Is Fasting Really a Safe Way to Lose Weight?

Fasting may help some people but I'm not a fan. People with medical conditions shouldn't be fasting. That said, It's my opinion, some overweight people don't realize they have a medical condition. They don't want to see the Doctor because they don't want to hear the lecture about how they need to lose weight. So they just avoid any medical advice. This is one reason so many people fail at their attempt to lose weight. I Think if you have more then 20 pounds to lose you should talk to your Doctor first. If you take any kind of medication you want to ask your Doctor about a diet. Everyone's ability to lose weight differs. No one loses weight the same way others do. So read this post from MyFitnessPal.com and see if Fasting might be right for you.

Think of a time when you wanted to lose weight. Naturally, you knew to eat less, but how much less depends on your metabolism, which determines the total calories you need throughout the day. Eating fewer calories than you expend typically leads to weight loss, but how you want to budget these calories gets very personal.

While most of us prefer a consistent calorie goal, some find it helpful to slash calories through intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is skipping meal(s) for a certain number of days with the purpose of creating a calorie deficit for weight loss. On the days you don’t fast you have the freedom of a higher calorie goal to eat with.

Let’s be clear: Intermittent fasting is not:

1) Going more than 24 hours without eating.
2) Regularly eating a very low calorie diet (think: less than 1,000 calories for women and 1,200 calories for men).

Both these scenarios can lead to nutritional deficiencies and other health complications and are not something you should pursue without the help of a health professional. Now that we have that straight, let’s jump in:

Defining Fasting for Weight Loss
Intermittent fasting allows you to shift the calorie-cutting phase of your weight loss to a couple of days per week as opposed to every day. It works because you don’t need to cut calories daily to lose weight. You can go under your goal one day and over the next but still lose weight if you eat fewer calories than you burn.

It’s important to note not all fasting diets are the same, and that something as simple as skipping a meal can count as fasting. Here are a few different ways people practice fasting that don’t include religious fasting:

• Complete alternate-day fasting: Fast every other day. A fasting day means no calorie-containing food or beverage for up to 24 hours. An eating day allows you to eat as much as you want.
• Modified fasting: Fast just a couple of days per week. For example, the popular 5:2 diet schedules 5 days of eating freely with 2 days where calorie intake is 20–25% of needs.
• Time- restricted eating: Eat freely as you feel hungry throughout the day, but only within a specific window of time. For example, setting up a window of 12 hours and only eating within that time frame. Skipping breakfast and not eating after dinner counts as time-restricted eating.

Are Fasting Diets Better than Non-fasting Diets?

by Krista Varady, PhD, at the University of Illinois at Chicago examined 11 daily-calorie-restriction and five intermittent-fasting studies. As an FYI, “daily calorie restriction” is how we’re traditionally taught to cut calories: cutting a consistent but small amount of calories every day. Varady found that both methods of cutting calories were equally effective at helping healthy subjects lose weight and fat, but intermittent fasting appeared to offer an added benefit. Those who practiced intermittent fasting preserved more lean mass (90% weight lost as fat, 10% weight lost as muscle) than those who followed the more traditional method of daily calorie restriction (75% weight lost as fat, 25% weight lost as muscle). Because lean mass burns more calories than fat mass, it is beneficial to help you lose fat while preserving as much muscle as possible.

While these numbers may look impressive, there are a few drawbacks to this review:

• Not enough studies exist. The review included just 16 studies—there just weren’t many studies addressing intermittent fasting. Because of this, there were disproportionately more studies for daily calorie restriction—11 daily calorie-restriction studies versus five intermittent-fasting studies.
• Small sample sizes. Study sample sizes were small, ranging from 8–173 subjects, with most studies hovering at 20 subjects.
• Difference in measurement techniques. Most daily-calorie-restriction studies use dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure fat mass while most intermittent-fasting studies use bioelectrical impedance. Because DXA and MRI are more accurate at assessing fat mass compared to bioelectrical impedance, it makes it difficult to conclusively say that daily calorie restriction preserves lean mass better than intermittent fasting.

