Avoid the Five Whites (7/16/2023)
Last week we mentioned ultra-processed foods, what foods are the basis for ultra-processed foods?  They are often called, the Five Whites!  What are the five whites?
1.  Sugar.  All artifical sweeteners, fructose, and maltose, also brown sugar and other modified sugars.  All the candies, cookies, frosting on cakes, and many, many other sugar products.  Avoid them.  Fruit sugar (fructose) as found in fruit is healthy, but "industrial fructose" such as table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and other industrial fructose are not healthy.  Two studies (1971,  2002) showed that eating 20 pieces of fruit a day is healthy and healing.  It is a myth that eating too much fruit is unhealthy.  Try to eat at least 4-8 fruit servings daily, which is healthy and can be healing.
2.  Salt.  All things with white salt, as in potato chips and the numerous products made.  The food industry makes foods salty because they sell more.
3.  White Flour.  All the white breads, food-colored breads, muffins, cakes, cookies, and bakery products.  White, brown, black flour -- it is all the same.  They add coloring and other ultra-processed ingredients.
4.  White Fat in Animals.  All read meats in animal products have white fat, pretty much almost all animal meats have white fat in them.  Either avoid them or minimize them.  There are a lot of studies that have shown eating fat is bad for you.  The body does need a small amount of fat.  Americans eat way too much animal products.
5.  Milk and Dairy Products.  Most dairy products are very damaging; all cow products are designed to make a calf into a 1,200 pound cow.  Goats milks, feta (same pH as human's milk), feta cheese is very close in nutrient values to a mother's milk too.  Almond, oat or rice milks are a good substitute.
Also avoid beverages including alcohol, all soda, carbonated beverages, sugary beverages, etc.

Ultra-Processed Foods! (7/9/2023)
A researched, Carlos Monteiro, PhD found that people were gaining weight not by putting more fats and bags of sugar in their diet but by eating a lot more ultra-processed food.  He developed four groups to explain this:
1.  Unprocessed or minimally processed foods.  This would include all whole foods, fruits and vegetables uncooked or processed or canned.
2.  Processed culinary ingredients like olive oil or spices.
3.  Processed foods with only a few ingredients added.
4.  Ultra-processed foods with many ingredients and additives, flavoring, highly industrialized production methods.  These foods leave little real food left.

Consumption of ultra-processed foods is a growing problem according to another study in 2016.  The ultra-processed food makes up nearly 58% of the American diet.  (BMJ Open, March 2016).  A dietitian Kirpatrick states, "The gut is like a battlefield with two-armies, the good gut microbes and the bad gut microbes.  Whoever is in the largest number is going to win the war.  Ultra-processed foods feed the bad microbes, and that feeds disease and inflammation."

Carlos Monterio, PhD research in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (Jan. 2023) showed that high consumption of ultra-processed food was a factor in about 10% of premature deaths among Brazilian people (ages 30 to 69) in 2019.