Nutrition

Nutrition (choose a topic, click on it):

Carbohydrates

Fats (the good and bad) , Do's and don'ts about fat intake , Omega-3-fatty acid (fish oil)

Protein

Essential fatty acids

Vitamins and Minerals

Genetically engineered foods and your health

For a balanced nutrition we need:

• PROTEIN to build our cells, organs and muscles. Protein is supplying us with essential amino acids that are the building blocks for the peptide hormones in the brain and ACTH (the major stress hormone). Hormones are needed for communication signals between organ systems.
• ESSENTIAL FATTY ACIDS for information transfer in our system. These essential fatty acids consist of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, which cannot be made by our body. We must supply them to our body, that is why they are called essential fatty acids.

Other building blocks are:

• CARBOHYDRATES. In response to carbohydrate and sugar intake insulin (the "storage hormone") is released. It "files" the nutrients into the cells for future use. Contrary to the essential amino acids and the essential fatty acids there is not such a thing as an essential carbohydrate and yet we need carbohydrates as energy source for all cell function. If no carbohydrates are forthcoming, our body will be able to make glucose (the main carbohydrate) from protein or fat that is stored in our cells. Without carbohydrates there would be no smooth functioning of our system.Finally our food has to supply us with:

• VITAMINS AND MINERALS. Both are found mixed in with animal protein sources as well as with carbohydrate sources (Ref. 1, p.276).

Let us now have a look at these main players. To make the best choices for our nutrition it is important to know in which foods they are found. For links to more details about these nutrients click on the appropriate links in the above table.

Detoxification: Whenever you read about good nutrition, detoxification is mentioned also. The body needs to be detoxified so that the nutrients and supplements can access the cells and do their supportive work. Books like "Breakthrough" (Ref.8) by Suzanne Somers have reviewed newer insights of antiaging medicine. This points out the importance of detoxifying the body from heavy metals like mercury, lead and cadmium. Chelation therapy with vitamin C and Glutathione, or with EDTA can be used to remove some of these heavy toxic metals.

MSG: Food additives like MSG (mono sodium glutamate) have to be avoided. They belong to the excitotoxins and may be causing dementia, Parkinsons and Alzheimers decades down the road. The food industry likes to add them into food as "food challenge tests" invariably make the consumer choose products, which contain MSG. Have a look where MSG is found and avoid it in your daily consumption. According to Dr. Russell Blaylock MSG induces free radicals that last for life and are a powerful stimulus for cancer growth (Ref.9). According to him cancer cells have glutamate receptors, which are stimulated by MSG and cause spread and invasion of the cancer into healthy tissues. Cancer prevention implies avoiding MSG in our foods.

Genetically engineered foods (GE foods) and your health:

