singly these chemicals are safe, how can we be assured that combinations of them are safe?

The idea that “natural flavours” are any healthier than “artificial flavours” is probably stretching the truth a bit, even though something designated as “natural” must come entirely from an herb, spice, vegetable, fruit, meat etc. Whether the chemical ethyl-2-methyl butyrate that provides the flavour of apples is separated out of an apple in a chemistry lab using a chemical process, or is created artificially through a different chemical process, the final product is the same, but one can be labeled “natural” and the other is labeled “artificial”. These natural flavours cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered “natural”, and they are certainly not healthier nor more pure than the synthetic flavour despite their higher price. And whether “natural” or “artificial” they are made in the same chemical plants. “Flavourists” are the scientists that design the flavours in our foods by mixing these chemical concoctions.

These food technologists also consider eye appeal, mouth-feel, textures, crunchiness, gumminess, spreadability, softness, juiciness etc. when adding chemicals to the food, as these properties are vital to the success of the product being marketed.  Their work gets no mention by the processed food companies that rely on them for the commercial success of their food.  When McDonalds was forced to switch from beef tallow to vegetable oil in order to cook their fries, they had a problem, as the beef tallow was key to the special McDonald’s french fry taste. So flavourists blended the appropriate chemicals to give that same taste to the fries. it would be wrong to think that the flavour of the fries is actually due to what happens in the kitchens of McDonalds!  (Or that the flavour of any fast food is due to the kitchen it was prepared in!) These flavours were concocted, put into the food, and shipped out to their clients by huge, secretive, chemical plants such as International Flavors & Fragrances, Givaudan, Haarmann & Reimer, Elan Chemical, Flavor Dynamics and Frutarom, many along the eastern seaboard of the States.

This information comes from the fascinating book, Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, about how fast food has entirely changed how we farm, how we live, and how we eat. Do read it – it will motivate you to stop eating fast food!  I want to close with a quote from his book, where Eric Schlosser is sampling various artificial flavours. “Before placing the strips of paper before my nose, I closed my eyes. Then I inhaled deeply, and one food after another was conjured from the glass bottles. I smelled fresh cherries, black olives, sauteed onions, and shrimp. Grainer’s most remarkable creation took me by surprise. After closing my eyes, I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. The aroma was uncanny, almost miraculous. It smelled like someone in the room was flipping burgers on a hot grill. But when I opened my eyes, there was just a narrow strip of white paper and a smiling flavorist.”

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Schosser, Eric Fast Food Nation Harper Perennial, New York NY, 2001

Copyright 2007 Vreni Gurd

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We are toxic soup! How much of a burden to our bodies are the chemical toxins that find their way inside of us?

A journalist for National Geographic decided to explore his own body chemical burden and was shocked to find out what and how many toxic chemicals were inside him, considering he lived a pretty "clean" life, in his opinion! And he was pretty surprised to find out that the chemical that was present in him in the greatest quantity was flame retardant.

After much thought, he figured it was from frequent air travel. According to the Fitzgerald Report, as of 1998, there were over 75,500 synthetic chemicals registered as appearing in processed food, consumer products, industry and agriculture. And since that time there have been about 2000 chemicals added to the list each year.

Chemicals are so much a part of our life these days, that we rarely give them a second thought.  We eat chemicals in the form of colourings, flavourings, preservatives, emulsifiers, thickeners, sweeteners, hydrogenated oils, transfats, inter-esterified fats, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides etc., and chemicals designed to make us want to eat more.  We apply chemicals on our skin, hair, underarms, teeth and nails to clean, moisturize and polish, protect from the sun’s rays, or to look and smell nice.

We bathe in water that frequently is contaminated with chlorine and fluoride.  (If you put it on your skin you are drinking it). We frequently store food in plastic, which usually have endocrine disruptors like phthalates and BPA in them – especially bad news if those foods are microwaved in that plastic!

We wash our dishes with toxic dishwashing detergent, and wash our clothes in toxic laundry detergent. Many of our household cleaners are very toxic and have toxic vapours that we breathe.

Many of us take over-the-counter medications or pharmaceutical drugs, which our livers then must detoxify. (Have you looked at the ingredient list on cough syrup??? Hydrogenated oils, colourings, artificial sweeteners – a virtual toxic soup!)  Even synthetic vitamins, especially those targeted to kids, are full of sweeteners and colourings. 

Many of us have mercury amalgam fillings, which leach mercury into our systems.  We cook with Teflon, which leaches PFOA into our food and into the air.  Then there is that new car and new carpet smell – not healthy!  And many of us have jobs involving chemicals on a daily basis. 

