Adages are memorable because there is truth in them. “You are what you eat” comes to mind recently for me as I have been studying nutrition, health, and longevity. Dr. Means’ book, which I mentioned in It Turns Out My Dad Was Right, gave me perspective on the vast quantities of food we will consume throughout our lifetime (154,000 pounds). The adage, “you are what you eat,” originally was, “tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” This was coined by French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1825. He was referring to how food influences our energy levels and is the main determinant of our overall health.
Two hundred years ago, junk food hadn’t been invented, and most people in France were eating a whole food diet, so it is hard for me to imagine what a poor diet looked like. Is there ever a thing of too many croissants? The foods people ate were what they could come by within their village, and buying local was the only option.
Fast forward to today, and it is almost impossible to consume only local food or even whole foods, for that matter. The market has changed considerably and is now dominated primarily by multinational food conglomerates. Although they have a vested interest in creating lifetime consumers, they are much more interested in the consuming part of that descriptor and much less so with the lifetime element.
According to Dr. Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food, these corporations are creating Ultra-Processed Food to be addictive, ensuring a constant revenue stream for the company. Food may be too generous a term. An industrially created, edible substance may be appropriate. As a free market capitalist, I treaded lightly into this book with a healthy skepticism. I didn’t want to believe that some of the most beloved household brands (too numerous to mention) cared so little for the consumers who were voraciously devouring their products. This insatiable appetite often leads to many preventable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, metabolic dysfunction, IBS, and even some cancers.
If you think about it, many additives that provide a longer shelf life, color, or flavor are synthetic ingredients. These ingredients have only recently been introduced to our biology, frankly, our bodies have no idea how to process them. Some ingredients pass effortlessly through, while others are stored in our cells, causing all sorts of problems.
In the book, Dr. van Tulleken is trying to raise awareness of this problem and sound an alarm for anyone interested in hearing it. He does this at great personal and professional risk, taking on some very powerful companies and the practices they are actively using to make “food” more addictive. This is one of the reasons these companies employ biochemists and scientists. The deeper I got in the book, the more upset I became and disillusioned by the callousness of actions by the name brands I grew to esteem. I will go out of my way to avoid Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Dannon, just to name a few.
Everything that I have learned so far about diet and nutrition has led me to believe that a whole foods diet is the best way to go. If you don’t have the ingredients listed on the package in your kitchen, you probably shouldn’t ingest them. Calcium phosphate, as an example, is commonly used as a texturing agent, making things smooth and creating mouthfeel, found in many products, such as Oreos. However, it could disrupt bone mineralization, harm the kidneys, and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Yum.
A friend of mine recently introduced me to an app he uses while grocery shopping. His daughter downloaded it onto his phone after looking in his cupboards. It’s called Yuka, and it couldn’t be easier to use. Simply scan the stripey code on the package and you will find a simple evaluation of the product on a scale from 0 to 100 and a color coding (green is good, red is bad) for people who don’t like numbers. Just because a package says all natural on it doesn’t mean it is good for you, as I discovered by scanning some of the “healthy” foods in our pantry. The app further evaluates each ingredient so you know why they earned their particular rating. It may have way too much sodium in it or too much sugar (or too much poison). This has changed a trip to the grocery store for me.
This app is not limited to food. I switched deodorants and toothpaste recently due to disturbing additives in each of them. Here I am practicing good oral hygiene, only to find out that I am brushing my teeth with Butylated Hydroxytoluene BHT. This is a banned substance in the EU and Japan. It is an endocrine disrupter (which ironically is the exact system I am trying to repair), and potentially adding toxicity to the liver, kidneys, and lungs. Some of its industrial uses include lubricants, plastics, an additive to paints, and an embalming fluid. Yes, it freshens the breath and increases the oxidative resistance of industrial lubricants. Not a very snappy jingle, but you get the idea.
I had been using Colgate for years (even though my dentist, father, preferred Crest) and thought I was doing the right thing. Without this information from this handy little app, I would have continued to disrupt my endocrine system and slowly poison my organs. Yuka rated it with a red circle, scored it a 16 out of 100, and classified it as Bad. The nice thing is that they give you healthy alternatives, which is the one I switched to.
The products that we knew and loved from 30 or more years ago no longer exist. When Twinkies originally hit the shelves 90 years ago, they were made with household ingredients. You could recognize and pronounce each one. Today, they include high fructose corn syrup, GMO flour, in addition to an entire chemistry set of unpronounceable additives.
I’m not trying to take the fun out of eating or shame anyone for their food choices. My only intention is to raise awareness that our products have changed and they are far less wholesome than they used to be. This is done intentionally, with the specific goal of maximizing profits with complete disregard for health outcomes. If you enjoy indulging in your favorite processed food every once in a while, I’m sure there is no real harm in that. However, if it remains a constant in your life, you should do it with the knowledge of just what you are consuming. For this reason, I love relying on this fancy app; you may want to check it out as well.