Hello Health Champions. Today, I want to talk about the most harmful foods that people keep eating. Now, some of you might be expecting a video to sensationalize some obscure food with a hidden poison, like a fish or a mushroom or something, but the foods I'm talking about are actually thousands of times more dangerous.
They claim thousands of times more lives than some fish or some mushroom, and these are all the foods that cause insulin resistance, nutritional deficiencies, dysbiosis, leaky gut, autoimmune disease, and chronic low-grade inflammation. The reason we need to take these very seriously is that they affect the majority of the world's population today. We have insulin resistance, probably somewhere between 50 and 80% of the world's population.
Nutritional deficiency is probably everyone, but it's more a matter of to what degree do we have these nutritional deficiencies. Dysbiosis, an imbalance in your gut microbes, is probably over 90%, and a good percentage of that, maybe 30, 40, 50%, probably have some degree of leaky gut. Autoimmune disease is something that's exploding in recent years.
Officially, it's probably somewhere around one in 10 in the world that have an autoimmune disease. In the US, it's one in seven, or about 14-15%, but that's a very underestimated number because it is very rarely tested for. So the only people they know about are the ones that they've actually performed antibody tests on.
In my clinic, where we actually test everybody for thyroid antibodies for starters, I think that it's above 30%. When it comes to chronic low-grade inflammation, it probably goes hand in hand with insulin resistance. It is most people that have some degree of low-grade inflammation; it's just a matter of to what degree do we have it.
But even though these four factors are responsible for most degenerative diseases, most suffering, and deaths today, we don't take them seriously enough because they don't kill us fast enough. If an animal eats something poisonous, they get sick and know to stay away from that food in the future. But these things take decades to kill us, and that's why we have such a hard time paying attention to them.
So let's dig a little deeper into the first one, which is insulin resistance. Of course, sugary foods and sugary drinks are the worst. These include things like soda, sweet tea, energy drinks, coffee drinks with sugar that are popular, and also fruit juice.
On the solid food part, we have all kinds of snacks. We have candy, baked goods, breakfast cereals, food bars, etc. All these things that contain added sugar are extra bad because they do two things.
They have one part that is glucose, which raises blood sugar and insulin and makes us insulin resistant. The other part is fructose. 50% of these things with added sugar are fructose that can only be metabolized by the liver and therefore will quickly overwhelm the liver, causing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, making the liver insulin resistant, and now that kind of spreads to the rest of the body as well.
So anything with added sugar is bad. Number two on the list is high glycemic foods. These are foods that are high in starch but don't have added sugar, so they don't have any fructose but are very high in glucose.
Here we have things like potatoes, rice, and flour, especially processed flour. Here we need to understand that some people can have a modest amount of these, and some people can have a moderate amount of high glycemic foods. It depends on where you are on the metabolic spectrum.
If you have a metabolic disease, if you're insulin resistant, if you have type 2 diabetes and you're on the red end of the spectrum as far as insulin resistance goes, then you want to completely avoid anything with added sugar and be very, very careful with any high glycemic foods. If you are very insulin sensitive, then you can probably tolerate a little bit more, but I wouldn't go crazy with it. Number three is artificial sweeteners, and that's kind of ironic because they were made to be a substitute for sugar.
We know sugar raises blood sugar and insulin, but these were supposed to be the opposite of that. They were supposed to be non-caloric, not raise blood sugar at all. But instead, what they do, and we're talking about aspartame and sucralose, which are the two biggest sellers right now, is they dysregulate insulin signaling, and they also reduce the amount of keystone bacterial species.
They affect the microbiome flora, they affect the balance, and therefore further dysregulate insulin signaling because some of that also comes from the gut microbes. In doing that, these non-caloric artificial sweeteners actually promote dysbiosis and insulin resistance. Under the heading of nutrient deficiencies, we have almost all the foods that we're talking about here, but one interesting example is trans fats.