Walking down the street we are inhaling air filled with car exhaust and other chemicals.  And many of these chemicals stay in our bodies for a very long time.

Toxicologists will say that the amount of a particular chemical  in the food etc. is too low to cause any problems.  Maybe so if you look at each chemical individually.  But the fact is that they spray up to 19 different pesticides on a field of strawberries!  How exactly do they interact?  And how do those 19 pesticides react with the other chemicals in the food / drugs we consume, and the chemicals we inhale or absorb through our skin? 

It is really no wonder that we are a toxic mess, and why rates of cancer have climbed so dramatically over the last 100 years.  And no wonder our poor liver is having a heck of a time coping in its detox duties, and may not have much left to help our hormones function properly, leaving our bodies in a chronically stressed state!

Even today, with the crunch in health-care playing out all around us, our chemical-laden life is not even on the radar as reeking havoc with our health.  And Canada’s Food Guide is actively promoting toxic food by suggesting we choose oils like canola, corn, soybean, and sunflower, which are rancid on store shelves due to the heat used in the processing, or soft margarine, a manufactured, unnatural fat over butter or lard!  It makes me crazy.

I won’t get into the problems that our chemical mess is causing the other living creatures that share this planet with us – needless to say the news is downright scary, especially with respect to fish.

Although we can’t come close to controlling all the toxins we are exposed to, to me it makes sense to do all one can in this regard, not only for our own health but also for the health of the planet.  Choosing organic, unprocessed food, environmentally-friendly cleaners, using over-the-counter drugs sparingly, doing what is possible through lifestyle modifications to reduce the need for pharmaceuticals, and using quality non-toxic skincare products can help a lot.

I have been using organic virgin coconut oil as my moisturizer for the last two years – seems to work fine for me.  Coconut oil may be expensive as a food, but wow, is it cheap as a moisturizer!  And no one yet has commented that I smell like a coconut!

The National Geographic article is very interesting. Make sure you check out the photos too. And I found the Hundred Year Lie website to be very fascinating reading about how the economic interests of processed food industry, medical/pharmaceutical industry and chemical industry have successfully shaped the notion that synthetics are safer than their natural counterparts.  (No, margarine is NOT healthier than butter!)

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Environmentally friendly kitchen clean-up
Teflon is hazardous to our health
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Nanotechnology and you
Processed food is taking over our supermarkets
Water Fluoridation, boon or bane?
Fats, the good, the bad and the ugly
Coldfire

Rapp, D. MD Our Toxic World: A Wake Up Call Environmental Medical Research Foundation, Buffalo NY. 2004.

Dadd, Debra Lynn Home Safe Home Penguin Putnum Inc. New York, NY 1997

Steinman, D. and Epstein, S. The Safe Shopper’s Bible: A Consumer’s Guide to Nontoxic Household Products, Cosmetics, and Food Wiley Publishing, New York, NY 1995.

Blaylock R. MD Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills Health Press, Santa Fe NM, 1997

Farlow, C. Food Additives: A Shopper’s Guide to What’s Safe & What’s Not (2004 Revised Edition) USA, 2004.

Pawlick, T. The End of Food: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply–And What We Can Do About It Barricade Books, Fort Lee NJ. 2006.
Fitzgerald, R. The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health Penguin Group, New York NY. 2006.

Rogers, Sherry MD Chemical Sensitivity USA, 1995.

Rogers, Sherry MD Detoxify or Die USA, 2002

Cutler, A. PhD Amalgam Illness, Diagnosis and Treatment : What You Can Do to Get Better, How Your Doctor Can Help Sammamish WA. 1999.

Kirby, D. Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY. 2005.

Copyright 2007 Vreni Gurd

www.wellnesstips.ca

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Insulin’s job is to take sugar out of the bloodstream and feed it to the cells which use the sugar as fuel. When there is more sugar in the bloodstream than can be actively used immediately, the sugar is stored as fat for future use in case of starvation.

Insulin also stores protein in muscle cells, so it can be considered an anabolic hormone. And insulin stores magnesium, an important mineral that aids in keeping blood vessels dilated and muscles relaxed.

The bad news is that chronic problems with insulin have DEVASTATING effects on our health, but the good news is that insulin is one of the easiest hormones for us to control.

We have all kinds of hormones that raise blood sugar – cortisol, glucagon, epinephrine, aldesterone etc., but insulin is the ONLY hormone that lowers blood sugar, so our body has no back-up system if insulin stops working. Why would that be, do you think? Does it not strike you as odd that in the fabulous system that is our body there is no back-up system for insulin, when our body tends to have all kinds of fall-back plans if something should fail?

