The French Don't Diet Plan Read online

  I’ll provide very simple guidance on this process (below), so you can approach it in the way that works best for you. First, I’ve included the worst of the ingredients, so you can pick up each product and scan for the main offenders. If you find one, toss it out. Next, as a backup, I’ll list specific examples of the most common chemicals people harbor in their cabinets. If you see any of these, toss them out.

  Ingredients: The Faux Has Got to Go

  If you need more information on the most popular faux-food ingredients, check our Rogues Gallery in the reference section at the end of this book. But to begin with, just toss out anything found on this short list of chemicals.

  What If You’re Diabetic?

  This condition warrants a close following of your doctor’s advice. That said, you still don’t have to eat chemicals. Ask your doctor about the insulin-moderating effects of natural foods that contain fiber, fat, or protein, and the way these lower the glycemic index of your carbs.

  Examples might include whole-grain bread with tuna salad, pasta with olive oil and garlic, or a potato with a little butter and sour cream.

  Everything with hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, or trans fats

  Everything with additive sugars, such as high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup solids, polysorbate 80, and all the chemical sweeteners such as aspartame, stevia, Splenda, saccharine, acesulfame K, cyclamate, sorbitol

  Anything with the words artificial or food product on the label

  All dyes, such as Red No. 40, Yellow No. 6, Blue No. 2

  Sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate

  Potassium bromate

  Propyl gallate

  Olestra

  Mycoprotein

  Monosodium glutamate (MSG)

  Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA)

  Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT)

  SUSPECT PRODUCTS YOU MAY FIND IN YOUR CUPBOARD

  Sodas

  Sugar-free products

  Powdered pudding

  Gravy packets

  Canned soups

  Crackers

  Chips made with hydrogenated oils

  Plastic-wrapped snacks

  Plastic-wrapped breads

  Boxed macaroni and cheese

  Boxed potato products

  Skillet “helper” dinners

  Breakfast cereals

  SUSPECT PRODUCTS YOU MAY FIND IN YOUR FRIDGE AND FREEZER

  Pie crusts

  Microwave dinners

  Frozen bagels

  Potatoes (fries, tater tots)

  Tortillas

  Fake dairy products

  Low-fat yogurts

  Frozen pizza

  Frozen oven meals

  Write these down and keep them together on a list, and we’ll show you how to replace them in the next step, when we walk you through the grocery store.

  No Faux Carbs!

  Low-carb Crash

  What started out with an incredible boom of 930 new low-carb inventions in 2004 became a fading food product line. Recent market analysis in the United States, Australia, and Europe confirm the trend away from these items. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that even giant food manufacturers such as Unilever and Nestlé are pulling back due to flagging demand for all low-carb food products.

  Here’s the dietary irony of the century. The theory behind low-carb diets is that limiting carbs prevents the rapid swings in blood glucose—from spike to crash—that leave you tired and hungry.

  Ironically, isn’t this exactly what has happened to the low-carb phenomenon itself? The low-carb craze spiked with a surge of super-sweetened promises, and seems to be passing just as rapidly. Just like one of their dreaded high glycemic index foods, the passing low-carb fad has left us tired of diets and hungry for something of substance.

  Maybe that’s because faux-carb products like low-carb bread, ice cream, and pasta are hopeless oxymorons, or because their chemical sweetener substitutes can cause health problems.

  In a recent interview, Donald Hensrud, M.D., a preventive medicine and nutrition specialist at the Mayo Clinic, pointed out that faux-carb alcohols can act as great laxatives—if you’re in need of a little diarrhea, cramping, or general digestive discomfort. These faux-carb sugar alcohols come in many forms: sorbitol, xylitol, mannitol, maltitol, lactitol, lycasin, palatinit, and other hydrogenated starches.

  Another problem is that faux-carb ingredients are being added to the market so quickly that they haven’t been sufficiently vetted by the overworked and understaffed FDA. Initial research shows some to have low carcinogenic activity, but the full story will never be told until the chemical has been in the food supply long enough. Don’t wait until then. To be safe, when you’re going through the pantry and fridge (diabetics, talk to your doctor), eliminate products that tout themselves as sugar-free. If you’re healthy, there’s no reason to be eating sugar-free synthetics in Jell-O, puddings, cakes, cookies, and so on. Below are some of the most prominent offenders.

  Synthetic Sugar Substitutes: High-Fructose Corn Syrup

  Doesn’t high-fructose corn syrup sound all earthy and natural? After all, corn and fructose are both natural. But when you read what they have to do to get this product, you realize how contrived it really is. HFCS is produced from refined corn starch through an impenetrable chemical transformation of “liquefaction, saccharification, and refining” that finally results in something called dextrose syrup. Dextrose syrup is then treated with isomerase to morph it into a high-fructose syrup, dextrose monohydrate, and sorbitol. Definitely not quite the same as sugarcane plucked right from the stalk.

  HFCS in Your Body

  “A high flux of fructose to the liver, the main organ capable of metabolizing this simple carbohydrate, perturbs glucose metabolism and glucose uptake pathways, and leads to a significantly enhanced rate of lipogenesis [fat creation] and triglyceride (TG) synthesis…. These metabolic disturbances appear to underlie the induction of insulin resistance commonly observed with high fructose feeding in both humans and animal models” (Basciano, 2005).

  SCIENCE-TO-ENGLISH TRANSLATION

  HFCS is not cleared from the blood like normal sugar, so the liver has to handle it as it would any other toxin. In the process, it produces triglycerides and fat. Over time, these can lead to weight gain, obesity, and diabetes.

