10 Signs Your Diet Is Destroying Your Health

Hello Health Champions today we're going to talk about the top 10 signs that your diet is silently destroying your health and I'm saying silently because a lot of these are going to be a little more subtle than what people associate with suffering and disease so they kind of sneak up on you and the first one is that you're always hungry and why would this be well sugar and processed foods that we get in a bad diet they very often result in blood sugar swings and your body doesn't work very well with swings it wants things

to be stable so if we think about your blood sugar it wants your blood sugar in a very narrow range but when you eat sugar and processed starches and aot processed foods you're going blood sugar is going to swing wildly outside this range and if it goes super high it's going to come down crashing very fast and for a lot of people it's going to come down a little bit below where it's supposed to be be and that's where you get hungry and then if your blood sugar is low and you get hungry you're going

to eat more of the same stuff that caused the problem so then you go up and down up and down and you're getting frequently hungry but there's another way this works too because processed foods is depleted food so the reason we want to eat food is because it gives us certain things and we're looking for fuel that we can turn into energy with the addition of oxygen then we're looking for building blocks that we can turn into tissue and that's proteins essential amino acids and good fats essential fatty acids and of course we also need

fat for fuel and then we also are looking for catalysts and those are the vitamins and minerals that make all the reactions in the body move forward and if we eat real unprocessed Foods then it's going to contain all those things that the body is looking for and it's going to contain them in a certain Ratio or quantity so if we imagine the amount of food or the amount of calories in this food then it's going to have a corresponding amount of nutrients we'll put an N there for nutrient and this would be the essential

amino acids the essential fatty acids the vitamins and the minerals and so forth but if we eat processed foods now for the same amount of calories now we're only getting a fraction of the nutrients in there and the rest is going to be missing so this is a deficiency the body was looking for this much it only got that much so what happens obviously you get hungry so with the processed food there's a lack of nutrients the body isn't getting what it was looking for and therefore it's going to make you eat more to compensate

it says I got this many calories I expected this many nutrients I only get that much now eat some more so we get all the nutrients that we want and over time of course that can result in poor health if the body isn't getting the components it's looking for then it's not going to work as well the problem of course is that this takes years or even decades before it becomes a real problem so very often we don't realize there's a problem or we don't associate it because there's so many young healthy people who are

doing just fine on junk food and for example when I was an athlete in my 20s and even when I competed in the Olympics I ate way too much processed foods but it didn't catch up with me yet number two is the Cravings are controlling you and that's kind of similar to hunger but it's still very different because this is more about why you are eating and if you ask yourself and you're super super honest about it then you'll figure this out and if you're eating because your body has certain needs and you're eating to

provide these building blocks and the fuel and all the nutrients and resources that your body needs now you have a hunger for food and this is real food that contains all those those things your body is looking for but more and more people are eating to change how they feel and if that's the primary reason that you're eating if you're feeling sad or agitated or upset or bored for a lot of people and you're eating to change how you feel then your food is acting more like a drug so we have to ask ourselves why

we are eating what's the reason that we want to put something in our mouths because the processed food manufacturers are well aware of this there's something called dopamine hijacking where dopamine is a neurotransmitter it's a brain chemical that changes how we feel and manufacturers know this because by Design there are entire Industries out there to make food additives and chemicals and put things in food to change how we feel to turn these Foods into drugs and that's part of why these processed foods are so addictive but another interesting way that very few people realize that

it's even possible is that if you eat something like sugar or some processed starch or this could also be in combination with antibiotics or anything that disrupts your gut Flora then you could get disbiosis an imbalance in the gut bacteria and then the sugar feeds selective pathogenic unfriend friendly bacteria but now these bacteria they feed off sugar and they start loving sugar and they get cravings for sugar so now these sugar-loving bacteria they signal your brain they produce different chemicals that mimic signals that you produce and now the brain doesn't know if these signals are

chemicals that you're releasing or if the bugs are releasing them because it all ends up in the bloodstream and gets up to the brain so now they get you Cravings even though you think you're doing fine here you might have an overgrowth of these sugar-loving bugs and you've been a weak on healthy food but all of a sudden you have these super cravings and they may not be your Cravings but your brain interprets it that way anyway so the emotional eating is a very real thing but the question is how did that start where did