Perhaps it is worth looking at the question through the eyes of primitive humankind. Not having lived at that time I can’t be certain, but I would imagine that there would have been times of limited food, and being able to increase blood sugar levels would have been critically important in order to fuel the body when there was very little or no food being consumed.

Just like many other animals, in the spring and summer when fruit, plants and grains were available, it was advantageous to have insulin store some fat to aid chances of survival through the lean winter months.  Fruit would be dried, and other foods fermented, but especially in the colder climates, people would rely on wild animals or fish for most of their food in the winter. Meat and fat do not induce a big insulin response.

So, perhaps in the body’s wisdom, it did not think it needed more than one method to lower blood sugar, as high carbohydrate (plant food) diets simply did not happen day in day out all year round except possibly in tropical climates.

I think it is very interesting to note that Weston A. Price, who traveled the world examining the diets of primitive cultures before they came in contact with "white man’s food", found NO vegetarian peoples, even in the tropics.  All the cultures he studied had no signs of the chronic diseases that plague our society, (even those that ate extremely high fat diets!) had excellent bone structure, and very few cavities.

Fast forward to today’s world, a blink of the eye in evolutionary time, and suddenly, even in colder climates, we have access to carbohydrate (another word for sugar) all year round in huge quantities, much of it highly processed and far sweeter than would have been consumed in primitive times.

We are being told that eating large amounts of grains in the form of breads and cereals is healthy, and practically every processed food in the supermarket has some form of sugar in it – no wonder our insulin is having trouble coping! It was never meant to deal with this amount of sugar! On top of that, we are told to eat low fat, so there is frequently nothing to slow the sugar into the bloodstream, which makes insulin’s job even harder.

When genetically one’s body is built to handle relatively few carbohydrates, and instead we are eating far more than our body can handle, it is no surprise that disease is a result.  The Inuit are a perfect example.  Having moved away from their traditional diet high in seal blubber, salmon, sea weeds, and cranberries when in season, to a diet high in processed carbohydrate all year round, they are currently dealing with rampant type 2 diabetes. Biochemical individuality plays a huge role in how well our bodies can cope with carbohydrates.

Eating large amounts of high glycemic foods (foods that turn into sugar in the body quickly) is problematic on many fronts. High blood sugar causes large amounts of insulin to be secreted into the blood, and insulin is very hard on the arteries, damaging them, and causing the body to call on cholesterol to try and fix the problem.

High insulin levels also increase blood pressure by increasing sodium retention and increasing sympathetic tone.  High insulin decreases T3 production affecting the job of the thyroid, suppresses glucagon and growth hormone levels, and decreases DHEA levels, which in turn decreases progesterone and testosterone levels.

If insulin levels are chronically high, the body starts ignoring insulin, down-regulating the receptors on the cell surfaces, and now, because insulin is no longer working, blood sugar levels are also too high (insulin resistance or pre-diabetes). High blood sugar also damages arterial walls through glycation creating Advanced Glycation Endproducts increasing arterial inflammation, and once again, cholesterol is summoned to repair the damaged arteries. Frequently the sugar in the blood glycates with cholesterol, making the situation worse. This is how type 2 diabetes and heart disease are linked.

So, insulin has a direct affect on the thyroid hormones, and the sex hormones. Guess what hormone has a direct affect on insulin? You guessed it – cortisol. Cortisol decreases insulin secretion as well as insulin sensitivity, which is logical, because if you are stressed, it is not helpful to have insulin remove the sugar that you need to help you fight or run!

So, if the reason you are stressed is you are sitting in a traffic jam, that increased blood sugar is not being used – it is just damaging your arteries. This is another way stress causes heart disease. As far as I can tell so far, cortisol is the kingpin hormone. I have found no other hormone yet that suppresses cortisol. If I find one, you will be the first to know!  So, decreasing stress levels in order to control cortisol will have the biggest impact on our health, and lowering insulin levels is not far behind!

There are two ways to lower insulin levels:
1) Avoid eating foods that cause a large insulin response, like all products that contain any form of sugar, flour products, starchy below-ground vegetables, and fruit juice. Avoid all processed food. If you are insulin resistant, pre-diabetic or already have type 2 diabetes or heart disease, it may also be a good idea to limit whole grains and fruit for the time being, and eat lots and lots of above-ground, colourful veggies and sea vegetables as your carbohydrate source. Make sure that you add a little quality fat (butter, ghee, olive oil) to your veggies so you can absorb the vitamins and minerals in them.
2) Exercise uses up the sugar in the blood stream so it does not get stored as fat. Resistance exercise or weight training is particularly useful, as it increases insulin-receptor sensitivity. If you set up your weight-training program in a circuit format and move quickly between exercises you will keep your heart-rate up as well, so additional cardiovascular exercise is unnecessary.

