Yeast: This substance is included not only in bread as baker’s yeast, but also in beer and, to a lesser extent, wine. Beer and lager are fermented with brewer’s yeast. If you’ve noticed that you feel worse after beer or wine than after spirits, the cleanest being vodka, then you may be yeast-sensitive. Does this mean you can’t drink? Not at all. Just stick to spirits and champagne! Champagne is made by a double-fermentation process, which means that it includes much less in the way of yeast. Some people think they are allergic to wheat because they feel worse after eating bread. If you’ve noticed this—perhaps you feel sluggish, tired, or blocked up after eating bread but feel fine after eating pasta—you may not be allergic to wheat but be reacting to the yeast in the bread.
Wheat: More people react to this grain than to any other. It contains gluten, a sticky protein also found in rye, barley, and oats. Gluten sensitivity occurs in about one in one hundred people according to research by the University of Maryland,55 but is medically diagnosed in fewer than one in one thousand people. So, there’s a 90 percent chance that your doctor won’t pick this up. However, there’s something in gluten called gliadin, which some so-called gluten-sensitive people react to. There’s no gliadin in oats, so some people feel fine when eating oats, but not when they are eating wheat, rye, and barley. Rice, buckwheat, millet, and corn are all gluten free, although some people react to corn. The only way to know for sure is to have a food-intolerance test.
Alcohol: As well as causing allergies in some people, alcohol irritates the digestive tract in everyone, making it more permeable to undigested food proteins, increasing the chances of an allergic reaction to anything. This is why some people feel worse when they both eat foods they are allergic to and drink alcohol. For example, you might be only mildly allergic to wheat and milk and feel fine after either. But when you have both, plus alcohol, you don’t feel great.
The good news about IgG-based allergies is that if you avoid the offending food strictly for three to six months you will no longer be allergic to it. This is because there will no longer be any IgG antibodies to that food in your system and the body will have forgotten that it was allergic to it. This isn’t the case with IgE-based reactions. The body, it seems, never forgets these.
If you suspect you have allergies
Avoid suspect foods for fourteen days and reintroduce them one by one, noting your symptoms, or have an allergy test.
Avoid foods you test allergic to for three months while improving your diet to allow your digestive system to heal and desensitize.
Even if you don’t have a dairy allergy, reduce the amount of cow’s milk products you eat, substituting goat cheeses and soy products and just drinking less milk.
Even if you don’t react to gluten, reduce the amount of wheat you eat, substituting other grains like oats, rye, and rice.
Reintroduce allergy-provoking foods one by one after three months, eating them infrequently, ideally no more than every four days, to minimize the chance of becoming allergic to the food once more.
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Detoxing Your Body
Throughout the centuries, health experts have extolled the value of spring-cleaning the body. In much the same way as you need a holiday, a break from your work, your body, too, needs a break from its work. One of the traditional methods of purifying the body is fasting. The fact that many people report feeling so much more vital after fasting is a testimony to the fact that making energy is as much a result of improving the body’s ability to detoxify as it is about eating the right foods.
However, not everyone feels better as a result of fasting, nor do they always feel better right away. Once the body starts to liberate and eliminate toxic material, if the liver isn’t up to the job, symptoms of toxicity can result. So modern-day detox regimes tend to use modified fasts in which the person is given a low-toxin diet, plus plenty of the key nutrients needed to speed up the body’s ability to detoxify. Doing this once a year, for a week, can make a major difference to your energy levels.
Prevention, however, is better than cure, so if you are basically healthy and want to promote and maintain optimal liver function, the best advice is to cut down on your intake of toxic substances, eat an optimal diet, and follow a balanced nutrition supplement program.
CHECK YOUR DETOX POTENTIAL
Complete this questionnaire to discover whether you need to improve your detoxification potential:
Do you often suffer from headaches or migraine?
Do you sometimes have watery or itchy eyes or swollen, red, or sticky eyelids?
Do you have dark circles under your eyes?
Do you sometimes have itchy ears, earache, ear infections, drainage from the ears, or ringing in the ears?
Do you often suffer from excessive mucus, a stuffy nose, or sinus problems?
Do you suffer from acne or skin rashes or hives?
Do you sweat a lot and have a strong body odor?
Do you sometimes have joint or muscle aches or pains?
Do you have a sluggish metabolism and find it hard to lose weight, or are you underweight and find it hard to gain weight?
Do you often suffer from frequent or urgent urination?
Do you suffer from nausea or vomiting?
Do you often have a bitter taste in your mouth or a furry tongue?
Do you have a strong reaction to alcohol?
Do you suffer from bloating?
Does coffee stay in your system for a long time?
If you answer yes to seven or more questions, you need to improve your detox potential.
If you answer yes to between four and six questions, you are beginning to show signs of poor detoxification and need to improve your detox potential.
If you answer yes to fewer than four questions, you are unlikely to have a problem with detoxification.
