Unjunking: The Last Diet We’ll Ever Need

Today there are not even enough fruits and veg­eta­bles in this coun­try to allow all Americans to fol­low the gov­ern­ment guide­lines to eat five to nine serv­ings a day.

What most of us are left with is indus­trial food. And who knows what lurks in the aver­age boxed, pack­aged, or canned factory-made sci­ence project.

When a French fry has more than 20 ingre­di­ents and almost all of them are not potato, or when a fast food ham­burger con­tains very lit­tle meat, or when the aver­age teenager con­sumes 34 tea­spoons of sugar a day, we are liv­ing in a food night­mare, a sci-fi hor­ror show.

The very fact that we are hav­ing a national con­ver­sa­tion about what we should eat, that we are strug­gling with the ques­tion about what the best diet is, is symp­to­matic of how far we have strayed from the nat­ural con­di­tions that gave rise to our species, from the sim­ple act of eat­ing real, whole, fresh food. When it becomes a rev­o­lu­tion­ary act to eat real food, we are in trouble.

The food indus­try, which is the sec­ond biggest employer in America after the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, heav­ily influ­ences the media and gov­ern­ment agen­cies that reg­u­late it (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration and Congress) and inten­tion­ally con­fuses and con­founds us.

Low-fat is good—so any­thing with a “low-fat” on the label must be healthy. But Coke is 100 per­cent fat-free and that doesn’t make it a health food. Now we are told to eat more whole grains, so a few flecks of whole grains are sprin­kled on sug­ary cere­als. That doesn’t make them a health food either.

The best advice is to avoid foods with health claims on the label, or bet­ter yet avoid foods with labels in the first place.

In the 21st cen­tury our tastes buds, our brain chem­istry, our bio­chem­istry, our hor­mones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food indus­try. The food-like sub­stances prof­fered by the indus­trial food sys­tem food trick our taste buds into momen­tary plea­sure, but not our biol­ogy, which reacts, rejects and reviles the junk plied on our genes and our hor­monal and bio­chem­i­cal path­ways. We need to unjunk our biology.

Industrial pro­cess­ing has given rise to an array of addic­tive, fat­ten­ing, metabolism-jamming chem­i­cals and com­pounds includ­ing aspar­tame, MSG (monosodium glu­ta­mate), high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats, to name the biggest offenders.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.