Recognizing Toxin-filled and Otherwise Unhealthy Foods: Getting a feel for genetically modified foods, Growing food without toxic influences and Avoiding unhealthy processed food.

Recognizing Toxin-filled and Otherwise Unhealthy Foods

In This Chapter

▶ Getting a feel for genetically modified foods

▶ Growing food without toxic influences

▶ Avoiding unhealthy processed food

 

The foods that are available on most grocery store shelves are often loaded with toxins, or they’re made using toxic processes, or both. It’s tough to eliminate the toxin-containing food from your pantry and refrigerator, but if you’re going to get serious about detoxification and detox dieting, you have to take that step.

To begin cutting out toxin-filled foods, you first need to be able to recognize them. That’s the aim of this chapter: to show you how to spot toxic foods.

I start with a look at genetically modified foods, give you a few tips for how you can grow some of your own toxin-free foods, and call your attention to several types of processed foods that you may not realize pose a toxic threat.

Being Wary of Genetically Modified (GM) Foods

I touch on the prevalence and potential threat of genetically modified foods in Chapter 3, but there’s much more to the story. I provide you with a lot more detail in this section. Foods that have been genetically modified — often called GM foods — include plants and animals with genes that scientists have played with, usually with the goal of increasing food production.

I want to make it clear that we’re not talking about selective breeding here. That process involves identifying positive traits in a couple of plants or animals of the same species and breeding them so that their offspring are likely to have those positive traits. The key phrase there is of the same species. In genetic modification, genes from lots of different species — from fish to insects to bacteria — are spliced together using biochemical processes in a lab.

In many cases the results sound appealing at first blush. Who wouldn’t want a tomato that stays ripe longer or corn that is less likely to get damaged by pillaging insects? The problem is that most foods created using genetic modification haven’t been around for very long, and it’s extremely difficult for even the savviest scientists to say what GM plants and animals will do to our environment — and, perhaps more importantly, to our bodies and health — in the long run. We may be creating and consuming foods that could damage ecosystems and harm our bodies in ways that haven’t been identified yet. Symptoms of these problems could take quite a while to surface, and when they do they may not initially be attributed to GM foods.

To better understand the impact of GM foods, consider what some people within the scientific community have said about the general process of genetic modification of food:

✓ In a recent public statement, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) called for “a moratorium on GM foods, long term inde- pendent studies, and labeling.” The AAEM went on to say that “several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food, including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regula- tion, and changes in the major organs and the gastrointestinal system.” The AAEM’s conclusion? That “there is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation.”

✓ Pushpa A. Bhargava, a world-renowned biologist and former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (one of the Indian government’s top science departments), reviewed 600 scientific studies on GM foods and came to the conclusion that GM organisms are a major contributor to the sharply deteriorating health of Americans.

✓ The British Medical Association, which represents more than 100,000 physicians, has called for an outright banning of all GM foods and a requirement for labeling in countries where GM foods still exist.

Clearly, there’s cause for concern when it comes to GM foods. With the rest of this section my aim is to finish bringing you up to speed on GM food basics and to let you know how you can identify (and avoid, if you choose) GM food products.

Understanding GM food basics

I don’t want to overload you with too many details on how GM plants and animals are created in a lab. However, to help you figure out exactly what I’m talking about here, an example would be useful.

There’s a bacterium that lives in soil called Bacillus thuringiensis, and it produces a toxin that kills many of the insects that destroy food crops (corn, for example). You might say that the bacterium contains a kind of natural pesticide. At a certain point, some people familiar with genetic modification realized that they might be able to take the gene from that bacterium that helps to produce the natural pesticide and insert that gene into plants that are grown for food. The result would be a crop that produces the insect toxin on its own and is much more resistant to attacks from hungry insects. That’s just what happened; the corn you eat today was modified in this way.

You may wonder, What’s the problem? Corn that doesn’t get eaten up by insects in the field sounds like a good thing.

The problem is this: The toxin that is now being produced by the corn ends up in our bodies, and it’s difficult to say what effects that toxin could have on us in the long run. What’s even more troubling is that the genes that cause the corn to produce the toxin can be transferred to the good bacteria that live in your intestines, and those bacteria will continue to make the toxin for years.

And the potential problems don’t stop there. In many instances, GM foods have been shown to cause health problems, including the following:

✓ Genetic material from GM foods has been found in the brains of animals that have been fed those foods.

✓ Foreign proteins that end up in some GM foods can cause allergic reactions.

For example, the United Kingdom saw a 50 percent jump in soy allergies after it started allowing GM soy products to be sold to consumers.

✓ A few years ago, a GM form of a supplement was released for public use without being tested. Before it was taken off the market, the product was linked to 37 deaths and 1,500 other reports of adverse affects.

I hope you’ll think hard about the impact that GM foods can have on you and your family, and consider trying to limit the amount of GM foods that end up in your diet.