did it start was it that we had an emotion we felt sad we felt bored and then we were looking for some food to change how we felt or was it that we had some kind of food that changed our emotion that changed how we felt and now we learned to depend on food to change those emotions well I'm going to argue for the second one I'm going to argue that it's the processed foods and the food chemicals that create the emotion and then it entrains this pattern and creates a vicious cycle for us and

why would I say that because your ancestors didn't have this processed food to change the emotion they only had real food and it's not to say that real food won't change how you feel because it can be very pleasurable to eat a nice meal but the question is what's the starting point is it that you're feeling bad that makes you want to eat and is that the primary reason that you're eating number three is that you wake up tired and this is especially if you feel like you've spent enough hours in the bed but you

may not be getting the quality of sleep that you should you may not be getting the different phases you may not spend enough time in deep sleep or in REM sleep and then that could affect you because you're not feeling fully rested and actually blood sugar swings again could have something to do with this because when you have blood sugar swings and like we talked about on the low end of that now you get a cortisol release so if you have blood sugar swings you're going to get cortisol swings and if this happens even a

little bit at night now this cortisol is going to shut off the Melatonin which is your sleep hormone and this makes sense because cortisol is a stress hormone it's there to make you very Alert in an emergency and obviously in an emergency you don't want to sleep so if these two hormones are doing different things then cortisol is going to override the Melatonin another way poor food can affect sleep is that magnesium and B vitamins are required for making melatonin and to be able to go into deep sleep so if you eat processed foods very

often they're going to be missing magnesium and B vitamins one of the most common things that are deficient and another thing to keep in mind is that serotonin which is a neurotransmitter is a precursor for melatonin it's a chemical that becomes melatonin and if we have screwed up our guts with a bunch of processed foods and other factors of course 90% or more of the serotonin is made by our gut bacteria so if our gut isn't working we may not be making the serotonin needed to make melatonin and now we can't sleep properly either number

four is stubborn weight and like we talked about before if we eat poor quality food which messes with blood sugar has few nutrients then that will tend to cause overeating and obviously overeating causes weight gain but one more thing that this works works against you is through insulin resistance because when you eat sugar and when you overeat now that's the recipe for insulin resistance and insulin is a fat storing hormone so when you eat an excess of food the excess gets turned into fat and gets stored on your body and insulin is the hormone that

does that but it doesn't even stop there it like a double whammy because insulin is fat storing and it prevents fat burning so now you can't break it down either the fat sits there for a future date when you run out of food but that day never comes and now you get super hungry because you can't get that food back that energy back so your body starts wanting to eat some more instead and unfortunately most people have bought into the idea of calories that it's all about the calories so they eat foods that create unstable

energy and then for all the reasons we talked about they gain weight and now they want to lose the weight so they go on a diet but diets are unsustainable they cause suffering they cause deprivation and most people think that oh I'll just diet for a week I'll just diet for 30 days and even if they last that long which most of them don't because of deprivation then they tend to gain the weight back firstly because they thought it was a limited time period so now they start eating all the things that created the problem

and the weight in the first place but also when you slow down your calories and you do it for a short period of time your body is going to compensate because it feels like your current weight is the right one and if you eat less then it's going to burn less it's going to slow down the metabolism and if you do this a lot then that's called yo-yo dieting and after so many times the body has a hard time to know what that set point is supposed to be doesn't know what your true ideal weight

is anymore because you moved it around so many times so now you have altered the set point and you are so much overweight but the body thinks that's where you're supposed to be and anytime you try to eat less now your slower metabolism your body burning less is going to keep you from losing the weight so the solution to this may not be really quick after it's become a problem but the solution is still to start eating real food that has the nutrients that prevent overeating and to become insulin sensitive to move that insulin level

down sign number five might be that you feel that you're aging faster than your friends and what could be behind that well again processed foods high in sugar high in white flour more processed oils they will cause glycated proteins when your blood sugar is higher blood sugar and protein they're kind of sticky together so if you have an increased level let's say your blood sugar is 50% higher or 30% higher than ideal low blood sugar now you have a 30 or a 50% higher likelihood of glucose sticking to the protein and if these glycated proteins

