Healthy Andy

Recently, a friend asked me about an email she recieved concerning eating fruit on an empty stomach.  The information she’d been sent informed her that if she didn’t eat her fruit on an empty stomach, horrible things would happen and she would die, die, die.

For some reason, this rumor about eating fruit in this way became associated with Dr. Oz, the medical doctor who became famous on Oprah’s TV show.  I’m not really sure why this is, since Dr. Oz didn’t come up with this, and my bet is, he disagrees with this concept as much as I do.

Eating Fruit On An Empty Stomach- A Myth?

The idea behind this old wives’ tale is, if you eat fruit with other foods, it somehow sits in the stomach and “rots” there, causing all kinds of problems.  On the other hand, if you eat only fruit, well then, it slides through your belly like greased owl poop and directly into your bloodstream, leading to your becoming nearly superhuman in strength due to the vast amount of nutrients in your body.

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.  Gastric emptying is the term used for the stomach releasing its contents into the small intestine (where most of the heavy-duty nutrient absorbtion occurs).  The rate of gastric emptying relies on a number of factors, mostly:

• how liquid the stomach contents are
• how nutrient dense the contents are
• how much volume of food is stretching out the stomach

Typically, even a solid meal is emptied out within a few hours, and no, mixing fruit in with other foods does NOT lead to putrefication.  While fruit does tend to break down more quickly all on its own (due to the high water content), if it’s mixed in with other food, it simply stirs into the liquid mix (called chyme).  It’s not chemically altered due to the presence of other foods.

Actually, for some people, mixing fruits with other foods is a good idea.  For example, diabetics or those with insulin resistance will react poorly to the rapid spike of sugar in their bloodstream from the quick digestion of a meal of only fruit, so mixing in some other sorts of foods with a lower glycemic index (that’s a measure of how sugary a food is) will actually slow down how quickly the sugar  is released into the body.

Don’t fall for this silly myth about eating fruit on an empty stomach.  It was made up out of thin air by some wacko trying to sell his “special” diet plan based on only eating certain foods in certain combinations.  There’s no evidence that he was remotely accurate. 

Here are some REAL guidelines on eating fruit:

• First off, actually eat fruit.  This sounds like a self-evident statement, but studies show Americans rarely eat fruit at all.  Fruits are packed with nutrients and antioxidants that keep your body working correctly, slow the aging process, and generally keep you alive.  So for God’s sake, actually eat some!
• Second, eat ACTUAL fruit, not fruit bars, fruit chews, fruit drink, or any other processed fabrication that pretends to be fruit.  Usually, what you get is a glorified piece of plastic painted pretty colors and stuffed full of artifical sweeteners.  In fact, a whisteblower organization recently found that the “fruit” in many cereal boxes was anything BUT actual fruit.
• Finally, drink fruit juice sparingly.  You’re far, far better off eating the entire fruit.  The whole fruit contains fiber, and there’s about a million studies showing that fiber helps keep you alive in many, many ways… too many to discuss here.  When you juice a fruit, you cheat yourself out of the fiber.  Another result of this is an increase in that glycemic index I mentioned earlier… without the fiber to slow the digestion of the fruit down, you end up dumping a lot of sugar into the bloodstream at once.  Read my article about insulin and weight gain to see why you don’t want that.

Keep things simple and natural, and you really can’t go wrong.  Don’t worry about silly little fads or tricks.  Stick to the basics.  A whole foods diet of fruits, vegetables, nuts, eggs, and lean meats will keep you alive and vital in the long term.

Stay healthy!

I love it when Science proves me right.  For years now, I’ve been hunting down and punching in the face anyone who stubbornly insisted on the outdated dogma that red meat is bad for you.

“No, no,” I’d explain, as my blows rained down upon them, “it isn’t red meat that’s the problem.  It’s PROCESSED meat that’s the problem.”

Now, a meta-analysis study published in the journal Circulation is backing me up.  A meta-analysis is where researchers take a whole big giant pile of other research papers and use that data to examine something.   In this case, they sifted through a ton of research studies on red meat and its effects on health and found something interesting.

They found that all these years, most researchers’ conclusions were falling prey to a confounding variable, which is a dirty little detail that throws everything off.  It works sort of like this.  If I see every Ford truck fall on the side of the road because their tires fell off, I might say hey… Fords aren’t so safe.  But, it could be that it’s the TIRES themselves that are the problem, not the entire vehicle.  So it could be that the Michelin Man didn’t do his job and the tires they made for Ford are defective, and Ford vehicles are just fine and dandy… it’s all Michelin’s fault instead.

DISCLAMER.  I think both Ford and Michelin are fine companies and that example shouldn’t be taken as any sort of attack on either company oh PLEASE don’t sue me angry corporate lawyers.

Okay, back to our discussion.  I think we see how a confounding variable works, right?  So the problem with the last few decades of research has been, when researchers found a link between “red meat” and health problems like diabetes or cardiovascular issues, they didn’t pay close enough attention to exactly what was going on.

