A Cornucopia of Choices

            

What do Special K cereal and Yoplait yogurt have in common? Well for one they are often promoted as being suitable for a healthy lifestyle or even worse weight loss. When a product has high fructose corn syrup as one of their main ingredients as well numerous other by products of corn, that product is not only horrible for you but has no business being promoted as a weight loss product. In fact, if you followed the source of the ingredients in most of our foods you will probably end up in some corn field in Nebraska. These so called “heart healthy” weight loss products have ingredients that not only you can’t pronounce but were probably made out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. Marketing has now completely overtaken science and much of what we were led to believe is not true.

So much of what we eat is just a clever arrangement of corn. If you were to open up your pantry or refrigerator at this very moment I would say ninety percent of your food has some kind of corn product in it. Your ketchup is laced with high fructose corn syrup, there is corn in your cheese, chewing gum, peanut butter, salad dressings, diet soda drinks, cereals, meat, junk food, margarine, juice heck even your batteries have corn in it. Everything starts with corn and we can now break that down into high fructose corn syrup (highly processed corn), Aspartame and Maltodextrin (found in your diet sodas), Di- glycerides, Xanthan Gum, Ascorbic Acid, Citric Acid, Sorbic Acid and the rest are too long to list. Essentially our food is being designed in a lab to stay fresher and last longer.  Best of all is you can feed it to animals and corn is now the primary food source of fish. Cows were designed to eat grass but now they only eat corn because not only is it cheaper but it gets them fat quicker.

Grains are now overwhelmingly the number one calorie source in the United States. The question is do we really need to be consuming 5+ servings of grains a day? This is where the real problem starts; grains have only been a part of our diet for the last ten thousand years which is a fraction of our evolution. Plus grains back then were a lot different to the so called wholesome loaf of bread you buy in your local grocery store today. Grains are anti-nutrient, not metabolized very well, promote fat storage and will send your blood glucose and insulin levels skyrocketing off the charts bad. We are told to get 5+ servings of whole grains per day in order to achieve optimum health but the irony of this claim is that I challenge anyone to eat 5+ servings of whole grains a day and maintain a healthy body weight or feel good without doing insane amounts of cardio to burn off the extra carbohydrate intake. If you want to lose weight do not over complicate things, base your diet on organic garden vegetables, especially greens, lean meats, nuts and seeds, little starch, and no sugar. Tell yourself you are allergic to grains because it is what makes you fat and slow and the more you cut out of your diet the better off you will be.