The science isn’t perfect, but it confirms what we already know: weight loss happens when the calories eaten are less than calories burned. If you’re overweight or obese, both nonfasting and fasting weight loss can lead to similar health benefits that’ll make your doc proud! Just a 5–10% weight loss can help bring down pesky numbers on your blood test (think: cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar).

Is Fasting a Safe Choice for Me?
The answer really depends on how you approach it and how your own body responds. As mentioned before, going long periods of time without eating, or eating a very low calorie diet for extended periods of time, is not safe. Generally speaking, though, the human body is designed to deal with periods of fasting. If you’re a healthy adult with weight to lose, there’s little evidence to say that intermittent fasting isn’t safe.

However, fasting isn’t for everyone and you shouldn’t try it if you are pregnant, diabetic or healing from a traumatic event like surgery. Still iffy about whether fasting is a good choice for you? We suggest seeking guidance from a health professional before experimenting.

5 Tips for Fasting
If you want to experiment with fasting to switch up your weight-loss journey, here are a couple of tips:

1. Log your calories. If you’re doing a modified fast, you may want to track calories on a fasting day to help you meet your target calorie goal. For all other fasts, it’s helpful to track calories on the days you eat freely. Doing so can help offset the likelihood you’ll overeat and thus cut into your overall calorie deficit.
2. Take it as an opportunity to better understand hunger. Not surprisingly, fasting diets can bring unpleasant side effects, one of which is hunger. We’re all born with hunger cues to signal that our stomach is empty and we should eat. For most of us, this ability becomes blunted as we age especially in a plentiful society where food is not in short supply. We may even mistake thirst or cravings for hunger. Fasting can reacquaint you with what physiologic hunger feels like.
3. Drink plenty of water. Depending on how long your fast is, your body may switch to fueling itself more from fat and protein instead of carbohydrates. To do so will require more water to keep your metabolic machinery running smoothly. Also, if you’re already feeling minor unpleasant side effects from hunger, you don’t want to add a dehydration headache to the list!
4. Choose nutrient-dense foods. On eating days, choose nutrient-dense foods that pack plenty of important vitamins and minerals along with calories. Nutrient-dense foods include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, lean meats, seafood, nuts—you get the idea! These are foods you should choose even if you’re not fasting. Check with your doctor if you’re concerned about vitamin and mineral deficiencies or want to undergo an extended fast longer than 12 weeks.
5. Know you can always change your mind. Tried fasting and found it’s not for you? Fasting isn’t for everyone, especially those who get hangry really easily. Just know that you can cut calories the old-fashioned way and still lose weight.

Reverse middle age weight gain

Middle age, those years between 30 and 50, are the years we all seem to add body fat. So what's going on, why does this seem to happen to everyone? The answer is that we slow-down and as the slow-down occurs we burn less calories but it seems we never stop eating, we don't even slow-down your food intake, actually as you gain weight you seem to consume more calories a day and that puts on even more weight. It's so gradual though you don't realize what's happening. 

The weight gain on average is only about 1 to 3 pounds a year. They even have a name for it now because it's so common. It's called "creeping obesity", that 1 to 3 pounds you seem to gain every year and don't even notice. In most cases people don't wake-up to the weight gain until they have to buy new clothes. It might not sound like a lot of weight but over a 20 year period it can amount to 60 pounds. The following post from WebMD.com addresses this problem and give you some solutions.

You have a couple of things working against you. You're probably not burning calories as efficiently as you did when you were younger. That's because your metabolic rate (the number of calories you burn in a day) dips about 1% per year beginning around age 30, says Carolyn Brown, RD, nutritionist at Food trainers in New York.

You can outsmart that. Shift a few habits so you can rev your body back up.

Start with these five strategies.

1. Eat More Protein

Protein is the building block of muscle, and since muscle mass diminishes as you age, you need even more protein.

“Starting at middle age, you need 10% more protein than you did during your younger years,” says Christine Gerbstadt, MD, RD, author of Doctor’s Detox Diet: The Ultimate Weight Loss Prescription.

A bonus: Foods that are high in protein pack a greater metabolic boost than fat or carbohydrates. Biting, chewing, swallowing, and digesting protein-rich foods can burn up to 30% of the calories on your plate, compared to 5% for fat and carbs.