In the last 20 years genetically engineered food (GE food) has entered the scene on grocery shelves and roadside fruit and vegetable stands, particularly in the US. During the 19th Annual World Congress Anti-Aging and Aesthetic Medicine in Las Vegas (December 8-10, 2011) several speakers cautioned that severe allergic reactions and autoimmune responses can be caused by GE food. An example is the introduction of tiny DNA pieces into GE food stemming from insects to make plants more resistant to disease. However, humans can react to these food changes with severe anaphylactic shock and less severe allergic reactions, which are now being seen in clinical practices and hospitals.
In 1994 GE foods were first introduced into the market. They were the FLAVR SAVR tomatoes. Although initially successful, the public demanded non GE foods and the product was withdrawn from the market (Ref.10). According to Ref.11 the Europeans approached GE foods with the precautionary principle in mind that if food has not been proven to be safe, it should not be allowed into the market. Many European countries require GE foods to be labeled as such or they are even forbidden. In the US the opposite is true: In 1992 the Food and Drug Administration declared that GE foods would be generally regarded as safe and would not require testing or labeling. By 1996 GE soy became widely grown; in 2009 GE beets for sugar production were introduced. Rats have recently been shown to succumb to various tumors when exposed to GE corn (Ref.12 and video below). 70% of packaged foods in the U.S. likely contain ingredients from GE corn, soy, canola, or sugar (Ref. 11).
Health risks of genetically modified foods have been investigated much more since about 2006 and prior to that there has been a paucity of reports (Ref.13). This reference also points out that animal toxicity experiments should include a mix of GE foods to simulate the human exposure to GE foods. Ref. 12 describes experiments with GE corn fed rats that had a number of tumors after 18 months. They were observed over the entire life span of the laboratory rats while standard toxicity experiments on mice and rats are conducted only over 90 days and declared as "safe" when in reality the exposure time was too short. Here is an example where mice were used as toxicity model, but only for 4 weeks in one set of experiments and 90 days in another set of experiments. When exposure to the GE product under these circumstances did not show a difference to the control group, the GE product was declared as "safe" (Ref. 14). Another such blatant simplification with an only 90-day exposure of rats to GE rice should make us believe that GE rice would be safe! (Ref. 15)
Conclusion: GE foods are NOT safe as explained above in detail. The discussion about the safety of GE foods is not over as this article shows.
We need 3 generation monkey and human studies to show that GE foods would be harmless. In the case of humans this experiment would last 90 years. Nobody will fund such a study. I prefer to be part of the control group that ate mostly organic foods. I recommend you buy organic food whenever you can and avoid foods that you know are genetically modified (also see organic blog Ref. 16).

Disclaimer:

This outline is only a teaching aid to patients and should stimulate you to ask the right questions when seeing your doctor. However, the responsibility of treatment stays in the hands of your doctor and you.

References:

1. B. Sears: "The age-free zone".Regan Books, Harper Collins, 2000. Also see Dr. Sears' site.

2. B. Sears: "Zone perfect meals in minutes". Regan Books, Harper Also see Dr. Sears' site.

3. B.J. Wilcox, D.C. Willcox and M. Suzuki: "The Okinawa Program."    Clarkson Potter,2001, N.Y., U.S.A.

4. E.L. Rossi: The psychobiology of mind-body healing. Norton &Co.,   1986, N.Y., U.S.A.

5. Vitamins and Foods. Audio-Digest Family Practice Vol 49, Issue 29,    Aug.7, 2001.

6. P.C. McGraw: Life strategies. 1999, Simon&Schuster Source, N.Y.,    U.S.A.

7. B. Sears: "The top 100 zone foods". Regan Books, Harper Collins,   2001. Also see Dr. Sears' site.

8. Suzanne Somers: "Breakthrough" Eight Steps to Wellness-- Life-altering Secrets from Today's Cutting-edge Doctors", Crown Publishers, 2008

9.Suzanne Somers: "Knockout" Interviews with doctors who are curing cancer and how to prevent getting it in the first place. Crown Publishers, 2009; Dr. Russell Blaylock, an oncologist, was interviewed on page 155 re. MSG.

10. http://ucanr.org/repository/CAO/landingpage.cfm?article=ca.v054n04p6&fulltext=yes

11. Rakel: Integrative Medicine, 3rd ed. , 2012 Saunders, an Imprint of Elsevier : The precautionary principle, genetically engineered food.

12. http://www.cban.ca/Press/Press-Releases/Unprecedented-Safety-Study-Finds-Harm-from-GM-Corn (Sept. 2012).

13. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18989835 (Health risks of genetically modified foods, Feb. 2009)

14. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22928600 (Mice fed on a diet enriched with genetically engineered multivitamin corn show no sub-acute toxic effects and no sub-chronic toxicity. Aug. 29, 2012).

15. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22215564 (Safety assessment of transgenic Bacillus thuringiensis rice T1c-19 in Sprague-Dawley rats from metabonomics and bacterial profile perspectives. March 2012).

16. Blog on organic food: http://www.befoodsmart.com/

Last Modified: Oct. 4, 2012