You are what you eat, for better or for worse

Book Excerpt

From my new book Nourish Your Self Whole: A Guide to Core Dietary Pillars, with Achievable Steps for Vibrant Health

Book coverFood is one of the most important influences on your overall health. Many of us erroneously chalk our health trajectory up to our genes, which is the biological equivalent of the luck of the draw. However, scientific research shows that about eighty-four percent of disease is actually determined by our epigenetics.

Among other things, epigenetics can be heavily determined by nutritional, environmental, and lifestyle factors, with food being a top driver. This means that our health is not simply impacted by our innate or hereditary genes acting out. These epigenetic influences help decide which genes “express” themselves, that is, which ones are active or dormant, and ultimately impact our health. So for someone that eats fried fast food every day, they may have genes that are not ideal turned on and active, while another person eating a healthy diet may have those same dangerous genes remain in the “off” position. To sum it up, it’s not just the genes you have in your DNA makeup, it’s also how they are influenced and triggered by outside factors like food that influence your overall health.

As a culture, many of our health indicators are declining because of the impact of these negative epigenetic factors. Chronic disease rates are skyrocketing, and experts believe that changes in our collective food choices and culture-wide eating habits are some of the primary causes. This does not simply impact adults. Chronic disease rates among children between 1994 and 2006 doubled! This is a disturbing trend that cuts across the age spectrum, but especially seems to be growing with each new generation of children.

Why is this? Where food is concerned, diets high in sugar, refined carbs, and highly processed vegetable oils are not compatible with healthy genetic expression. That’s right, genes don’t function well on the heavy doses of these substances that most of us consume. The bad genes that we hear about in the news, such as Alzheimer’s & breast cancer genes, don’t necessarily cause their damage unless specific conditions activate them. When negative gene expressions are triggered, this in turn can cause many diseases and negative health conditions.

In other words, our genes aren’t necessarily our destiny. The choices we make have a powerful influence, but the good news is that bad gene expressions have the potential to be reversed when controllable factors like food consumption are improved.

The bottom line for most of us is that there are too many irritants and toxins and not enough nutrients coming into the body. Nutrients can powerfully counteract the negative stimuli we are pummeled with each day, from air pollution to stress and poor food choices, among others.

One of the most powerful antidotes comes in the form of vegetables and fruits, as they can help clean up and shuffle out many toxins, but all the steps within this book are critical. I will of course be discussing many tips on improving your diet in the bulk of this book. Additionally, the last quarter of the book will highlight other lifestyle and environmental factors that you can improve for maximal health results and more ideal epigenetic expression.

The Proper Fuel for Our Bodies

It’s so important to give your body what it needs to function properly. You wouldn’t put diesel fuel in a premium unleaded engine. It would break down. And yet so many of us do just that to our own bodies by filling them with poor-quality foods.

You’ve also likely heard by now that consistently high levels of inflammation are unhealthy for the body. In fact, rampant inflammation is thought to be a primary factor behind heart disease, cancers, and other serious chronic health issues. (There is a strong correlation between excessive inflammation and negative gene expression as well.) The dietary tips within this book are largely anti-inflammatory. They will help you balance out your immune system, too, restoring your body’s capacity to do what it is supposed to at an optimal level of performance.

All that being said, every body is unique. You will discover for yourself which combination of foods and nutrients help your body perform at its best. There is no “expert” out there who can replace your own innate wisdom when you are tuned into what you really need. When you clean up your diet, your senses and awareness of how your body feels when you eat particular things that either work for or against it will become more astute. You’ll be better able to gauge what you most need. These pillars should be a solid starting point, but listen closely for what works best for you. This does not mean what your current taste buds or emotions want, but what your body systems want and need. Their signals are trying to communicate with you all the time, but the SAD diet (standard American diet) triggers so many disruptive signals that it’s much harder to figure out what is really going on until you give them more priority by cleaning up your health.

You can learn more or buy the book here!

Nourish Your Self Whole – The New Book

An overview of my forthcoming new book, “Nourish your Self Whole: A Guide to Core Nutritional Pillars, with Achievable Steps for Vibrant Health.”Book cover

Healthy food and lifestyle choices are more than virtuous practices. They are often the magic key to keeping our body running in its optimal and precision-tuned natural state of wellness. The poor choices we make are frequently the driving force behind our body’s undue degradation, far more than most people realize.

