Hello, health champions! Today, I want to share with you the top 10 foods to avoid if you want to live a long and healthy life. Coming right up! Hey, I’m Dr. Ekberg. I’m a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete. If you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss anything.
Very often, we hear that you shouldn’t eat this or you shouldn’t eat that, and we read these long, long lists. But we may not understand why these foods are good or bad. So today, we’re going to talk about it. We’re going to give you the list, but we’re also going to explain each item. Make sure that you really pay attention to each one so that you understand why it is a good idea to avoid it.
Also, I’m never going to tell you that you shouldn’t eat this or that, but if you understand the consequences, then you will want to avoid those foods in order to have the best possible health.
If you notice on the board, I have “foods” in quotation marks. That’s because some people think that just because it’s customary to put something in the mouth and swallow, that that’s called food. We have all these habits of eating things we think are food, but they’re not really food.
So, let’s first talk about what food is. Food is something that provides fuel and nutrients, something that has building blocks that you can use to build new tissue, and something that contains catalysts like vitamins, minerals, and enzymes to help your body turn the fuel into energy and the building blocks into tissue.
That’s what whole food is. Whole food has all these different things, but when we process food, a lot of times, we destroy it, making it non-food.
Alright, so health is the ability to turn the fuel and the building blocks and the catalysts into energy and tissue and to use this energy to coordinate the function in the body with signals the brain receives. About a billion bits of information every second come from the body, from your intestines, tissues, joints, muscles, and the environment—temperature, air pressure, gravity.
All those things generate signals that your body has to use energy to process and regulate. That is what health is, the ability to produce and manage signals. The better that works, the healthier you are. The sooner you can return to homeostasis or balance, the healthier you are.
A poison is something that interferes with the regulation of signals, either with the production of energy or with the transport and regulation of signals. If the body is trying to send a signal somewhere and there’s a poison, then that signal is either blocked, distorted, or somehow interfered with.
We’re going to keep these in mind as we talk about these foods and so-called foods so that we understand what they do and if it’s something that we want to eat or not.
Let’s take this list in reverse order, starting with number 10. The 10th worst thing to consume would be any nonfat product. Anything labeled nonfat, low-fat, or reduced fat, whether it’s yogurt, milk, sour cream, nonfat sour cream (a contradiction in terms), mayonnaise, salad dressings, peanut butter, all these things that naturally have some fat in them. If they’re labeled as low-fat or nonfat, it means they’ve taken something out.
They’ve taken the food was complete, but they took stuff out because they’re afraid of fat. The fat provided flavor, texture, mouthfeel, richness, and satisfying properties. When they take those out, we lose those satiating properties of the food. They typically have to put in sugar and artificial flavors and artificial stabilizers and all these different chemicals to try to give it the same texture and flavor that the product originally had. So, it’s usually a destroyed food. The fat was there for a reason in the beginning.
If nature put the fat there, then it was good fat. Unprocessed foods have good quality fats, but when we remove them and put something else in, it becomes just a chemical concoction. These are something that I would never eat if I had the choice.
Number 9 on the list is deli meats. This is one of those things that could be good or bad, so you have to understand why it would or wouldn’t be. If they take a good, healthy meat and they don’t add a bunch of chemicals, especially if the animal was organically raised and fed natural food, it can be an excellent product. But if they add a bunch of sugar, nitrites, artificial flavors, and things that give it a certain texture and preservatives, now it’s not a good food anymore. Now, they’ve added as much poison and foreign stuff as they have meat in there.
Especially things like hot dogs, sometimes there is so little meat in there that there’s more other stuff. So, you want to know that there are good ones and bad ones. Avoid the bad ones like the plague, but the good ones can actually be excellent snacks.
Number 8 on the list is GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and modified plants. The primary ones to avoid are corn, soy, and sugar beets. There are others, and you want to pay attention and find things that are labeled non-GMO. If there are certain vegetables that you eat on a regular basis like eggplant and squash, you want to try to learn which ones could be genetically modified. Get organic whenever you can because organics are supposed to be guaranteed not to be genetically modified.
Genetically modified organisms are where we’re playing genetic roulette. These things can combine with other DNA, bacterial strains in your gut flora, and create whole new species. They can produce pesticides and alcohol and different things that you really don’t want in your body. These are species that we never had on the planet, so you don’t want to put them in your body.
Number 7 on the list is commercial oils, vegetable oils, and anything deep-fried. Vegetable oils include soybean oil, canola oil, safflower oil, corn oil, etc. These oils are very sensitive to heat, light, and oxygen, so they oxidize and go rancid very quickly. In order to make them shelf-stable, they process them very harshly, making them chemically enhanced and produced concoctions.
These oils are far from food. Health is the ability to manage and produce signals. The better that works, the healthier you are. The sooner you can return to homeostasis or balance, the healthier you are. A poison is something that interferes with the regulation of signals, either with the production of energy or with the transport and regulation of signals.
If the body is trying to send a signal somewhere and there’s a poison, then that signal is either blocked, distorted, or somehow interfered with.
We’re going to keep these in mind as we talk about these foods and so-called foods so that we understand what they do and if it’s something that we want to eat or not. Let’s take this list in reverse order, starting with number 10. The 10th worst thing to consume would be any nonfat product. Anything labeled nonfat, low-fat, or reduced fat, whether it’s yogurt, milk, sour cream, nonfat sour cream (a contradiction in terms), mayonnaise, salad dressings, peanut butter, all these things that naturally have some fat in them.
If they’re labeled as low-fat or nonfat, it means they’ve taken something out. They’ve taken the food was complete, but they took stuff out because they’re afraid of fat. The fat provided flavor, texture, mouthfeel, richness, and satisfying properties. When they take those out, we lose those satiating properties of the food. They typically have to put in sugar and artificial flavors and artificial stabilizers and all these different chemicals to try to give it the same texture and flavor that the product originally had. So, it’s usually a destroyed food.
The fat was there for a reason in the beginning. If nature put the fat there, then it was good fat. Unprocessed foods have good quality fats, but when we remove them and put something else in, it becomes just a chemical concoction. These are something that I would never eat if I had the choice.