You see, “red meat” is kind of a broad category.  You could lump steaks, hamburgers, beef hot dogs, and any and all other forms of red meat into this category.  And by just closing your eyes and accepting that broad category as being responsible for health problems, you miss the boat entirely.

What the researchers of this journal article found was that it wasn’t red meat but PROCESSED red meat that seemed to be the culprit behind all these health problems reported over the years. After all, most of the red meat consumed in this country is either highly processed, grain-fed, or eaten mixed in with all kinds of unhealthy crap.    Let’s look at each in turn so we can see where the confusion came from.

Processed Foods

I’ve ranted extensively about the problems with processed foods on many occasions.  To sum it up quickly, any sort of processing makes a normally healthy food into an unhealthy food… usually by adding salt, sugar, and various chemical additives that would downright terrify you if you knew what they did to you biochemically. 

So it isn’t that making beef into hot dog form is the problem, it’s the nitrates and salt  and MSG and other gunk they mix in there that causes all of the problems.

Grain-Fed Cattle

Next, by raising cattle in couped-up pens and stuffing them full of grains, you create an unhealthy animal that produces unhealthy meat.  Cattle are grazers by nature; they are evolutionarily designed to meander around, eating grasses of various kinds and occasionally going “moo”. 

Cattle that are fattened quickly and cheaply by grains become full of the inflammation-causing Omega-6 fatty acids (which I talk about a lot in articles like this).  So, when you eat them, YOU become full of those Omega-6s, and become prone to inflammation, which leads to the release of a hormone called cortisol that creates all kinds of health problems for you.

Here’s more of a discussion on grass-fed animals vs. corn-fed if you want to know more.

Unhealthy Junk On the Side

While a hamburger patty made with grass-fed beef isn’t so bad for you, the high-glycemic bun, the sugary ketchup, the french fries on the side soaked in trans fats and covered in salt and ketchup, and the insanely sweet soda full of high-fructose corn syrup definitely ARE all bad for you.

Barbeque sauce?  Tons of sugar and other chemicals like MSG.  Really, most of the stuff we stick on the side of eating a good old fashioned chunk of beef is just plain garbage.  So, if researchers see people eating steak covered in barbeque sauce getting fat, they might think “It’s that darn red meat again!  Curse its oily hide!” 

When, really, it’s the sugary barbeque sauce that is spiking insulin levels and leading people down the road to diabetes.  Barbeque sauces (or all the other junk food “sides”) are confounding variables.

Healthy Red Meat

So, how exactly DO you eat red meat and not die or get sick from it?  Easy.  Eat it in its most natural state.

Once again, I’ve ranted about a whole foods diet and how it’s the healthiest diet for you in the past.  Basically, the more you process or change a food, the more unhealthy it becomes. 

Cattle in their most natural state are grass-fed, free-range animals.  So start there by buying grass-fed meat.  Grass-fed meat has a balanced Essential Fatty Acid profile, meaning it has a healthy ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 fatty acids.  So, your body won’t get inflammed by having too many Omega-6s, and you won’t have any ill health effects from chronic inflammation.

After that, don’t take that lovely grass-fed meat and start mixing it in with a bunch of junk.  If you stuff it in a sausage casing with a bunch of salt and chemicals, then gee, I guess you’ve made it unhealthy, haven’t you?  And if you cover it in sauces that are full of sugar or eat a bag of chips along with it, again, don’t blame the red meat if you get fat and sick.

To sum it all up, red meat is NOT bad for you.  Only when we start messing with it, do we turn it into something unhealthy.  So stick to a grass-fed steak… and stay healthy!

Source article reference:  Micha R, Wallace SK, et al.  Red and processed meat consumption and risk of incident coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes mellitus: a systematic review and meta-analysis.  Circulation, June 2010;1;121 (21): 2271-83.

A couple of idiot researchers have come up with a fantastic suggestion to actually increase the amount of refined grain products in the diets of children.  Because we’re apparently not fat enough already.

Oh, they think they’re helping.  In fact, the suggestion is basically this:  let kids eat more snacks made with whole grain flour, because hey, it’s whole grain, so it has to be good for you, right?

Wrong.  Listen, folks, just because the food has buzzwords like “whole grain” or “organic” on it, doesn’t mean it’s automatically good for you.  I cringe whenever I hear somebody bragging about scarfing down a bag of cookies that they bought from Whole Foods, like that somehow changes the fact that they just sucked in enough sugar to choke their pancreas for a week.

“Whole grains” are only healthy to eat when you eat them like that… AS WHOLE GRAINS.  As in, oatmeal.  Wild rice.  That sort of thing.  Not if you pound it into flour, add a bunch of sugar, salt, sweeteners, and God only knows what other sorts of processing chemicals, and turn it into a “Whole Grain Snack”.  No, sorry.  A whole grain cracker is still just a cracker, and will still spike your insulin levels and make you fat.