2. Tame Your Stress

The stress hormone cortisol is tied to an accumulation of fat around your midriff. And midlife can be a stressful time, says Florence Comite, MD, an endocrinologist in New York.

Chronic stress can also affect how well your body responds to insulin, which controls your blood sugar, Comite says.

Eliminating as much stress as possible from your daily routine will help cut the amount of cortisol your body makes. 

Do this: Meditate. Just 10 minutes of mindful meditation can make a difference, Comite says.

3. Don’t Skimp on Sleep

When you're short on sleep, your appetite kicks into higher gear. In one study of some 68,000 women, those who slept for 5 or fewer hours each night gained 2.5 pounds more than those sleeping 7 hours a night.

Do this: Set a soothing bedtime routine that includes turning off all screens at least one hour before bed.

4. Get Stronger

The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even when you’re at rest. But you start losing muscle mass around age 40, Gerbstadt says.

Resistance training helps. Keeping your muscles strong makes it easier to maintain your weight.

Do this: Use weights that are heavy enough to exhaust your muscles with 12 repetitions, yet light enough to complete at least eight repetitions. Do lunges, squats, dead lifts, and pushups (12-15 repetitions per set). Or, if you're not into weightlifting, do yoga or other exercises that use your own body weight for resistance.

5. Clean Up Your Diet

It's true: You can't eat the way you used to, without some consequences.

A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people who ate the most refined foods (like sugar, white bread, cookies, and cakes) developed significantly more belly fat than those who consumed the same number of calories from less processed foods.

Do this: Always have healthy snacks on hand. Keep almonds in your pocketbook, trail mix in your desk drawer, and hard-boiled eggs in the fridge.

WebMD Feature

The Truth About This Gluten-free Craze

I read dozens of article about  gluten-free and enriched or processed wheat. First of all, gluten-free products are foods that have no processed or enriched wheat. At first consumers thought these foods were only for people with food allergies. But now we know that today's wheat is not your grandmother's wheat. Processed or enriched wheat can be just as dangerous as eating sugar products like fructose and just as habit forming.

So those of us watching our weight and those trying to lose weight need to avoid any enriched or processed foods and wheat in particular. Fortunately gluten-free products are very popular today and it's pretty easy to find a big section of gluten-free products in the major grocery stores. You can find bread, bagels, crackers even pizza crusts, cereals you name it, if it's made of flour there's probably a similar Gluten-Free product.

Science says the reason enriched wheat is bad for your diet is because it raises your blood sugar and not just a little but spikes it up and let you crash just as fast. That crash you get after the spike will cause 'food cravings' and in a short time you'll want more food. I know what your going to say "I don't eat that much at the table". And the reason for that is that it takes about one hour for blood sugar to crash. And by that time we don't go back to the table for more dinner but we do reach for snack food. Enriched or processed wheat is in all the snack food, chips pretzels, crackers, Chex,  and dozens  of other snacks.

Whether it's drinks or food the reason it seems like your constantly eating is because your blood sugar  jumping from super-high to super-low causes cravings so you think your still hungry and you want to eat more, but in reality your not hungry it's only a craving, your body is telling you that your blood sugar levels are low. It's not a trick, they are low and you did it to yourself by eating foods you shouldn't eat.

Avoid processed foods and any foods with enriched wheat flour.  So gluten -free will help you lose weight by avoiding food cravings caused be wheat and you can further help yourself by avoiding added sugar. Don't eat or drink anything with added sugar or sugar substitutes like fructose or corn syrup.

Where Do I Start?

Losing weight isn't as hard as some might think. You want to start by changing the food your eating. This is a common mistake many people make. They think if they just cut back on calories by eating less they'll lose weight. Maybe if you just want to lose 2 or 3 pounds. It's your diet that put on your extra weight and by the way that's extra body fat, not just weight. You can gain healthy weight and that's okay. Pro-athletes will gain healthy weight by adding muscle, but if your gaining fat that's the stuff you want to lose.

Changing your diet and eating healthy will give you more energy to exercise and be more active. The extra activity will help your burn more calories and you'll lose fat. Now the hard part is to get your body to burn the stored fat.