Trying to identify GM foods

GM foods don’t necessarily look different from other foods, so it’s not always easy to tell which foods are GM and which aren’t when you’re shopping for food in the United States. That’s the exception, though — not the rule. In many countries (including all countries in the European Union), all GM food must be labeled to let consumers know that the food contains GM organisms.

When you’re trying to figure out which foods in your grocery store contain GM ingredients, it’s useful to know which plants and animals are most commonly modified. At the top of the list are corn and soybeans — two of the biggest sources of our calories in the United States. Recent estimates indicate that roughly 75 percent of the soybean crops and about one-third of the corn crops in the United States have been genetically modified. That’s an enormous amount of food! Both vegetables are used to make many different types of ingredients that show up in processed foods (ingredients like soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup, which you find on a huge variety of labels in the processed food aisles of your grocery store). Some researchers say that when you add up all the genetically modified foods and ingredients that are based on GM foods, about 75 percent of the food for sale in a run-of-the-mill grocery store in the United States is genetically modified.

The GM food blitz doesn’t stop at corn and soybeans. Several other crops are often tinkered with at the genetic level, including cotton and cotton seed oil (check your candy bars for that one), papaya, tomatoes, potatoes, canola, sugar cane, sugar beets, rice, alfalfa, squash, cantaloupe, and flax. That’s not an all-inclusive list by any means, because it’s very difficult to obtain information on which crops are actually genetically modified. The regulations and review processes of genetic modification are sparse and lax at best.

And the problem isn’t limited to plants. The big genetic modification companies are now genetically modifying animals, too. To date, pigs, goats, fish, and cows have been genetically modified, and in the short term it doesn’t look like that trend is going to slow down. As is the case with GM plants, very few regulations or rules exist to limit the use of GM animals for food in the United States, so it can be extremely tough to tell what has been modified and what hasn’t.

So what is a health-conscious consumer to do when he’s faced with a grocery store full of foods that very well may have been tinkered with?

At this point in the United States, no requirements exist for labeling GM foods. The only surefire way to make sure you’re not buying or eating GM food products is to stick to foods that are labeled “100 percent organic.” That’s actually a good practice to follow whenever possible, and I cover all the ins and outs of eating organic in Chapter 7.

Many people are very concerned about genetic modification and the impact it will have on this and future generations. Right now, no studies exist to tell us what kinds of changes are likely to happen to us and our environment as a result of the GM revolution. But I encourage you to seek out new information about GM foods so you can find out quickly when certain products are revealed to be dangerous, either for your health or for our environment.

Growing Food in a Toxic World

Even if the seeds used to grow many of our foods aren’t genetically modified, it’s still tough for them to sprout, grow, produce fruit, get harvested, and end up in our grocery stores without being poisoned with fertilizers and insecticides. These chemicals are very widely used, and it’s getting difficult to escape their influence on our food. The days of the small-time farmer and his attention to detail are almost gone. Today, large commercial farms with genetically modified seeds, fertilizers, and insecticides are the norm.

Because of these toxic influences, many Americans are trying to grow their own fruits and vegetables so they can be certain that the foods they’re eating don’t come with a built-in side of poison. I’m a doctor, not a master gardener, so I won’t try to tell you how you can turn your backyard (or even a few pots on your patio) into an organic vegetable or herb garden. But as an expert on toxins, what I can offer is an overview of the ways you can cut out the toxic fertilizers and insecticides that many people turn to when they endeavor to grow some of their own food.

If you’d like to read more about how to grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs in a truly organic way, check out Organic Gardening For Dummies by Ann Whitman, Suzanne DeJohn, and the National Gardening Association (Wiley). It contains loads of basic but extremely helpful information on how to set up and succeed with a toxin-free garden.

Focusing on fertilizer

Picking out a safe fertilizer can be a daunting task because much of what’s available now contains at least a few toxic ingredients. Making matters much worse are the labeling conventions for fertilizers. For instance, a product marketed and sold as a fertilizer is required to list only the plant nutrient ingredients that are included in the formula. The other ingredients — which can and often do include toxins — don’t have to be listed.

Fertilizer is usually sold as a mix, and the bags are prominently labeled with three numbers. A common example is “10-10-10.” This means that the fertil- izer contains 10 percent nitrogen, 10 percent phosphorus, and 10 percent potassium. Here’s the obvious (yet unaddressed) question: What makes up the other 70 percent of the product? The truth is that the 70 percent can be anything from municipal sewage sludge to toxic waste. Some unethical fertilizer manufacturers even go so far as to label their products with the word “organic” when many of the non-nutrient ingredients are based on byproducts from water treatment facilities.

If you want to dodge all the possible toxic fertilizer pitfalls, do the following:

✓ Look for fertilizer that is labeled “100 percent organic.” That “100 percent” part is important because sometimes “organic” can be used by itself in inappropriate and misleading ways.

✓ Try fertilizers that come from animals. These can include blood or bone meal and manure.

