If bone broth is the beautiful, then processed food is the rotten when it comes to never getting sick.
Growing up, my middle name might as well have been Processed Cupcake because processed junk food is all I ever ate and, well, I just love that word cupcake. I was also always sick, with the culmination coming my sophomore and junior years of college when I had tonsillitis and/or pharyngitis about every other month. The tonsils and adenoids were removed, and a few years later I started on a healthier lifestyle.
This past year I went almost completely unprocessed.
Everything in my physical-health life got better – from the female menstrual cycle to a nearly healed gut, a ton more energy and of course, nil illness.
Here are my top 3 issues with processed foods, as they relate to sickness
- Processed foods contribute to inflammation and inflammation throughout the body causes disease and sickness.
- Processed foods disrupt digestion. They are stripped of invaluable vitamins, minerals and nutrients. They are pumped full of other artificial things which your body doesn’t know how to properly process.
- Processed foods will make you want more. The more processed foods we eat, the more we crave. We become hungrier, less satisfied and gain more rotten gut bacteria. Yes, it’s a vicious cycle. As long as we’re trapped in this cycle, we’re prone to imminent or lingering illness (and hunger and weight gain).
So what am I supposed to do?
Problems always come with solutions.
The problem is that the solution is not always convenient or desirable.
Like everything in life, you do have a choice.
If keeping illness at bay is a top priority, the first thing you can do is simply try to minimize the amount of processed foods consumed. You don’t have to cut cold turkey, but even a slight reduction will help.
- Substitutions. Try to find unprocessed alternatives to your favorite foods. I do this daily. For example, you’re craving granola and milk for breakfast. Instead of buying the processed, pre-packaged granola from the store, try making my Grain Free Slow-Cooked Pumpkin Granola Clusters. And for your milk? You could always enjoy your own homemade Vanilla-Mint Almond Milk. Don’t have “time?” It’s not an excuse I can empathize with anymore.
- Read labels. Remember, beware of marketing words. They lie to you. Just read the ingredients in a label. Can’t pronounce it? Don’t buy it. More than a handful of ingredients? Beware. And guess what? Just because it says “gluten free” and it’s a large, well-known company does not mean that it’s a healthy, unprocessed food. Prime example: Udi’s Gluten Free Blueberry Muffins. A couple years back I ate these all the time. They were gluten free and since I love muffins, I thought they were doing me good. But just look at all these ingredients -> {DRIED CANE SYRUP, WHOLE EGGS, WATER, TAPIOCA STARCH, BROWN RICE FLOUR, WILD BLUEBERRIES, NON-GMO CANOLA OIL, POTATO STARCH, PALM OIL, CRYSTAL SUGAR, DRIED BLUEBERRY CRUMBLES (BLUEBERRIES, SUGAR), BAKING POWDER (SODIUM ACID PYROPHOSPHATE, SODIUM BICARBONATE, CORN STARCH, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE), SALT, VANILLA EXTRACT, SUNFLOWER LECITHIN, LEMON ZEST (LEMON PEEL, SUGAR, LEMON OIL), XANTHAN GUM. CONTAINS EGG} Enough said.
- Learn. Educate yourself on ingredients and the food you are feeding your body. If you don’t know where to start, I’d invite you to join the 21-Day Life Unprocessed in 2014 Program or the custom one, just for you, Premier Healthy Lifestyle with Real Food Program.
I can promise you that by getting rid of processed foods in your diet, you’ll be healthier and more able to fight sickness.
I’m living proof.
I know it’s not easy.
But I also know it’s worth it.
This is part of my mission for 2014 — to continue teaching people how to live this unprocessed lifestyle, to share as much information as possible and to help implement these practices into your everyday life (ps. are you local? Tracy, California? Livermore, California? Dublin, California? Mountain House, California? Then I can do a lot of this for you. Check it out!)
Love your guts,
SKH