Your body only processes or burn enough to give you the energy you need at that moment. The body works in real time. In other words when your resting your body burns very little calories. It will burn some because your heart is always working and your brain is always working and there is other body functions that have to work constantly. When I sit and type out the post, I'm burning some calories, more than just watching TV, but if I was standing I would burn twice the calories because of the work your muscles have to do just to hold you up. So watching TV burns more than sleeping, but write my post at my desk burns more than watching TV and walking burn even more and running burns even more.

So if a normal person doing normal activity might burn 2000 calories a day, some hours you might burn 50 calories and some hours you might burn 150 calories. For example, a person who works out 5 days a week for one hour a day does a walk and run routine can burn 300 to 350 calories during that workout. All these statistics are to give you an idea of how many calories you might burn.

If you go to the Mall or grocery store and watch people for a long period of time you'll notice people who have a hard time getting around and some moving at a very fast pace. The point I want to make is that someone who spends most of the day either sitting or laying may only be burning a minimal amount of calories like 1000. The person burning 1800 might be the average office worker who could be sitting or lying as much as 16 hours as day, and that's even if they workout. And some people who are very active, working all day on their feet and working out every day and then working around the house after they get home, may be burning 2500 calories a day.

You want to be one of those people who burn more than 2000 calories a day and you can do it. But first, you want to start by eating healthy and building your energy. Nex,t you want to start walking more. Try to walk in the morning, before work, and then again in the evening after dinner. A good way to begin exercising is to walk more. Now is not that easy to judge the amount you walk because of your speed. So I suggest getting a pedometer. There cheap, just go to a sporting goods store. The average person doing normal things all day walks about 5000 steps a day, but to lose body fat and build strength you want to walk 10,000 steps a day. The pedometer will count for you, just set it to zero in the morning and hook it on your belt. If your short steps after dinner you want to walk before bed and finish the 10,000.

I think changing your diet and sticking to it is the hardest part. You have to start eating 'clean', no processed foods. Which means eating 'fresh' foods. Fruits, vegetables, dairy and grains and some meat. I follow the 'food pyramid'.

I write several blogs and e-books, check out some of my other sites.

gettingtoahealthyweight.blog
idropped40pounds.wordpress.com
howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.blogspot.com
blogonweight.blogspot.com

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books. 

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. I’ll give you a discount coupon you can use at checkout. (PJ42H) not case-sensitive the price is $1.99 w/coupon

5 Reasons To Eat Real Food

This is a great post that I'm re-blogging from the 'MyFitnessPal' website. The post is about the 
advantages of Clean Eating. This is only a portion of a larger post that I hope to reblog at a later date.  For people who want to have a better diet but don't know were to start, this article should help you.

1. Eat “healthier” without thinking about it. It’s useful to think of food as nutrients (macro- and   micronutrients) so we can better understand our body. When it comes to healthy eating, it’s more useful to think of food simply as food. Choosing “real” foods lets you eat healthier from a nutrient perspective without thinking too much about nutrients.

2. Redefine your relationship with food. Do you find yourself labeling food as “good” or “bad” based on a predefined notion of what healthy eating looks like? Nothing should always be that black and white, least of all a healthy relationship with food. Choosing real foods forces you to reevaluate the foods you think are healthy (aka processed foods labeled “low fat,” “sugar-free” and so forth). That being said, if you’re willing to buy real food ingredients to bake a cake, you should be able to enjoy a slice of dessert without a side of guilt.

3. Get the most nutrients out of the foods you’re eating. Processing foods usually removes or destroys valuable nutrients. The two exceptions are fortified foods (think: orange juice with added vitamin D) and preserved foods (think: canned and frozen). Choosing mostly real foods helps you maximize the nutrients you get from the foods you eat.

4. Cook, connect and celebrate with friends and family. Real food means real cooking! Since real foods come in the most natural form, it pushes you to be creative in preparing and cooking your meals. Cooking is an essential skill when it comes to living a healthy life. Since good food is a cause for celebration, get your friends and family members involved if you can.

