Every day you have to navigate a toxic nutritional landscape. You have to survive the American supermarket and dodge the dangers of industrial food. The good news is that if you follow simple rules you can eat safely for life.
Think of them as shortcuts or tricks to use when shopping or eating. If you just do these things and nothing else, you will automatically be eating real, fresh food that will prevent, treat and even reverse most of the chronic diseases that drain our energy, stress our families and deplete our economy. You don't even have to understand anything about nutrition. Just follow these rules for getting healthy, losing weight and feeling great.
RULE # 1 - If a food has a label it should have fewer than five ingredients. If it has more than five ingredients, throw it out. Also beware of food with health claims on the label. They are usually bad for you. Think about a bag of deep-fried potato chips with the health claims "gluten-free, organic, no artificial ingredients, no sugar" and with fewer than five ingredients listed. Sounds great, right? But remember, cola is 100 percent fat-free and that doesn't make it a health food.
RULE # 2 - If sugar (by any name, including organic cane juice, honey, agave, maple syrup, cane syrup, or molasses) is on the label, throw it out. There may be up to 33 teaspoons of sugar in the average bottle of ketchup. Same goes for white rice and white flour, which act just like sugar in the body.
RULE # 3 - Throw out any food with high-fructose corn syrup on the label. It is a super sweet liquid sugar that takes no energy for the body to process. Some high-fructose corn syrup also contains mercury as a by-product of the manufacturing process. Many liquid calories, such as sodas, juices, and "sports" drinks contain this metabolic poison. It always signals low quality or processed food.
RULE # 4 - Throw out any food with the word hydrogenated on the label. This is an indicator of trans fats, vegetable oils converted through a chemical process into margarine or shortening. They are good for keeping cookies on the shelf for long periods of time without going stale, but these fats have been proven to cause heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
RULE # 5 - Throw out any highly-refined cooking oils such as corn, soy, etc. Also avoid toxic fats and fried foods.
RULE # 6 - Throw out any food with ingredients you can't recognize, pronounce, or that are in Latin.
RULE # 7 - Throw out any foods with preservatives, additives, coloring or dyes, "natural flavorings," or flavor enhancers such as MSG (monosodium glutamate).
RULE # 8 - Throw out food with artificial sweeteners of all kinds (aspartame, Splenda, sucralose, and sugar alcohols - any word that ends with "ol" like xylitol, sorbitol). They make you hungrier, slow your metabolism, give you bad gas, and make you store belly fat.
IN ADDITION, ALSO REMOVE THESE ITEMS FROM YOUR KITCHEN:
1. Toaster
2. Microwave
3. Sandwich maker
4. Large dishes
5. Deep fryer
6. Rice Cooker
7. Popcorn maker
"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."
Source: Dr. Hyman / Harvard Health Publications