Oh, sure, the fact that you used whole grain flour to make it might make it SLIGHTLY less horrible for you, but that’s like smoking low-tar cigarettes.  It’s still a bad idea.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.  Any time you process a food, ANY TIME you process a food, you start to make it unhealthy.  The more processed or refined it is, the more unhealthy it is.  The nitwits who wrote this study are trying to make it sound like eating graham crackers- crackers full of sugar and made with hydrogenated vegetable oils- should actually count as a eating whole grains.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  I guess Grape Soda counts as eating fruit now, too.

If you’re looking for a guarenteed way to get fat and stay that way, start pretending that sugar-filled processed snacks are whole foods. I mean, jeesh, this was an old Bill Cosby comedy routine!  He used to joke about how he baked his kids chocolate cake for breakfast because it contained eggs, milk, and wheat, so it must be healthy!

Part of the problem is the outdated food pyramid and so many researchers’ stubborn refusal to open their eyes and realize that it isn’t working.  Some people simply do as they are told, believe what they are told, and refuse to look into the facts for themselves.  This is a real problem in research, obviously, but that really doesn’t stop it from happening.

If these researcher had stopped to think for a microsecond, perhaps they would realize that a focus on getting anything at all with the words “whole grain” involved into your body might not work out as planned.  However, here’s what happens.  Somebody declares “We need to find a way to get kids to eat more whole grains!” and the solution doesn’t need to make sense so long as the words “Kids eating more whole grains” is somehow involved.

HEY!  I’ve got an idea!  Here’s a way to get kids to eat more whole grains!  Make waffles out of whole grains, and drench them in maple syrup!  Thin City, here we come!  Then we’ll soak spinach in sugar water, and put chocolate sprinkles on carrots… I AM A GENIUS.  I have single-handedly just solved our nation’s obesity epidemic.  Just turn everything into a sugar-covered snack, and it will all work out just fine.

Or, we’ll all explode into fatness even faster than we are now.

And parents, I know kids love snacks.  Of course they do.  Everybody does. They’re tasty.  But pretending a sugary snack is somehow good for you, because some microscopic portion of it is made of something that used to be healthy, isn’t helping.  You can’t fool Mother Nature.  The laws of physiology don’t care if you really, really, REALLY want to believe that eating a graham cracker is the same as eating a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal.

The only way to lose the weight (diet-wise) is to cut out the processed foods, especially those with sugar or sweeteners added, and stick with a whole foods, unprocessed diet.  There’s no real way around it.  So instead of lying to yourself and getting frustrated with not getting any results, simply focus on changing your habits to match up with what works in reality.

In the meantime, I’m going to buy these moronic researchers a bicycle and tell them to pretend it’s a rocket ship.  So they can go straight to the Moon and stop making such stupid claims.

Stay healthy!

Source: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/07/23/Sneaking-in-whole-grains-via-snacks/UPI-82061279937609/

Remember a little while back, when everybody started freaking out over a toxic chemical called BPA because it was found in plastic bottles- especially baby bottles- and could leach into the water or milk or whatever was in the bottle?

Surprise!  It hasn’t gone away.  In fact, it’s as popular as ever.  Not in plastic bottles… no no no, you’re all looking in that direction now, they can’t get away with THAT… but in the lining of canned food.  You see, something has to protect the metal of the cans from that darn food, and that’s done with a resin sealant made mostly of… all together now… BPA.

Of course, lobbyists and trade groups promise that BPA is safe, despite a massive lack of study into it… I’m guessing because they make millions and millions of dollars off of it.  Just a guess.  And the FDA is pretty sure it’s okay, mostly because they’re a bunch of ineffective nitwits who can’t get anything right.

So what’s the big deal?  Well, like with many industrial pollutants, there’s a concern that BPA may be estrogenic, meaning it mimics or alters the way the female hormone estrogen works in the body.  Estrogenic toxins may be responsible for an untold number of health problems in our society; it’s hard to tell because the endocrine (hormone) system is so complex and intertwined, that being able to target one specific problem becomes nearly impossible.  The big one I keep hearing about is cancer.

There’s one researcher who’s finding that it actually changes the way our DNA works, in such a way to encourage cancer.  Remember, cancer is basically runaway growth, and DNA is the blueprint for growth.  DNA has some protective mechanisms that help make sure that when your body builds something, it gets built properly and doesn’t become a uncontrolled growth (tumor).  Remove those protective mechanisms, like BPA is thought to do, and all bets are off.

This, of course, is only one possible toxic effect.  The truth is, we just don’t know what this crap does to us.  And while various industry spokespersons (read:  spin doctors) say it would take a massive amount of exposure to BPA to cause a problem, I personally take the stance that avoiding ANY dosage level of poison is a good policy.

Folks, don’t expect the government to have your back on this one.  You’re going to have to take care of yourself, as usual. 

This is just one more of a long, long list of reasons to stick to a whole foods diet and avoid processed foods.  The more I hear about this sort of nonsense, the more firmly I believe, simple is better, and natural is the way to go.

As always, please feel free to comment, ask questions, and spread the word with the social networking share buttons below.