5. Live a longer, healthier life. “You are what you eat” is a simple mantra capturing the impact that diet quality has on your quality of life. Eating mostly real foods will decrease your chances of getting a debilitating chronic disease like heart disease, stroke, diabetes or cancer. After all, the goal of being physically healthy is to live a long life whilst avoiding these pitfalls. 

I think people have forgotten that first line in #5, 'You are what you eat'.  This phase isn't new. I remember being in school some 50 years ago and reading the same thing. I think people use to pay more attention to what they ate. Today all we look for is convenience and price. Isn't that the real problem with our overweight population? We want to spend more time relaxing and less time worrying about our health or our appearance.

How I Plan Meals

I always start to plan meals the day I'm going to shop. I generally shop on Sunday morning, so before I go out I'll make up a meal plan for the coming week. It's might sound hard but breakfast, lunch and snacks are pretty easy, It's usually the same week after week. For me and my wife it's pretty simple, we don't buy a lot of complicated foods. What I mean is pre-made foods or processed foods. So I want Low-Fat Plain Greek Yogurt and frozen berries, eggs, low-fat milk and Oatmeal. I stay away from any berries that have syrup included, I just want plain berries. I also get a variety of fresh fruit, whatever is in season. If they have apples in June, be sure to read the small sticker that tells you what country the fruit comes from. When things like Apple are in the stores in June and you pick Apples in the fall, you have to wonder how old they are or where did they come from. I always stick to fruit from California or Florida or at least fruit from the U.S.  Harmful chemicals are used in other countries like in Central America by the big commercial growers to increase production. In the U.S. we outlawed this chemicals  several years ago.

Next is the snacks and drinks. This is pretty easy for me, we drink lots of water and we might add a little juice to flavor the water. I look for juice without added sugar, then I buy tea bags and coffee. If you like beer, lite beer has about 100 calories per bottle and if that fits into your food plan, okay, there's no added sugar in beer. Wine and hard alcohol has added sugar, but if you want hard liquor, tequila and vodka only have about 100 calories per drink. A good mixer for these alcohols is a carbonated water with no calories. I only buy un-popped popcorn, mixed nuts, seeds and for a treat, dark chocolate.

Dinner menus are the hardest I want to eat fish 3 times a week, poultry once a week and red meat about twice a month. The other days I try to go meatless. I try to buy mostly fresh vegetables, mostly organic and fill in with plain frozen vegetables. I like bread and rolls but it's that easy finding whole grain items. They are out there and there's more than ever before. I'm not talking about whole wheat, whole grain wheat or oats or barley, but whole grain. I buy gluten-free pasta, bread, bagels and pizza crusts. That way I don't have to search the shelves for non-enriched flour.  And for dessert we eat fruit. Don't forget fruits like grapes and pineapple, but again try to buy only what's grown in the U.S.

Before I go to work, while I'm having coffee, I plan dinner for that day. If there's something in the freezer I need I’ll take it out and put it in the refrigerator.  So I remember I always write down the menu and take it with me when I go shopping. If your organized enough to do this a day or two ahead then if you're missing anything from the menu you'll have time to pick it up. If you learn to stick to the planned menus then you can actually save money on food. It means a few more trips to the store, but the inventory of groceries around the house will start to shrink. This is a good thing and yes the kids need snacks, but this will give you the opportunity to make some healthy choices. When you wait until the last-minute to shop, you don’t have time to make the proper choices, you end up buying anything just to get out quick. I wish I could count the times I nearly got run over going to the checkout line.

Fruit is great snack food, it has sugar but its good sugar, its natural sugar. It's all the processed foods that are causing our health problems. Try to avoid processed food. If you saw the Today Show when a health guru was talking about the six meals a day plan, maybe some of you thought it sounded  crazy, but it's true. Never skip breakfast, but be careful that you’re eating the right thing. Eggs are great, but only one yolk, the rest whites. toast is good, but not white bread or bagels unless the whole grain, it's just empty calories, and fruit is okay.  It's very important to eat but eat good food and avoid food that doesn't have nutrition. Get something for your food dollar. Go back and review earlier posts where I discuss the six meal plan. It won't hurt to read it over again. There's a lot of truth in that post. Remember you're not eating to fill your stomach with things that taste good, you’re eating to give your body enough nutrition until you eat again.