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Sugar, the disease generator
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Another “healthy heart guide” that got it wrong
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Stress and cardiovascular disease

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I was going to write about insulin this week, but I’ve been noticing something in my practice, and I figured I’d better write about it before it slipped my mind. So my apologies to those of you that are eagerly awaiting the next installment in the endocrinology series.

I should also apologize to all my wonderful SI joint teachers who took the time to really coach me with respect to SI joint dysfunction, (Diane Lee and Linda Joy Lee, Marcy Dayan, Paul Chek, Shayne McDermott, David Ewert, Mark Finch, Tom Myers, and most recently, Richard DonTigny), because it is very probable that you actually did teach me this, and I forgot and have now simply relearned it for myself.

For those of you that are not in the exercise or physiotherapy field and have no idea what and where the sacroiliac joint is, it is the joint between the sacrum, or the triangular bone at the bottom of our spines that the tailbone is a part of, and the pelvis.  People that have SI joint pain frequently point to the "pelvic bump" area in the very low back where the dimples are as the achy spot, and that pain is often one-sided.

For non-exercise people, skip to the next paragraph where I’ll explain this more simply, but for those in the field, what I’ve noticed is that most people that get SI joint pain seem to walk using their hip flexors as the prime movers.  While walking quickly, the pelvis is frequently in anterior tilt and/or there is a distinct forward lean of the trunk, and very often the person with the dysfunction is "pulling" their legs forward rather than "pushing" them. In my practice at least, using the hip flexors to walk seems to be a far more obvious pattern in SIJ dysfunction than a Trendelenburg sign, although the patterns do frequently go together.  I realize that someone in anterior tilt also tends to have poor local stabilizer and poor glute function, but I have found that even when someone has generally improved their pelvic position and been trained to connect to those muscles in other functional patterns such as stand-to-sit-to-stand, unless their faulty motor-recruitment pattern in walking is also corrected, the SIJ pain does not go away due to the constant forces trying to unlock the joint.  So I have put gait to the top of the priority list, and have been spending a lot of time recently teaching people how to walk – and it seems to be helping. Because I frequently see this same faulty walk pattern in those that have had or are about to have hip replacement surgery, I think it is possible that overuse of the hip flexors during gait may pull the femur slightly forward in the acetabulum, potentially creating a wear problem leading to the need for hip replacements. Therefore in my opinion, correcting this faulty gait as soon as it is recognized (possibly in late childhood or adolescence) may go a long way toward not only reducing future pain and suffering, but also reducing the need for hip replacement surgeries. If a study has not already been done on this, I think the idea has potential!

Probably the easiest way to explain this concept is to actually try it and feel it in your body. So, stand up, and pretend that your pelvis is a bucket, and you are pouring water out the front. You should feel like you are sticking your butt out behind you, and you have a big arch in your low back. Now try walking while maintaining this pelvis position. Notice how you have no choice but to use the front of your hips to move your legs? Notice how effortful this is?  Not good.  Hard on your SI joint, hip joints, low back, turns off your local stabilizers and your gluteus maximus, and way over uses the hipflexors and quads.  If you have SI joint or hip pain or if this is how you tend to walk, it may be worth your while to try a different way.

First, stretch your hip flexors gently for a minute or two.  Then, while hanging onto something, try standing as tall as possible on one leg on a small stable stool or a stair, tucking the tail under slightly (hold the bucket level so no water spills out) without squeezing the buttocks, so that the other leg can hang down completely suspended from the hip socket. You should be able to swing the leg like a pendulum with no muscles gripping the leg bone at all – it pretty much moves by itself with no muscle effort.  That is how one’s leg should feel in the swing phase while walking – loose, like it’s hanging, and pretty much moving by itself.  So, now get down from the step and try walking.  The trick is to walk while standing as tall as possible – this will frequently be enough to bring your pelvis to a neutral position.  If you can’t get that "hanging" feeling at the hip joint while you walk, stretch your hip flexors again, stand taller, and tuck your tail under a bit more by using your lower abdominals to gently pull up the pubic bone.  If you are walking correctly, you will not only feel like your legs are floating, but you will also feel that any work that is happening is coming from the back side of the body rather than the front side.

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