Get In Shape After 40.com

To get fit in my 40’s and beyond, I am eliminating certain foods and drinks. My previous blog targeted soft drinks and fried foods. The third food on my list of foods to eliminate is processed foods and overly processed foods. 

This is the most painful of all foods to give up because it is the easiest to grab when we are on the go and one of tastiest groups of all of our foods. (Not that it’s a food group.)

Processed foods (refined foods) can be anything from cheese doodles to white bread.  We take nutrient rich grains and process all of the goodness out of them.  Why?  Again it comes down to “shelf life” (can sit on the grocery store shelves for weeks,) and manufacturer’s making more money (lots more money.) 

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water!  The way our wheat is processed is exactly that. We basically strip all of the vital nutrients out of our grains to produce white flour.  Not only that, but then we add chemicals to enhance the “whiteness” of the flour so we can produce these gorgeous breads, cookies, cakes and crap that sits on our grocery store shelves for weeks without spoiling. 

Let’s look past the beauty and see what is really going on. Let’s learn to detect the real enemies and improve our own “shelf life” so that we can have many, many, great years ahead of us and live them doing things that we enjoy.  Now is the time in life to make goals of the things we would like to do before our bodies do turn “old and gray,” when we inevitably resort to the tight little perm and thigh-high varicose vein stockings.

Trans fat, (”Shortening,” “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” or “hydrogenated vegetable oil,”)  artificial preservatives, chemicals, nitrates, dyes and artificial additives are just a short list of things added to our foods to enhance flavor and “shelf life.”

We will look at the affect of only one of our organs; the Pancreas.  The pancreas produces insulin that helps to control our blood sugar levels.   The more processed foods we eat, the harder the pancreas has to work to control blood sugar levels. As we age, this may result in the overworked pancreas to work less effiecently. This wearing out can bring the onset of Diabetes because it has a much harder time controlling blood sugar levels. 

The pancreas also manufactures important digestive enzymes.  In our human bodies, enzymes are very important and a word that we never hear about.  Ask a friend if they have had enough enzymes in their diet today and I will bet you get a puzzled look. One of the vital roles played by enzymes is to help with our immune systems. The very system that helps to fight off cancers. 

Our pancreas also manufactures important digestive enzymes.  This helps to digest our food properly and get the nutrients flowing in the right direction.  But, and it is a big but, our pancreas was designed to “help” manufacture the digestive enzymes by breaking down foods that already contained these important enzymes. Get it?  Help - not doing the job by itself.  So, in our 30,000 + McDonalds restaurants and our highly processed foods with boxed meals, cookies, crackers, white bread & artificial crap, our pancreas has been left holding the bag.  It can’t do its job when it is continually overwhelmed.  

Our body has to spend more energy trying to produce these enzymes than producing the other important enzymes that will help keep our immune systems healthy. 

There is no nutritional value in processed foods and fast foods.  All this work that our body has to do results in nothing.  The more we load our bodies with the bad foods, the more we push our bodies into old age, sickness and general bad health.

The bottom line is, by eating processed foods,  we are putting toxins into our body faster than our bodies can remove them. Our generation can be saved. We were not brought up on fast foods and processed foods. It is the generation behind us that is very scary. 

Next we will look at how to get more enzymes into our diets and how to pick our foods wisely.

1. No soft drinks or diet drinks.
2. No Fried Foods.
3. No processed foods including white bread and white rice and fast foods.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Getting Started. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.