Dangers of processed foods

This post is a great example of the dangers of processed foods that I preach about constantly.

A Closer Look at Processed Foods

Editor’s note: This post is part of our WebMD Special Report: What’s In Your Food?

By Brenda Goodman
WebMD Health News

Melanie Warner is the author of Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Foods Took Over the American Diet. A former reporter for The New York Times, she spent a year and a half investigating the modern system of food manufacturing in the U.S. to conclude that “much of what we now eat is not so much as cooked as it is engineered into finely-tuned, nutrient-deficient creations of science.”

Warner says she began to wonder what manufacturers were adding to foods after she started what she calls her “food museum”—a collection of products like cookies, crackers, and even guacamole from a grocery store deli that she discovered could sit on the shelf of her pantry or refrigerator for months or years past their expiration dates without spoiling.

Since her book came out in 2013, the FDA has told food manufacturers that trans fats are no longer safe to use in processed foods, and many major companies, including Kraft, General Mills, and Nestle have pledged to get artificial colors and flavors out of their products—a practice called “clean labeling.”

WebMD asked her what she thought of these developments, and whether companies have really committed to making healthier products.

Q: I’m sure you’ve noticed this recent spate of public announcements from Kraft and General Mills and Nestle that they’re going to get artificial ingredients out of their foods. Do you think companies are feeling more consumer pressure to talk more about how they make their food?

A: Companies, I think, are only going as far as people push them, and by people I mean consumers—the people that are eating their products. They’re doing it because they’re being pushed in that direction by consumers.

They get all this input coming from social media and focus groups and all this market data gathering that they usually do. What they’re hearing is that people are concerned about this, and they’re worried about sales. They feel like if they don’t do this there’s going to be an impact on sales, and they’re probably right.

But they aren’t doing it to be better companies. They’re not trying to truly open up the doors. They’re not truly trying to reform their foods to make them healthier. They’re simply reacting to what consumers are telling them. I know that sounds cynical. That’s just my observation of how food companies think and how they operate. Or any consumer-facing company, really.

Q: After telling us so many revealing details about how processed foods are made, you say in your book that food companies aren’t going to fix this. Since they’re making the food to begin with, why shouldn’t they be the ones to reform it?

A: I’ve had this debate and argument with some people in the food movement who think that we need to be putting pressure on companies. We need to look at regulation and force companies to do things. That’s great if it happens, but companies are so good at getting around regulations. They find every loophole they can. And it’s also really hard to get any regulation passed.

So I think it’s really about pushing forward with a new consciousness about food and educating people and opening people’s eyes up. I’ve been really amazed and heartened by how much has happened on that front within the last 10 years. There have been books written, articles, documentaries. People are looking at all this much more with a much greater awareness about what’s healthy for us to eat and caring about our health. Not everyone — there’s still a huge ways to go.

I think that’s where the momentum needs to continue. We need to keep focusing on opening up people’s eyes to what happens inside the food industry. And if they decide ‘Oh, it’s fine. No big deal,’ then let people decide for themselves. But most people when they see what happens inside the food industry, whether it’s on the farms or in factories decide, ‘Oh, that’s kind of gross. I think I’m going to find other options.’

Q: Where is the FDA in all this?

A: I think people have gotten so used to the FDA not doing anything that it’s hard to summon anyone’s outrage about it. They say, ‘Well, the agency doesn’t have a big enough budget to really police our food supply.’ But they’ll never get enough money if people don’t get angry about it and insist on greater regulation.

It is a Herculean job to try either initiate or try to stay on top of the scientific research on so many different food additives. Let me just say that. It is a really big deal. But there’s just clear examples of how the FDA is just not being rigorous at all in ways that it definitely could.

Trans fat is just the most recent and glaring example. We’ve known for at least 10 years, probably more, that trans fats are one of the most harmful things in the food supply and it’s just now that FDA has taken away the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status of partially hydrogenated oils. So, just the fact that they sat on it for that long and didn’t want to press the food industry, and from what I can tell, the reason they didn’t take action was that the food industry said ‘No, wait, it’s not that bad. We’ll just reduce the amount, and we’ll still have half a gram, you need to give us time.’ So they kind of go in line with the schedule that the food industry requests.