How the body detoxifies
If eating the right food is one side of the coin, detoxification is the other. From a chemical perspective, much of what goes on in the body involves substances being broken down, built up, and turned from one thing into another. A good 80 percent of this involves detoxifying potentially harmful substances. Much of this is done by the liver, which is like a clearinghouse able to recognize millions of potentially harmful chemicals and transform them into something harmless or prepare them for elimination. It is the chemical brain of the body—recycling, regenerating, and detoxifying in order to maintain your health.
How the body detoxifies. The body processes toxins in the liver using different chemical pathways. Shown here are examples of what the liver does with caffeine, acetaminophen, or aspirin. These different pathways, such as glutathione conjugation or sulfation, need different nutrients to work properly.
External toxins, or exotoxins, that are taken in from the environment represent just a small part of what the liver has to deal with; many toxins are made within the body from otherwise harmless molecules. Every breath and every action can generate toxins. These internally created toxins, or endotoxins, have to be disarmed in just the same way as exotoxins do. Whether a substance is bad for you depends as much on your ability to detoxify it as on its inherent toxic properties.
Disarming the toxins
The liver detoxifies substances by sticking things onto them so that they are ready to be eliminated from the body in a process called conjugation. The four main types of conjugation are glutathione conjugation, sulfation, glucuronidation, and glycine conjugation. To optimize each of these particular processes, it is essential to have an adequate supply of the nutrients fundamental for them to work, plus an ensured intake of all vitamins and minerals (from a supplement), a range of which is needed enhance the four processes.
The keys to enhancing these are taking glutathione and sulfur supplements. In addition, eat plenty of cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts. These vegetables are rich in a family of nutrients called glucosinolates, which are particularly supportive of glutathione conjugati
on and glucuronidation. The final key factor in supporting the detoxification pathways is maintaining the right acid-alkaline balance in the body—that is, it should not be too acid. In order to ensure that you are doing this, take a formula that contains alkalizing minerals such as potassium bicarbonate, in addition to including plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables in your diet.
Liver problems or health problems?
Having a liver’s-eye view on disease processes often sheds new light on the health problems and solutions of the early twenty-first century. Just about any allergic, inflammatory, or metabolic disorder may involve or create suboptimum liver function, including eczema, asthma, chronic fatigue, chronic infections, inflammatory bowel disorders, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and hormone imbalances.
Substances that interfere with proper liver function include caffeine, alcohol, recreational and medicinal drugs, birth control pills, HRT, dioxins, cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, high-protein diets, organophosphate fertilizers, paint fumes, saturated fat, steroid hormones, and charcoal-barbecued meat. Needless to say, you should try to avoid any of these you can and minimize your exposure to the rest.
The good news is that, with a good diet, lifestyle, regular detoxification, and the right supplements, you can restore and maintain optimal liver function.
Protect yourself with antioxidants
We are threatened by internal toxins as well as external ones. For example, oxygen, the basis of all plant and animal life, is our most important nutrient, needed by every cell every second of every day. It is also chemically reactive and highly dangerous. In normal biochemical reactions, oxygen can become unstable and capable of oxidizing neighboring molecules. This can lead to cellular damage that triggers cancer, inflammation, arterial damage, and aging. Oxidized molecules, known as oxidants, are the body’s equivalent of nuclear waste and must be disarmed. Oxidants are made in all combustion processes, including smoking, exhaust-fume emissions, radiation, frying or barbecuing food, and normal body processes. Antioxidants disarm these harmful oxidants (see chapter 15).
The balance between your intake of antioxidants and exposure to oxidants may be the difference between life and death. You can tip the scales in your favor by making simple changes to your diet and taking antioxidant supplements. The key fact to remember, though, is that none of these nutrients works in isolation in the body. Vitamin C, which is water soluble, and vitamin E, which is fat soluble, are synergistic: together they can protect the tissues and fluids in the body. What’s more, when vitamin E has “disarmed” an oxidant, the vitamin E can be “reloaded” by vitamin C, which is then recycled by glutathione, which itself is recycled by anthocyanidins, so their combined presence has a synergistic effect.
Detox supplements
It is wise to make sure that your daily supplement program contains significant quantities of antioxidants, especially if you are older, live in a polluted city, or have any other unavoidable exposure to oxidants.
The easiest way to do this is by taking a comprehensive antioxidant supplement, in addition to a good multivitamin and mineral. Most reputable supplement companies produce formulas containing a combination of the following nutrients. The kind of total supplementary intake (which may come in part from a multivitamin and extra vitamin C) to aim for is:
Vitamin A (retinol/beta-carotene) 7,500 IU
to 20,000 IU
Glutathione (reduced) 25 mg
to 75 mg
Vitamin E 100 IU
to 500 IU
Vitamin C 1,000 mg
to 3,000 mg
CoQ10 10 mg
to 50 mg
Lipoic acid 10 mg
to 50 mg
Anthocyanidin source 50 mg
to 250 mg
Selenium 30 meg
to 100 meg
Zinc 10 mg
to 20 mg
There are several other supplements that really help boost your detoxification. An increasingly popular one is MSM (methyl sulfonyl methane)—a form of sulfur—that is particularly helpful in supporting the sulfation process in the liver. Aloe vera juice is also a great all-round tonic for boosting the cleansing processes in the digestive tract. Blended with a range of herbs, aloe vera juice is a great basis for any cleansing program (see Resources).
