The Dangers of Eating Processed Food

“Americans are a people so obsessed with nutrition yet whose dietary health is so poor,” says Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He believes that when it comes to thinking about food, America is obsessed with “nutritionism,” which views food as just a sum of its nutritional components. 

“Whatever tentative scientific information is developed, it gets very quickly distorted by the food marketers and manufacturers,” Pollan explains. This is why Americans prefer processed foods. “A banana or potato cannot significantly change its structure. But any processed food can be changed overnight to correspond with food fads.”

Processed food comprises 90 percent of the annual American food purchases, as marketing backed by billions of dollars is constantly working to convince consumers that fast foods and junk foods are the way to go. This reliance on processed food as the main source of nutrition has caused epidemic proportions of diabetes, diet-related cancers, heart disease and obesity.

Delicious Taste, Deadly Diet

Sure, processed foods taste good but are actually “dead foods” and do not provide natural nutrition. These foods are chemically altered to make them more appealing to your taste buds and use unhealthy artificial flavors and additives like high fructose corn syrup, a common sweetener and the single greatest source of calories in the United States.

High fructose corn syrup by itself, is enough to seriously compromise your health. But it’s just one of the dangerous ingredients in processed foods. 

On the other hand, refined sugar, another common sweetener in processed foods, has been found to be more addictive than cocaine!

If you regularly consume a lot of processed foods – particularly sugar-rich ones – you are subjecting the sweet receptors on your tongue to abnormally high levels of stimulation, resulting in an overload of reward signals in your brain, which can override your normal self-control mechanisms and cause addiction.

This is the reason why raw and whole foods seem to taste bland – because processed foods are destroying your taste buds. Your body has been conditioned to think that chemically altered foods should be the primary fuel, when the opposite is true.

Throw in aspartame and other artificial sweeteners, MSG, salt, trans fats and a host of other questionable ingredients and you’ve practically scheduled a visit to your doctor in the not so distant future.

What Should You Eat Then?

Because processed foods are addicting, many people would probably feel deprived if they can’t eat their favorite junk food.  But in reality, the sooner you ditch processed foods and start eating right, the sooner you’ll be in a better mood, boost your energy levels, manage your weight better, and experience improved health in general.

Dr. Joseph Mercola’s no-grain diet will help you conquer your addiction to processed foods by severely limiting your consumption of grains and sugars. This grain-free diet can be likened to a protein diet with a strong emphasis on vegetables, which will provide you with complex carbohydrates that will sustain you with energy throughout the day.

Eating raw and in-season organic, locally-grown vegetables will deliver optimal nutrition to your body because vital elements such as biophotons, enzymes, hormones, oxygen, phytonutrients, minerals and vitamins remain largely intact. Dr. Mercola recommends that you should eat at least one-third of your food consumption raw.

It’s a big misconception that eating healthy means eating bland and unappealing food. You’d be surprised to know that there are many delicious grain-free meals and grain-free recipes that you will surely enjoy.

You can eat great meals and snacks that don’t include processed foods. It would take some getting used to but once it becomes a healthy habit, you will surely notice a marked improvement in your health.

MTT and Kicking the Grain Habit Today

Do you know that you can “tap” your way to overcoming your grain addiction for good?

Top health expert Dr. Joseph Mercola delivers the good news: while a grain-free diet may be a Herculean task for those who have grown accustomed – or addicted, more likely – to their grains and sugars, the Meridian Tapping Technique or MTT (also known as the Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT) could be used to recondition the mind and to not succumb to the cravings anymore.

Why the No-Grain Diet Spells Success
Why do some diets fail to deliver their lofty promises of weight loss?

Dr. Mercola recounts that low-carb diets have been around for the longest time, but have remained limited to controlling gram count. Weight loss is thus pegged on the idea of staying below a given number of carbohydrate food’s gram count each day.

Proposing a revolutionary weight loss program in his book, The No-Grain Diet: Conquer Carbohydrate Addiction and Stay Slim For Life, Dr. Mercola believes that to merely address the WHAT of eating and to ignore the WHY of being delirious for pecan pie or that tall stack of pancakes is not the best way to promote weight loss in the long term.

In short, weight loss goes beyond gram count. The No-Grain Diet satisfies this by penetrating cravings, emotional eating triggers, and beliefs, and being able to turn all these around into a positive lifestyle philosophy. 

Recognizing them as interconnected, functioning entities, Dr. Mercola finds the need to harness the body, mind and emotions as the key to successfully shedding the extra pounds. Your weight problems should be tackled on different levels:

•    BODY - Is your digestion and metabolism telling your body to store fat after an overwhelm of excessive grains and sugars?
•    MIND - Do your beliefs state that it is impossible for you to permanently lose weight?
•    EMOTIONS - What negative feelings or situations prompt your system to crave for sweets and to indulge recklessly?

The No-Grain Diet gets to the bottom of the problem, satisfying the questions of what you eat, why you eat, and how your cells are reprogrammed into wanting the proper food.

Fight the Grain Habit through MTT
The Meridian Tapping Technique is one of the basic tools of the No-Grain Diet, which will help you eliminate all the barriers to optimal health.

MTT is a form of psychological acupressure popularly used for concerns such as improving sleep and marital counseling. The practice is akin to traditional Chinese practice, which identifies acupuncture points to help energy flow smoothly through meridians.

MTT is easy to learn. Using all four fingers of both hands, tap five to seven times each of your body’s nine acupuncture points: the top of the head, eyebrows, and the area under both eyes, to name a few. While you tap, identify the cravings needed to be eliminated and form your healing statement, such as “Even though I crave for this slice of chocolate cake, I deeply and completely accept myself.”

MTT may be done whenever your cravings get in the way of your No-Grain Diet. Perform this healing tool as often as 10 to 20 times a day for up to five days, and you will be surprised at how it addresses the very core of your food addictions and gives you a new, grain-free lease of life.

Dr. Mercola says that being escapist is the last thing that can help you in your grain addiction. No matter what craving it is – perhaps an insatiable desire for pizza or doughnuts that has consumed you for years – it needs to be properly recognized to get going on the No-Grain Diet and the journey to weight loss.