The encouraging news that I’m excited to share with you in this book is that vibrant and enlivening health are well within reach. Good food is medicine. Weaving the four nutritional pillars in this book into your life can help create substantial healing for your body and get you back into the shape in which you can thrive. This will inevitably lead to a more fulfilling and energetic life. And, I believe, it’s one of the ultimate acts of self-love.

Rather than write an exhaustive overview of nutrition and all the things we could do to be healthier, I have distilled the nutrition steps in this book down to the four most highly leveraged and important “pillars” for good health. Even those of you with a crazy busy modern life can implement some of these steps and start to improve. Every step you take, even small ones, make a difference. There is plenty within to get you on a great path to feel amazing!

These tips can help you:

  • Prevent disease and in some cases reverse,
  • balance weight without worrying much about calories (eat plenty of the good stuff!),
  • generate more energy and vitality,
  • improve blood sugar and cholesterol,
  • shed or reduce longstanding body aches and pains,
  • clear up foggy-headedness,
  • create vibrant skin,
  • improve your mood,
  • help you sleep better, and more…

 

Is Coconut Oil Really Poison? Or a Health Food?

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been asked by quite a few folks, “Is coconut really bad for you?” You may have seen some headlines recently citing a professor who called it “pure poison” and kicked off another debate. Coconut Oil

However, most of the researchers I trust, who are looking at high-quality science, hold a much different view. When part of a healthy diet that includes a range of different types of healthy fats, coconut oil can be a healthy part of it.

One of my favorite researchers, Dr. Sarah Ballantyne (who has her Ph.D. in medical biophysics and spent years as an award winning researcher), had this to say in a recent article she wrote on the topic:

“The myopic view of coconut oil as harmful due to its high saturated fat content not only ignores the very real biological differences between medium-chain and long-chain dietary saturated fats, but is also refuted by recent, well-designed, human studies that show quite conclusively that coconut oil does not increase cardiovascular disease risk.”

In the article, Dr. Ballantyne really digs into the facts and science behind coconut oil. If you are concerned, I’d urge you to give it a read.

Also, a recent study found this to be true of coconut oil:

“Coconut oil significantly raised HDL (good) cholesterol with no differences in LDL compared with olive oil. Coconut oil did also did not differ significantly from olive oil in terms of the total cholesterol to HDL or non-HDL ratio.” (These are common indicators of “good” cholesterol stats.)

COCONUT OIL CAN BE PART OF A HEART HEALTHY DIET

In a nutshell, it’s smart to eat a well-rounded variety of healthy fats, leaning most heavily on the monounsaturated varieties, like olive, avocado, nuts and seeds. If you eat meat, try to get quality grassfed varieties which are much higher in heart healthy omega 3’s. If you decide to go with coconut oil as part of it, focus on high quality virgin and extra virgin coconut oil, which most of the studies that show its health benefits have focused on.

For most people, moderate amounts of saturated fats should be part of a heart healthy diet, and the medium chain varieties from coconut oil can offer many health benefits, especially when in conjunction with an overall healthy whole foods diet that is low in sugar and refined carbs, and high in vegetables (and a bit of fruit). Dr. Ballantyne and others suggest around 10-15% of daily calories from saturated fat.

You can read more about healthy fats in my recent blog article.

Eat Plenty of Healthy Fat for Optimal Health

When it comes to the topic of dietary fat, we’ve been sold a mountain of falsehoods over the past decades. The fats we were told were good, like industrial seed vegetable oils1, are actually largely toxic and can cause disease, while healthy fats can help protect against it. The good whole-food based fats, even quality saturated fats2, are an important part of a healthy diet.Healthy Fats

We were told that eating fat made you fat and we heard little about sugar and refined carbs’ role in weight gain (or disease). The evidence is now clear though: Good fat is crucial to thriving health and the real triggers for weight gain are often sugar, refined carbs and bad fats.3 4 The healthy fats you eat in your diet, are not the same thing as stored fat in your body. There is a whole other set of mechanisms at play to trigger fat storage, and that fat storage is often born of glucose (sugar).

Having enough quality fats in your daily diet actually tends to increase metabolism and leads to sustained weight management. It’s important for most people to get enough quality fat when trying to manage weight. Our body needs nutritional caloric satiation to function properly. When you try to lose weight simply by calorie restriction, it actually reduces metabolism. It’s important to eat enough good fats so that your body isn’t overly stressed and can perform its key functions well.

Fat was also supposed to be the big cause of heart disease and a number of other health conditions. When it comes to healthy fats, the exact opposite is true. By depriving ourselves of the good fats we need, we’ve shifted towards needing to eat and burn sugar and carbs for energy, which are literally killing us!

