These days, much of the public and virtually all of the healthcare industry believe the same thing. We have synthetic medications, clothing fibers, building materials, and synthetic foods.
Synthetic foods, you ask. OK, so you might be thinking "I don't see any polyester apples out there," and you are right. We don't have completely synthetic foods, but we have something very close to it. Food companies are able to chemically separate parts of foods, and combine those parts into various other types of "food." I put food in quotes, because these products have little or no value as food. Mostly they are clever combinations of corn and soy molecules. Not the good parts, mostly the fat and sugar.
Yet these convenience foods flood our grocery stores and vending machines, and many people eat a diet which consists of almost all processed convenience foods. Often times, these foods are even marketed as being good for you. The manufacturer will note one or two of the nutrients contained in the product, and tout it as being good for you. For example, I am currently looking at a cereal box that touts "heart healthy grains," and "14 vitamins and minerals." Of course, they fail to mention that the "heart healthy grains" are combined with high fructose corn syrup, and that the "14 vitamins and minerals" were added in artificially, and do not actually belong in the food in question.
What is the problem with synthetic foods, you might ask? If we get all of the nutrients we need from them, why is that not an OK way to eat? They are easy and taste good. Well, there are really two major problems, and a host of minor problems. I will discuss the major problems here:
1. The foods are too energy dense. Processed foods concentrate the parts of food that we humans find appealing based upon our sense of taste, namely the fat, salt, and sugar. They leave out the fiber, starch, and all the "filler" which is in whole foods. This amps up the calorie density, and makes the foods far richer than they should be. Thus, you eat far more calories before your brain knows that you are full.
2. All that "filler" is pretty important. We are pretty arrogant as a species. Because we now believe in the omniscience of science, we study foods, and try and isolate the parts of food that are "good for us." We hone in on these nutrients, and study them. When we find one that shows some benefit in our studies, we start adding it to all kinds of processed goodies. We feel good about ourselves, because we think that this makes the otherwise unhealthy food healthy. Unfortunately, this is very far from the truth. In our arrogance, we forget that there might be other chemicals in the whole foods that we can't detect which contribute to the benefit we see. A classic example of this phenomenon is fiber. I'm sure you have heard that fiber prevents colon cancer. Shortly after this was discovered, synthetic fiber products appeared in large numbers on grocery shelves. Fiber was added to cereal, doughnuts, bread, and scores of other foods. People feel better, because they are able to get their 35 grams of fiber without changing their habitual diet at all. Wonderful, right?
Not so much. The colon cancer rates did not fall with this influx of fiber. In fact, they got higher! When the scientists did research as to why, they got quite a shock. Where the fiber in whole foods did lower the risk of colon cancer, the "fake fiber" in the other products did not. The same is true of most of the nutrients the USDA recommends. While vitamins are crucially important, and deficiencies of vitamins cause diseases, taking vitamins in pill form does not improve lifespan or mortality. In fact, some recent studies have shown that taking a vitamin may actually INCREASE your risk of death!
The bottom line is that we were meant to consume the whole foods, not their chemically rearranged counterparts. There are probably thousands of nutrients in the whole foods that we are unable to detect that work together to produce health benefits. That is why the Devolve eating rule #1 is:
Eat foods like they grow in nature
Wherever possible, eat the whole, unprocessed food. The closer you get to plucking it off the tree or pulling it out of the earth, the more nutritional value you will get out of it. In general, if your food was created in a lab, you will probably need to take a lot of lab created medicines to treat the diseases your created foods caused.
M. Jacob Ott, M.D.
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