I'm bringing up a few things that people probably haven't heard of. Trans fats will reduce cell membrane absorption. They affect cell membrane signaling in the body, and therefore you lose your ability to absorb some of the nutrients.
They also reduce enzyme activity. Enzymes are what your body makes to break down food so that you can absorb it, and trans fats will interfere with that function as well. Furthermore, trans fats are known to increase inflammation.
Trans fats, of course, are when we use vegetable oils, we use plant oils, we process them very harshly. It's a bad oil to start with, but then we bombard it with hydrogen under high heat and high pressure, and now we turn them into something called margarine or shortening. Sometimes it's still a little bit liquid, especially if they use them for frying oils, and these trans fats are basically one step away from plastic.
Number five is food additives and preservatives. There are hundreds and hundreds of these, and they have different types of effects. Among these are that they interfere with digestion, they bind nutrients sometimes, so if they bind to the nutrients that your body wants, then you can't absorb them because they're already bound to something.
They also disrupt the gut microbes, they further promote dysbiosis, which again means you can't digest and process foods as well. The next category is biome disruptors and inflammation. As you probably have noticed, there's a huge amount of overlap between all these categories, but on these last two, there's so much overlap that I put them together.
We already talked about additives and preservatives; we're not going to count them again. We talked about sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and white flour that also disrupt the biome and promote inflammation. Next, we have mainstream processed meats.
We're talking about sausages and bacon and things like that. It's not the meat itself that is necessarily bad. I don't think it's the best form of meat, but if it's processed naturally, if they don't add a bunch of preservatives, nitrates, sugar, and other chemicals, then it can still be a good thing to eat.
When we're talking about these things being bad, it's primarily the chemicals and the additives in them that are bad for you. Number seven is fried foods. The reason these are so bad is that they use very bad oils to start with, these harshly processed plant oils, and then from all the heat and all the processing, they further oxidize these oils and damage them.
They're also very high in Omega-6. When that ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 gets way out of balance, that becomes a pro-inflammatory factor in itself. Furthermore, they damage the lining of your intestinal tract and increase inflammation, and just like almost everything else, they also disrupt your gut microbiome.
They reduce the keystone species, and with the inflammation, they disrupt the balance down there. Number eight is energy drinks. What they have found is that the combination of high levels of sugar and caffeine is extra damaging.
It will increase inflammation, damage your gut lining, and alter your bacterial balance. Number nine is excess alcohol, which again will damage the gut lining, increase inflammation, contribute to leaky gut, and because alcohol, just like fructose, can only be processed by the liver, it will dramatically increase your risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, especially if you consume it at the same time that you're eating sugar. Therefore, it will also increase insulin resistance.
Number ten on the list is all ultra-processed foods. This is basically anything in a package, anything that has a long shelf life, anything that's processed in the store. 60 to 70% of the calories consumed in the United States are ultra-processed foods.
The US was the first and the worst when it comes to this, but it is really, really sad to see how the rest of the world is catching up very, very quickly. Even if where you live is not at 60-70%, it is getting there much, much too fast. You can probably see how these factors keep coming back for most of the foods we talk about.
Again, we have insulin resistance, which processed foods cause from all the sugar and all the starch and all the bad oils that they contain. We have nutritional deficiencies, which of course happen from processed foods because we remove most of the nutrients when we process food. The nutrients are the things that go bad, so they take away the essential fatty acids, the vitamins, the minerals, and the fiber in order to give the product a longer shelf life.
Therefore, we tend to eat more, so we get some of these nutrients in our bodies and now we end up overeating. That's where "overfed and undernourished" comes from. Then we have dysbiosis and leaky gut, just like we talked about.
All of the sugar and the preservatives and the artificial sweeteners cause dysbiosis, and of course, chronic inflammation is associated with insulin resistance as well as all of these oxidized components and all the additives. I wanted to break it down like this for you so that you see what these components are, and you realize that it's not really all that complicated. If you just eat meat and vegetables, you eat whole unprocessed foods, you cook at home for yourself, then you have already handled 90% of the problem.
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