Course No. 13
Avoid what’s toxic to you and your microbes.

Eating Bad Food Impacts More Than Eating Good.

Overview
In the modern nutrient-rich diet, what you don't eat is more important than what you do eat. The current focus on eating healthy foods is a holdover from times when a shortage of nutrients is what was unhealthy. Also, it's a lot harder to make money by telling people what not to buy and eat. Nutrimatters does not champion a particular "healthy diet" such as Low-Carb, Keto, Paleo, Mediterranean, Vegan, Vegetarian, Plant-Based, Adkins, DASH, etc., because it all depends on the disposition of your bioreactor and microbiome. Also, almost all diets can be healthy or unhealthy for an individual depending on the food’s diversity, how the food is processed, and what is added to the food.
If food additives, preservatives, emulsifiers, thickeners, flavor enhancers, transformed oils, and so on were subjected to the same safety testing as drugs, there would be a lot fewer of them in use. They would have a high economic threshold for use, meaning it may be cheaper to use natural healthy ingredients, and they would be safe and effective for their intended and disclosed purpose.
If you eat a toxic molecule, will eating a non-toxic molecule help? Generally not, unless the non-toxic molecule is specifically an antidote for the toxic molecule. In other words, the antidote molecule has been shown to negate the harmful effects of the toxic molecule. It's not enough to say the non-toxic molecule has some health benefits. If it's not an antidote, the toxic molecule will do its harm. This also applies to antioxidant foods, which are discussed in detail in the lessons You Breed What You Feed and  When You Become the Infection.
While science has yet to reliably develop a consensus list of healthy foods, properly done randomized controlled trials in nutrition do show characteristics of diets that foster healthy outcomes. These healthy diets have two characteristics in common: they are comprised of diverse foods, meaning a little bit of everything, and they are low in threshold toxins, meaning they are not factory food.
Actionable Knowledge
  • More than half of all Americans will be obese by 2030, full stop. That's right; more Americans will be sick with metabolic conditions than will be healthy. It is unprecedented in our history for more Americans to be sick than are healthy for any clinically identified health condition.
  • The FDA’s Generally Recognized As Safe, or GRAS, standard is essentially only tested on human cells. There is virtually no testing regarding the microbiome for GRAS. Nutrimatters disagrees with the current approach, where food additives can be used until they are proven unsafe to human cells. Food additives should only be used once they are proven safe for you and your microbiome.
  • A central problem with GRAS is that the "harm" focused on relatively high clinical threshold levels of serious diseases, such as cancer, or changes in the body known to be associated with these diseases. GRAS doesn't consider harm that hasn't yet reached the clinical threshold for disease.
  • Every molecule engineered to enter the body at an effective level should undergo the same safety testing, whether it happens to be called a food additive or a drug. The best antidote for all toxic substances is avoidance. Even if other healthy molecules may help mitigate the harm of a toxin, nothing works as well as simply avoiding the toxin in the first place.
Eating Bad Food Impacts More Than Eating Good.
Top Sponsors of this Course
  • sponsor Your Name - Your Organization
  • sponsor Your Name - Your Organization
  • sponsor Your Name - Your Organization
  • sponsor Your Name - Your Organization
Related Article
Eating Bad Food Impacts More Than Eating Good.
Article 13

Avoid what's toxic to you and your microbes.

Read Article

Previous Course

It's About the Liver... Stupid! About Course
It's About the Liver... Stupid!
Course 12
The liver removes the bad stuff, and so much more.
A Presidential Candidate's advisor famously said “It's the Economy... Stupid.” Yeah, it's the same with the liver. Alcohol and complex sugars cause liver cells to be replaced by fat cells, undermining regulation of the body's biochemistry. As this worsens, organs are damaged, metabolic disease begins, and you feel lousy making you sedentary.

Next Course

When Is as Important as What You Eat. About Course
When Is as Important as What You Eat.
Course 14
The impact of food changes by time of day.
The same food and calories eaten at different times of day have very different effects on the body. Like the hormones that affect sleep change from day to night, so do the hormones that affect digestion. As a result, foods eaten in the day are processed differently than those eaten at night.