✓ Look into mineral fertilizer options like Epsom salt and limestone.

Investigating insecticides

Generally speaking, insecticides are as loaded up with harmful toxins as any products on the market. Most of the bottles of insecticides in your hardware or home improvement store have enough toxic material to kill you pretty easily. (If you want to discover more about the threats posed by insecticides and see a breakdown of the three different levels of toxicity that are used to categorize these substances, flip back to Chapter 3.) Why does it make sense to spray these materials onto the plants that will produce food you plan to eat?

The good news is that lots of formulas for safe organic pesticides exist, and many good products are available at health food stores and on the Internet. Here are a few examples.

✓ Concentrated garlic rids plants of a multitude of damaging insects.

✓ Soap mixed with pyrethrum, an extract from the pyrethrum flower, thwarts a wide range of aphids, whiteflies, mites, and a number of other pests.

✓ A liquid or wax made from hot peppers wards off quite a few insect species. You can even use hot sauce!

✓ You can make an effective fungicide at home by mixing baking soda with a little vegetable oil.

I strongly advise against using chemical, commercial pesticides. But if you do choose to use them, please do so sparingly. Make sure you’re working in well- ventilated areas, and be sure to at least wash your hands (or, better yet, take a shower) when you’re finished. Be sure to also keep these materials in a safe place (away from children). And make certain that the containers are extremely well marked and identified as poison.

Working around Processed Foods

In Chapter 3, I provide quite a lot of information about processed food. Just about everything I cover there supports this statement: Don’t eat processed foods if you can help it. We were meant to eat fresh, healthful, simple foods — not brightly colored, shrinkwrapped mystery foods that are loaded up with high fructose corn syrup and other toxin-laden ingredients.

It usually isn’t too difficult to identify processed foods in your grocery store, and if you’re honest with yourself you probably know when you’re putting a potentially harmful processed food in your shopping cart. But if you need help, here’s a very simple and virtually universal rule for avoiding the processed food aisles at the store:

When you’re grocery shopping, select most of what goes in your cart from the store’s perimeter aisles. The outer aisles are almost always where you find produce, fresh meat, and a lot of the other foods that haven’t been ruined by common food processing techniques.

You should be able to dodge most processed foods with just a little effort. However, some food processing methods can be harder to detect but still surprisingly dangerous to your health. I cover the top two here.

Keeping your hands off homogenized food

Many dairy products, including almost all the milk that you find in the aver- age grocery store, have been homogenized. Homogenization is a process that involves forcing a liquid through a very fine filter at really remarkable pressures — sometimes as much as 4,000 pounds per square inch. (That’s more than a lot of pressure washers, which are used to clean caked-in and baked-on dirt from sidewalks, among other things.)

Milk is homogenized to keep the cream that it contains from separating when you leave it sitting in your refrigerator. (It’s done more for aesthetic reasons than anything else.) The problem is that the homogenization process alters the milk, making it less healthy for humans.

Multiple studies show an increase in cardiovascular disease among people who drink larger amounts of homogenized milk. Further examinations into these connections have been historically poorly funded, so we’re not exactly sure why homogenized milk may contribute to cardiovascular ailments. One theory involves a substance called xanthine oxidase (XO), which is present

in milk. XO in milk that hasn’t been homogenized isn’t absorbed in our intestines, but XO is absorbed when the milk has undergone homogenization. Elevated levels of XO in your blood have been implicated as a cause of damage to the blood vessels that can result in plaque development in the arteries, which can lead to blocked arteries and heart attacks.

If you’re wary of homogenized milk — and I think you should be — ask at your local health food store for milk that hasn’t been put through the homogenization process. You can also find it through local dairies and farms, and some of them will even allow you to come and tour their facilities. That can be a good way to see what is done to the milk you may be consuming to make sure you’re seeing the udder truth when it comes to the safety of your milk.

Passing on pasteurization

The pasteurization process has been around for about 150 years, and it involves raising the temperature of a food or liquid to a very high level in the interest of killing off bacteria, parasites, and other dangerous organisms. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but a problem arises because heating food up to such extremely high temperatures can destroy many of the beneficial substances that may be present, like vitamins, nutrients, and enzymes. Pasteurization destroys plenty of dangerous critters, but it also limits the good stuff that your body needs to get out of the foods you eat.

These days, pasteurization is most commonly associated with milk. Almost all milk is pasteurized even though the process isn’t nearly as necessary now that milk farms and dairies are much cleaner and more sanitary than they used to be. Pasteurization ruins a lot of the good vitamins that milk can provide.

While milk is the most familiar pasteurized food, many others exist, including almonds, apple cider, beer, canned food, cheese, crabs, cream, eggs, fruit juice, honey, maple syrup, soy sauce, sports drinks, vinegar, water, and wine.

You’ll often see “Pasteurized” notes on the labels of food products that have been put through the pasteurization process. If you’re concerned that your food may have lower nutritional quality because it has been superheated, keep your eye out for that notation.