There are other examples like BHT, which is the preservative that’s used so that oils don’t go rancid in foods, and you find it in a number of processed foods as well as in packaging. That’s a probable carcinogen, according to the Health and Human Services department, so clearly that could be something that’s banned and not allowed in food. So those are just small examples of where the FDA could take simple action without going through tons of scientific studies. The data is already there.

Six months ago, there was a study that popped up on a couple of emulsifiers that are pretty widely used. Polysorbate 80 was one of them. It’s a whole area where there has been hardly any research done because it’s relatively new, our knowledge of the gut microbiome. We have no idea what all these additives are doing to our gut bacteria. That’s just another example of how there is a need for more research.

I’m not going to be the one screaming, ‘Don’t eat any food additives, they’re all horrible.’ I think in a limited amount, your body can handle (them) and has a system for detoxifying. Because everyone eats some processed food. We’re all exposed to food additives. It’s just a question of quantity. If people are consuming a diet heavy in processed food, then they’re getting an abundance of all these different kinds of food addititves. And I think the FDA needs to be a lot more aware of that, the accumulation of many, many food additives coming into our bodies day after day for people who are eating these diets heavy in processed food.

Q: What do you think is the next trans fat?

A: Certainly the most dangerous things in our food now are sugar and refined grains. They’re in abundance in processed food and their effect on the body in excess is well documented.

Refined grains get turned into glucose in the body very quickly. If you’re eating a whole grain product, like oatmeal, there’s some fiber that helps to slow down the absorption in the body, but if you take out that fiber, there’s nothing to prevent it from being readily converted into glucose and functioning very similar to the way sugar does in terms of rapidly going into the bloodstream and causing these rapid spikes in blood sugar, and your pancreas produces a lot of insulin to compensate, and you have that whole cycle that can lead to metabolic syndrome and diabetes if left unchecked.

Q: Do you think when you take artificial colors and flavors out of a processed food, that makes it a better product? Is clean labeling really going to make our food healthier?

A: That’s a tough one, I think. Some days I think, ‘OK, that’s kinda good. It’s making something less bad.’ It’s good to have those options as a better alternative when you do want the chips, cookies, frozen stuff and cereals. But on the other hand, the concern is that it gives those foods a health halo and confuses people. And then people think, ‘Well I can eat more … or (it’s) a healthy product.’ … I think people have to be sophisticated about it and think ‘Well, there are none of these seemingly horrible additives, but what are the other ingredients in them?’ If there’s a lot of sugar and refined grains, then I think you have to look at those ingredients and make an assessment.

(Some companies) are taking out artificial colors and flavors without really addressing the other stuff. Like BHT and methylcellulose and all these other ingredients and preservatives.

Q: How natural are “natural flavors”?

A: All the natural flavors are still highly processed. Special strawberry flavor doesn’t come from a strawberry. They’re coming from a natural source. It could start with corn, or soybeans, or yeast. It starts with a natural source, but the way you get to it is highly processed, similar to the way you would for an artificial flavoring. The process is very similar. It’s just what you start with that’s different, that makes it natural. People can decide whether that’s better. I don’t necessarily think it’s better.

Q: We looked into problems of adulteration with processed foods like parmesan cheese.  When I asked a cheese expert if he wanted the FDA to do something about it, he said no. He said the agency has to stay focused on preventing foodborne illness caused by contamination with E. coli and Listeria and things like that.  He said these additives aren’t really a health issue. What do you say to that?

A: If you have to choose one or the other, you’re going to go with prevent E. coli and Listeria, obviously. But why do we have to choose?

It’s ironic that the FDA was inspired by Harvey Wiley, MD, who wanted an agency to oversee food, specifically because there was so much adulterated food and no one was overseeing this. That was the original inspiration for the FDA in the first place. So you didn’t have sawdust in your coffee and things like that. Now it’s cellulose in the parmesan cheese. Maybe that’s why all those shakers of parmesan cheese, when you buy them, have no taste. There’s no flavor. You have to put so much on to get a little bit of taste.