❈ A Guide to Making Foods Our Main Medicine ❈

I try to live by the motto: "Eat to live, don't live to eat."

Our bodies are like engines. If we put clean fuel into them, we will get great health results.

But if we put harmful fuel into them, we will get poor health results.

Which is more important? Carbohydrates for my taste buds OR improved energy levels, pain, and prevention of all kinds of diseases? The good news is that a person can eat low carb and still find sweet and tasty substitutes for nearly everything they're used to eating.

Check out DietDoctor.com for all kinds of helpful and evidence-based information on low carb eating:

• They even tackle the "Top 17 low-carb & keto controversies" such as concerns regarding cholesterol, pregnancy, deficiencies, constipation, etc.

There are 3 main causes of common health problems

such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic fatigue, inflammation, and pain:

1) High amounts of carbohydrates in most American's diet

if 70% of our diet comes from carbs, we are heading for many problems

carbohydrates are inflammatory and hard on the body leading to chronic inflammation, pain, organ damage which leads to disorders such as diabetes, fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, etc

Our bodies thrive on a hunter-gatherer type of diet which most of the time would be based on eating animals, and animals are made of protein and fat.

2) Harmful oils

mainly vegetable/seed oils such as canola oil, safflower oil, peanut oil, margarine, etc. -- these inflame us and harm us.

Better alternatives are coconut oil, olive oil, avocado oil, and BUTTER.

3) Eating too many highly "processed" foods

If many of the food ingredients look like the names of chemicals which should be in a laboratory, then they are probably harmful to our bodies

We encourage people not to smoke for the same reason: there are MANY harmful chemicals in cigarettes which inflame and harm the body, and stop its defenses from preventing things like cancer to develop

Most Americans Significantly Over-Consume Carbohydrates

The average American's diet consists of roughly 70% carbohydrates, 20% protein, and 10% fat. Most people think if they eat fat, they will get fat, and I also thought that way for a long time. But I have found that idea to be incorrect, because the only way to gain weight is to consume more total daily calories than our bodies need for energy. Fat and carbohydrates are both sources of fuel for our bodies. Protein is fuel as well, but we should not overly consume protein as it can harm our kidneys and other organs over time if we did. So let's keep protein intake to around 20% of our diet, and then focus on the difference between how our bodies use carbohydrates and fats for fuel.

The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for carbohydrates is 130+ grams per day (which equals 520+ calories of carbs). If the average American's diet consists of about 70% carbs, that would equal about 1400 out of 2000 total daily calories from carbs. 1400/520 = 2.7 Thus most Americans are consuming nearly 3x the RDA goal of 130+ grams of carbs per day.

To further put this information into context, a medium-sized banana is around 25 grams of carbs and 100 total calories. So a banana would be about 1/5th of our daily RDA in carbs. A cup of cooked macaroni is about 155 to 190 calories and almost 40 grams of carbs (or about 1/3rd of our RDA in carbs). The RDA for carbs is met by so few people that I have found many dietitians basically ignore how much carbs patients are consuming. That concerns me greatly, especially when I see up to 4+ diabetic patients every single day. So it is easy to see how most people, diabetics included, are not eating low carb.

According to DietDoctor.com (which uses many evidence-based studies to back up their claims) they recommend to consume less than 100g of carbs per day. Another option is to go very low carb (20-50g of carbs total per day) and then the body will run off its own sugars created from fat (aka ketones). By running off of fat (via ketones) for energy, our blood sugars and insulin levels can remain stable and low.

According to the CDC, more than 10% of US adults have diabetes and about 33% have pre-diabetes (in other words early warning signs of impending diabetes). Diabetes can simply be thought of as the body losing its ability to be able to process carbohydrates due to the constantly high amount of them that it has to work to process. And diabetes has become very common in the US in recent decades.

