Why Your Health Food is Killing You
Health conscience people often assume that by eating organic fruits and vegetables and not eating processed foods and foods with additives likes nitrates and MSG that they are receiving the best shot at radiant health and longevity.
Unfortunately this is not the case for one simple reason.
The more food you eat regardless of its origin or whether it is considered a health food, the more disease you will likely experience and the faster you will meet death.
For the purpose of this article think of your body as a biological machine and like any machine such as an automobile, the more fuel that you put into it, the more it has to work to burn the fuel resulting in more breakdowns and faster wear.
Food places a tremendous burden on your body and in actuality very little is needed to repair tissue and supply you with the energy needed to function in your daily life.
Mastication, digestion, absorption and elimination of food takes a great deal of vital energy which is why you feel tired after a big meal, your body is using a lot of energy to process that meal.
Vital energy is diverted from other more important bodily systems like immune function and tissue repair.
For most people the process of digestion is an all day event because they are continually eating food before their earlier meals have been processed.
Filtering organs like the kidneys and liver are constantly burdened removing toxins from the blood.
The colon works hard but can't always eliminate the waste from one meal before more material comes down the pipe which often leads to clogging and eventually a host of health problems.
To top it all off when you eat constantly your blood is always overloaded with pro-inflammatory compounds like insulin, fat and homocysteine, all of which promote disease and aging.
Unfortunately Americas consumer driven economy not only condones high caloric consumption but even recommends it, it may not be easy to see that the less food you eat, regardless of the kind, the healthier you will be.
There is a powerful reason to eat less, much less, on the genetic level as well.
Eating excess calories causes gene expression that accelerates aging and eating a low calorie diet causes genes to express favorably for life extension and better health.
It has been known since 1935 when the now famous study by McCay and Crowell showed that rats fed a restricted calorie diet had much less age-related disease and lived much longer than their fatter well fed peers.
Since that time numerous animal studies have shown that under eating without malnutrition has a dramatic positive effect on health and longevity.
The fact appears to be that caloric restriction or “undereating” is the only proven life extension protocol known today.
Eating like we do is a learned behavior and is not a healthful practice.
What we think of as being hungry is not true hunger at all. Often we get hungry when there is food still in our stomach.
In summary there is ample evidence to suggest that eating a high calorie diet, regardless of whether it is health food, triggers several mechanisms in the body that promote age-related disease and shortened life span while a calorie restricted diet promotes the exact opposite.
Eating less and eating lower calorie but more nutrient dense foods may be the closest we have come yet to discovering the fountain of youth.
Michael Ingraham is a health and fitness researcher, the creator of Kahunka.com and several other sites like
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