Healthy fats are calorically very nutrient dense. They feed the body far more per calorie than carbs/sugar. Therefore, you get a much better bang for the buck and are able to satiate yourself more than you can with carbs/sugar. You have to eat a lot more carbs/sugar for your body to get the energy it needs to run than you do with fat. This is a particularly important point for those who are trying to manage their weight.

Now as I said earlier, there’s a big caveat. Highly processed and easily oxidizable and inflammatory industrial seed vegetable oils, which we’ve been told for decades are so much better for us, are actually a big villain. We’re talking canola, soy, corn, safflower, sunflower, the so-called “safe fats.” These oils are extracted through chemical processes, often using toxic substances.

Alternatively, good quality fats are essential to our existence. Here we are talking about:

  • olive,
  • coconut,
  • avocado,
  • sustainably sourced palm oil,
  • nuts and seeds,
  • quality animal fats (grass-fed in particular),
  • egg yolks,
  • butter and ghee (yup, I said butter).

These are whole-food based fats. When not eating a whole food source, independent oils attained should be through expeller pressed methods, which, unlike toxic chemical processing, are safe and provide a nourishing food.

The good news is, by bringing in more healthy fats and replacing the bad, you don’t have to stop eating or cut something out of your diet, you’re simply swapping it with a form of fat that is much healthier and actually tastes even better. So it’s a win, win!

You want your fat stores to be of the utmost quality. The industrial seed oils that are often oxidized before you even use them, work against your body in a myriad of ways. Source quality is always critical! You are what you eat.

Most people find that when they shift to a diet that burns more fat for energy instead of glucose, body weight quickly stabilizes and energy is gained. Fat and glucose burn differently in the body. In most cases, good fat actually speeds up our metabolism. And it’s a more sustainable source of fuel for prolonged energy.

Oxidization is not our friend:

A key risk of consuming bad fats occurs because of a process called oxidation.5 Oxidation is a disaster for the body, and another main driver of disease, including: heart disorders, cancer and strokes. This is one reason that most vegetable oils are a problem. The bad ones oxidize easily.

Oxidation is damage caused by oxygen. It’s like when apples or bananas turn brown from air exposure. This happens with fats too, and it’s essentially what happens inside your body when you eat oxidized oils. It’s kind of like rusting on the inside. The ensuing “oxidative stress” creates “free radicals” that are inflammatory and can damage your body. Most of the bad and highly refined vegetable oils listed above cause great risk of this happening inside you.

Fried foods from industrial seed vegetable oils, leave your cells and arteries looking just like the fried foods — rugged, crusty, torn. They disable cells functioning in the short term, and ultimately destroy healthy cells, causing heart attacks and strokes. This process is also how oxidation fries arteries! While eating food fried in these bad oils is the worst of the worst, eating the oils themselves generally does the same thing over time. Eating fried foods from these oils is one of the very worst things you can do to yourself. It creates both short term damage and suffering as well as dire consequences in the long term. (You can fry your own foods in certain oils; see below for more details).

Trans & Hydrogenated Fat:

This type of fat that is now universally understood to be toxic and linked directly to coronary artery disease is called trans fat, or hydrogenated fat. Transfats and hydrogenated or even partially-hydrogenated oils are highly processed foods, typically made from industrial seed vegetable oils. They are created this way through processing, so that they can be more “shelf stable” and thus cheaper and easier to produce and store. These fats should be avoided at all times. Be mindful, even when your label says “0” trans fats, it can still include some as it allows for .5 grams or under to be listed as “0”. The more processed foods you eat with these bad oils, the more the grams will add up. ANY amount will do damage.

The lesson here: ditch the margarine and bring back the butter!

Learn much more about fats and other crucial dietary steps, by downloading my free guide “Your Path to Vibrant Health.”

Learn more about fat from the experts: For those interested (or who need more convincing), you can really geek out on the various types of fat our body needs, and those it doesn’t. There are so many roles fat plays in thriving health. If you are interested in learning more, I’d highly suggest reading the work of Dr. Mark Hyman and/or Dr. Catherine Shanahan. Google their names along with the word “fat” for a myriad of informative articles and videos. Here are a couple of good ones:

Dr. Hyman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgWBKJsJtk0

Dr. Shanahan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbpX41oCi1M&t=508s (this one’s really only for those who want to geek out on the deep science, it’s in-depth but fascinating.)