happen to be things like collagen and elastin things that are in your skin now that could result in wrinkles in sagging skin and in joint stiffness because collagen is a protein that your body uses for connective tissue it's all the tissues that bind things together so bone and hair and skin and blood vessels anything that has a structural property in the body is going to have collagen and it can get damaged by glycation sign number six is if you find you're more moody or anxious and again this can have to do with sugar causing blood

sugar swings and I hope that you're noticing this sounds almost like a broken record in how many things are caused by fluctuating blood sugar because the body wants stable energy and sugar is the opposite of that so blood sugar swings will cause rapid shifts in mood when blood sugar is high you feel good when blood sugar isow you feel not so good another reason for processed foods affecting mood is that it is typically devoid of essential fatty acids they process out any sort of essential fatty acids because these are very fragile and they want the

processed foods to be shelf stable so they take all of that away and especially the EPA and the DHA those are the longest and the most complex of the fatty acids and the body needs those for very critical reasons in very small quantities and if we don't get enough of those essential fatty acids that could cause brain inflammation and poor membrane integrity and this is so critical a structure in the body that we really need to understand a little bit more about it so every cell in your body has an outside layer it's a lipid

by layer that's like the outside surface of every cell and this is formed by two layers that have heads and tails and there is a water soluble portion that's facing outwards so you have fluid outside the cells and you have fluid inside the cells but inside this fat layer this lipid layer is the tail which is these fatty acids and they zigg zag kind of because that's the shape of the molecule but if they're saturated then they're mostly straight overall even though there's some zigzags the overall shape of that fatty acid is straight so if

we have nothing but straight molecules in here then they would pack very very closely together and this membrane would be stiff and rigid and it would lose some of these signaling properties that the cell needs to have so every cell needs to determine what goes in and what comes out of that cell but especially for brain cells for neurons it is critical because this membrane also determines the capacity the signal properties and that's what brain cells do they process information and they receive and send signals and that's why the structure of this membrane is so

critical and if we have enough of those EP and dhas then they're going to have a much more curved shape because they're unsaturated in five and six places so they're not going to be straight they're going to be curving a lot and therefore when we have those in the membrane now this membrane becomes much more flexible and elastic and it changes the capacity of processing signals and letting certain things in and out of this cell membrane and that's why we need a steady supply of these EPA and DHA fatty acids so that we can maintain

a certain percentage of those fatty acids in that cell membrane so it doesn't pack so tight together and another thing they're finding that's super important for stable mood is to have a healthy gut so if you have disbiosis if you have an unhealthy gut unbalanced bacterial Flora now you may not be able to produce the serotonin and the dopamine in sufficient quantities and with the correct timing so the gut produces the vast majority of those neurotransmitters that are super important for stabilizing and regulating our mood and while the cell membrane and the Integrity of that

is not the only factor that determines disbiosis we do need to realize that even the gut lining has a cell membrane just like this so in order for us to have healthy membranes we need those essential fatty acids and that also is one factor in determining your gut health sign number seven would be a white tongue coating because the tongue is supposed to be pale pink or skin colored but if it starts getting a white coating that is very often a Candida overgrowth and one reason you get it would be a high sugar diet but

it could also be several factors involved because it's opportunistic it takes advantage of imbalances so if you have a disbiosis if you have an unbalance between the beneficial and the pathogenic species of microbes now it takes advantage of that imbalance if you don't have enough beneficial bacteria to sort of keep the bad ones down now it starts popping up and then of course if you eat a bunch of sugar that makes it even easier for it to grow and now you can get an overgrowth also of other yeast and bacteria in the mouth and what

we want to realize is that every part of the body has its own unique culture and blend of bacteria so usually we just talk about the microbiome as being in the gut but you have one for every part of the body you have one in your ear and you have one on the skin and in the mouth and in the eyes and so forth and if you have an imbalance in your mouth now you can get a weakened immune response in that microbiome in the oral cavity sign number eight could be easy bruising and one

reason for that would be that processed foods don't have a lot of vitamin C and vitamin C is necessary for the production of collagen which is that structural protein that you find in all connective tissues in the body I have a lot of it in the skin that's where people usually talk about it but of course you also have it in your blood vessels in the capillaries so now if they're damaged if they're a little bit weaker and you bump up against something now that could cause a bleed even for a little bit of an