High Carbs = Dirty Fuel --> Inflammation --> Chronic Pain and Fatigue (Among Many Other Problems)

Most people realize that if they want to run a marathon or participate in a big sporting event tomorrow, tonight they might consider carbohydrate loading, which for many would look like eating a large meal of pasta. The reason this works is because our livers will store sugar (aka glucose) in a form for temporary storage called glycogen for when we need it in the near future. This can be thought of as a mechanism that helps us survive in nature, when perhaps we need to eat a large meal before going for days without any available food; that way we don't starve during those upcoming few days without easy access to food. The problem with this survival mechanism is that most people are not going for days without eating or running marathons or participating in long sporting events on a daily basis, but at the same time most people are still consuming carbohydrates at a high amount (up to 70% or more of their diet per day). So we basically store carbohydrates in our liver for much longer than we realize, until they get converted into fat for long term storage or are used as energy for physical activities.

But here is the real kicker which most people do not realize: until those carbohydrates (aka glycogen) get processed by the liver to be stored as fat or are used for physical energy, they are inflaming us. Ask any diabetic whose blood sugars have been too high due to not taking medication to help them process their blood sugar, they will inevitably say that they have been feeling much more achy and tired overall since their blood sugars have been high.

In Summary:

The main idea behind why a person would want to eat foods higher in fat calories and lower in carbohydrate calories: our bodies are engines which run off of energy from protein, fat, and carbohydrates --- eating lower carbohydrate foods will reduce our insulin demands and reduce our overall blood sugars and inflammation (preventing diabetes and other diseases such as chronic fatigue and arthritis, to name only a few). But by eating more healthy fats and proteins and overall less carbohydrates, we can have more stable energy and less inflammation and pain.

These 3 Areas of Concern Are Further Discussed Below

OVERVIEW:

Not all fats are good for us. Most restaurant foods (especially anything deep fried) are cooked in vegetable seed oils like safflower oil or canola oil, because they are the cheapest of the oils.

But unfortunately for us, most of those vegetable seed oils are high in Linoleic acid (aka Omega-6 fatty acid), which is ok in very small amounts, but when consumed in high amounts has been shown to significantly damage mice (by quickly giving them bad problems like obesity, cancers, diabetes, etc.).

The 3 healthiest vegetable oils with the lowest amount of Linoleic acid are olive oil, coconut oil, and avocado oil. Aside from using those 3 oils, I cook mainly with butter, which is also low in Linoleic Acid. I avoid any other vegetable oils such as canola oil, peanut oil, safflower oil, etc. I buy dry roasted nuts because the food industry nearly always roasts nuts in cheap vegetable oils like safflower oil.

To help illustrate what those harmful vegetable oils do to our bodies, when discussing nutrition I like to ask people if they have "Ever eaten greasy restaurant food and then shortly afterwards felt like you had to take a nap?" I have found that nearly everyone (myself included) can quickly answer 'yes' to that question. Before learning about the harms of Linoleic Acid, I used to think any foods saturated in oil or butter would kill my energy and cause me to want a nap. The good news is that is not true. Since eating low carb foods which I very often cook in butter, I have never felt tired afterwards. I now realize that foods cooked in cheap vegetable oils cause inflammation and at the same time give us poor energy.

Part 1: Carbohydrates Vs Fat/Protein for Energy

Part 2: Problems with Cooking Oil

Part 3: The Problem with Processed Foods

All the added chemicals in processed foods can wreck our health by causing toxicity, inflammation, and damage, similar to how all the chemicals in cigarettes cause a ton of damage and inflammation to our bodies, and even disrupt our bodies so much that cancers can often develop.

Have you ever looked at the ingredient list on a bagel? It appears to be a mile long due to all the processing, including preservatives! This is why they seem to last forever before growing any mold. The problem is that our bodies have to break down all the stuff in bagels and other highly processed foods and then figure out what to do with it all.

According to an article by Kevin Hall, who is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, he reports that: Refined foods like "cookies, ice cream, cereal bars, chips, hot dogs, and soda ... are subjected to industrial processing to increase convenience, availability, or shelf life. We're now doing studies to look at their health effects. The weight of scientific opinion is that people should eat as little ultra-processed food as they can. But there are precisely zero randomized controlled trials that have examined the impact of ultra-processed foods other than ours."

On the other hand, if we consume less processed foods and also consume more whole and natural foods, I believe that can make a big impact on our health over time.

Here is the link to the above article

Worth noting: I do eat some processed foods, but now I try to limit them to avoid inflammation and harm over the long run.

The image below is also taken from the above-mentioned article