My seven-day detox
Begin your detox at the weekend or during a time when you don’t have too much going on.
Walk for at least fifteen minutes every day.
Drink at least two quarts of water a day—purified, distilled, filtered, or bottled. You can also drink dandelion coffee or herb teas.
Have half a pint of fruit or vegetable juice a day—either carrot and apple juice (you can buy these two separately and combine them with one-third water) with grated ginger or fresh watermelon juice. The flesh of the watermelon is high in beta-carotene and vitamin C. The seeds are high in vitamin E and the antioxidant minerals zinc and selenium. You can make a great antioxidant cocktail by blending flesh and seeds in a blender.
Eat in abundance:
Fruit—the most beneficial fruits with the highest detox potential include fresh apricots, all types of berries, cantaloupe, citrus fruits, kiwi, papaya, peaches, mango, melons, and red grapes. Vegetables—especially good for detoxification are artichokes, peppers, beets, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, red cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, cucumber, kale, pumpkin, spinach, sweet potato, tomato, watercress, and bean and seed sprouts.
Eat in moderation:
Grains—brown rice, corn, millet, quinoa: not more than twice a day.
Fish—salmon, mackerel, sardines, tuna: not more than once a day.
Oils—use extra virgin olive oil for cooking and in place of butter, and cold-pressed seed oils for dressing.
Nuts and seeds—one handful a day of raw, unsalted nuts and seeds should be included. Choose from almonds, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts, pecans, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, and flaxseeds.
Supplement two multivitamins/minerals, 2 grams of vitamin C, two antioxidant complexes, and 2 grams of MSM every day. Also have a shot of aloe vera juice.
Avoid all wheat products, all meat and dairy products, eggs, and salt—and any foods containing them—hydrogenated fats, artificial sweeteners, food additives and preservatives, fried foods, spices, and dried fruit.
Limit potatoes to one portion every other day and bananas to one every other day.
Don’t be surprised if you feel worse for a couple of days before you feel better. This is especially likely if you are eliminating foods to which you are allergic or upon which you are dependent.
36
Breaking the Fat Barrier
Sixty percent of Americans are overweight and thirty percent are obese, with numbers increasing daily More than one in two people are overweight. Once a person is obese, the risk for diabetes goes up seventy-seven times, and once diabetic the risk for heart disease goes up eight times. Obesity is a serious health issue that costs the U.S. $117 billion and accounts for 400,000 deaths each year, according to the Center for Disease Control. Yet the startling fact is that it is relatively easily solved by tackling the true underlying cause—by restoring blood sugar control.
Most people believe that eating too many calories causes weight gain. However, people in countries where obesity is extremely rare, like China, eat substantially more calories (2,630 kcals a day) than the obesity capital of the world, America (2,360 kcals). In Britain, the average is around 2,000 kcals. Different levels of activity can explain part of this, but this isn’t the whole story. The big difference is the quality of what we eat. Contrary to popular opinion, it isn’t fat that’s the main culprit. Like our calorie intake, our dietary percentage of fat has steadily declined. We eat too much sugar and refined carbohydrates.
Your weight is a burning issue
The missing link in the calorie equation is metabolism—how the body turns food into fat. And the key is to maintain an even blood sugar level. According to Professor Gerald Reaven of Stanfo
rd University in California, one in four people in the Western world now has “insulin resistance,” which means an inability to keep their blood sugar level even. Among obese people, this figure rises to nine in ten. Put simply, if you can’t keep your blood sugar level even, it goes up and down like a yo-yo. When it’s too high, you turn the excess sugar into fat, and when it’s too low you feel lethargic. The end result of insulin resistance is diabetes.
Whenever your blood sugar level rises, your body produces the hormone insulin, which helps transport the sugar from your blood into your cells, converting any excess sugar into fat. The more often your blood sugar rises, the more insulin you produce. And as more insulin is produced, more sugar is turned into fat. Over time, your body’s cells become less responsive (or resistant) to insulin, causing even more insulin to be produced. Eventually, cells become so nonresponsive that diabetes results. For these people, even the slightest indulgence means extra weight gain.
This, by the way, is why high-protein diets like the Atkins diet work for some people. Dr. Atkins proposed that turning fat and protein into energy was so difficult that you used up calories doing it and hence lost weight. This has been proven to be untrue. He also proposed that the by-products of running on fat and protein, ketones, would be another route to losing calories, since these ketones, which have a calorific value, are excreted in the urine. Again, this is untrue. No appreciable amount of calorie loss occurs via ketone excretion. However, what is true is that by eating a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet your appetite decreases. The reason for this is simple. By having more protein in a meal and less carbohydrate, your blood sugar level doesn’t go shooting up, so your body doesn’t have to make more insulin to carry the excess sugar out of the bloodstream, which would then get dumped as fat. Blood sugar is the key to appetite and to weight control. There are, however, easier, less restrictive, and healthier ways to reduce insulin secretion and control blood sugar.
The New Optimum Nutrition Bible Page 33