impact and then there's another vitamin called vitamin K that we also don't find much in processed foods and that's your clotting vitamins so if you don't have enough of the vitamin K now first you start bleeding because of the vitamin C lack and then now you get a little bit of a bleed but it doesn't stop bleeding so now you form that bruise very very easily and once more I'm just amazed at the wisdom of the body and how everything support each other because the microbiome the healthy bacterial Flora actually produces a significant portion of

your vitamin K sign number nine would be increasing blood pressure and the number one reason for that is that you have insulin resistance because with high levels of insulin that increases the amount of sodium that the kidneys reabsorb so the normal function for the kidneys is to filter out the equivalent of hundreds of bottles of water every day but then you reabsorb something like 99 and a half% of that so that when you go to the bathroom you only pee out like one or two bottles a day but if you have insulin resistance now instead

of 99.5 that might increase to 99.6 and even though that's just a tiny little difference that's going to keep more fluid in the body and water and so sodium always follow along so if you have too much fluid in the body that's going to increase the blood pressure so processed foods is the number one reason for insulin resistance but processed foods do a lot more so they produce Advanced glycation end products or Ages which are those proteins that get sugar stuck to them which damages the tissues you get R reactive oxygen species which is basic

basically free radicals or excess free radicals you get inflammation and processed foods also have very little magnesium and processed foods also contribute to disbiosis or gut imbalance so what all of these have in common is that they affect the function of the blood vessel that's called endothelial dysfunction so the blood vessel is not just a tube it's not like this PVC pipe where fluids just passively flow through the blood vessel is alive it has muscles in the wall so it can contract constrict to increase blood pressure or it can dilate to lower blood pressure and

the body regulates this all the time because it determines how much blood is Flowing to the different parts of the body but if you have endothelial dysfunction that means that the blood vessels don't work work properly they don't regulate the flow and the blood pressure properly and overall they tend to stiffen which would mean that blood pressure goes up so that's another factor that contributes to high blood pressure so we need to understand that sodium plays a role in high blood pressure but it's not like you've been told it's not a primary role it's a

secondary role so I know that wherever you go the first thing you're told about blood pressure is is to cut back on the sodium but a healthy person a healthy body knows how to regulate sodium it knows even if you eat three times as much sodium your body can get rid of it because it's a very easy mechanism if your body is healthy so in other words it's not the sodium it's you have to get unhealthy first and then your body becomes unable to regulate the sodium and now you have a problem sign number 10

would be that you seem to catch every cold and flu that comes around and there are many reasons for that we'll go through these one would be that if you're low in zinc vitamin C and selenium you might catch a lot more colds because these are necessary for white blood cell function and white blood cells that's the cellular component of your immune system that's the mobile the circulating portion and if you eat a lot of sugar of course sugar suppresses white blood cells who is surprised at this point I don't think we've ever found anything

good about sugar and if your bad diet causes a weak gut or an unbalanced gut now you're going to have a weak immunity as well because 70% of your immune system resides in the gut it's called GT g t gut Associated lymph tissue tissue and that makes sense because everything that you put into your body needs a barrier it needs to be shielded from your body it needs to be processed before it's allowed in and that's what the GT does and when it comes to immune system we absolutely have to talk about the brain and

stress so if you do have a bad diet that can influence the brain like we talked about unstable blood sugar is unstable energy for the brain and if you don't get the proper essential fatty acids you can't build the proper cell membranes but we need to understand how fundamental the role of stress is to the functioning of the body so anytime that you have stress your body is trying to defend itself there's some sort of emergency that needs dealing with right now and when you have a stress response to something then your body is allocating

more resource es to deal with that right now and that means it's allocating less resources to something else so whenever you have a stress response you're going to turn off or reduce the amount of resources going to your internal organs that means your digestion and your immune system and your reproduction and your DNA repair and your healing they're just not that important in that moment when you have an emergency and that's why stress is so critical for us to understand and do something about so anytime that you have a stress response when you have increased

stress that means that you have fewer resources allocated to your immune system and we need to understand that a stress response is necessary you wouldn't survive if you couldn't respond to different stresses but the question is how long does it keep going and how strong it is and that's the brain that determines you're supposed to have the stress response but the brain is supposed to control the magnitude and control the length of it so if you have a well-working brain then it will be a lesser magnitude and shorter duration so stress doesn't control you so

the brain is critical in that aspect if you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one and if you truly want to master Health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe hit that Bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video