  Maybe all that processing is why your body does not to treat HFCS the same way it does sugar. The corn refining industry will squawk, but this assertion is simply based on the plain data. Insulin doesn’t even recognize HFCS like it does normal sugar. This forces your liver to clean it up just like it does other toxins.

  If that weren’t bad enough, your liver processes this 100 percent fat-free ingredient by actually producing fat and triglycerides—the very things you were trying to minimize! Concludes Stephanie Davail in a 2005 study, “The digestion, absorption, and metabolism of fructose … favors de novo lipogenesis [fat creation]…. In mammals, fructose is known to be able to raise plasma triacylglycerol concentrations significantly; consequently, this may induce obesity.”

  So, when reading the labels on your food boxes, eliminate everything with HFCS (if it’s in there, you’ll likely spot it in the first three ingredients).

  Synthetic Sugar Substitutes: Artificial Sweeteners

  Aren’t those little pastel packets pretty? On most restaurant tables you can find the light pink, powder blue, sunny yellow, and wedding-mint green doses of fake sugars for you to choose from. But none of them are food.

  McNeil Nutritionals, a unit of Johnson & Johnson that markets Splenda (also known as sucralose, invented in Britain and developed by Johnson & Johnson), was sued by the Sugar Association in federal court in Los Angeles for their advertising slogan. You’ve heard it: “Made from sugar so it tastes like sugar.” This is worded to make the consumer think it’s not fake, when in fact their chemical processing turns it into a chlorocarbon compound that is certainly not found in nature. It used to be sugar but, after their chemical processing, are y
ou still going to eat that?

  The problem is that you can find data on Splenda’s safety that are positive and negative. Even the studies that show no problems at all with eating it simply may not have asked the question in the right way, or tested for the right condition. The drug Vioxx, for example, was tested for arthritis pain but no one thought to test it for heart attack and stroke. The diet drug combination phen-fen may have produced heart valve problems because of the interaction effect between the two drugs—so they are potentially dangerous only when used in combination.

  This kind of research ambiguity happens all the time, and drives home the bottom line: If it’s been in the food chain for several decades and everyone seems to be fine, you can trust it. Otherwise, you become the little white lab animals for the next new chemical. How else could they possibly figure out things such as the fact that margarine damages your heart (that took forty years) or thalidomide harms women’s reproductive systems after the second generation (that took more than twenty years)?

  Mixed results for the new chemical sweetener stevia has left the World Health Organization unconvinced of its safety. It seems like stevia should be fine because it’s extracted from the leaves of the South American Stevia rebaudiana plant. But even with these natural origins, its importation has been banned in Britain, canned in Canada, and flunked by the FDA—the European Union didn’t approve it either (Ephedra, also an “all-natural herb” supplement pill taken for weight loss, was banned because it caused higher risks of heart palpitations, tremors, and insomnia, according to the National Institutes of Health).

  Most Americans don’t know that the chemical aspartame, found in hundreds of products from Jell-O to diet sodas, has been embroiled in controversy since its FDA approval was revoked for hiding the health damage it caused in experimental animals that ate it. It was reapproved in 1981 after Reagan took office. (At the time, Donald Rumsfeld was CEO of the company that made aspartame, and was on Reagan’s transition team.)

  Even now, no chemical additive evokes more powerful emotions on both sides of the debate. When you read about aspartame, you’ll hear plenty of evidence for and against it. The chemical company points to studies saying aspartame is as good as mother’s milk; other researchers, such as Dr. John Olney of the Washington University School of Medicine, point to their studies showing that it kills brain cells in the hypothalamus (the area that helps control weight regulation!), and a Canadian group showed that aspartame exacerbates the brain wave pattern of children with absence epilepsy (see aspartame in Appendix II: A Rogue’s Gallery of Faux-Food Additives).

  Consumers are rightfully concerned about what happens when aspartame gets warmer than only 87° F—it degrades into formaldehyde, methanol, and formic acid, all of which can be toxic on their own. The company that profits from your purchase of aspartame says not to worry about it—and they’ve sponsored plenty of research to make their point.

  I’m not here to settle this squabble, only to say that the safest approach to health is to be conservative and eat real food. Remember, all businesses will say the same thing, just like a telephone recording: “There’s no evidence our product causes harm.” But the absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. I could pour together some brand new combination of motor oil and Windex in my basement and the same statement—”There’s no evidence that this particular product causes harm”—would hold true. And if some study does come along that implicates harm in any given product, it’s a simple matter to dispute some aspect of its methods and materials so you can still say, “There’s no evidence …”

  For your weight and health, be conservative. Eat food that you know is healthy for you, not an invention that you hope might not be bad for you!

  No Faux Fats!

  For decades, the low-fat dogma was the only answer to weight and health questions. But not only did the theory fail, people couldn’t make it work in their lives—it failed the practical test. Now, instead of being instructed to severely cut fat grams from our diets, we’re coached on the difference between good fats and bad fats. Giving up eggs, it turned out, was a bad idea. Giving up nuts, it turned out, was a bad idea. Giving up salmon, it turned out, was a bad idea.

  Science may double back on itself like this, but doesn’t it always come back to something suspiciously close to the French approach? This culture has always intuitively known about good fats and bad fats. And we’re just now getting over our low-fat flirtations to come back around to their conclusions. We’ve circled the block; they’ve never moved.

  A big reason “low-fat” eating failed to improve our health was that the decrease in fat caused an increase in sugar consumption. If you’re selling cookies, and you’ve taken the fat out, you still have to make the cookies taste good, and cheaply, too. So what do you put in them? More sugars, such as high-fructose corn syrup!

  Another reason is that the faux fats, or “trans fats,” found in many low-fat products can be disastrous for your heart. Research published in the American Heart Association Journal showed that trans fats raise your LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol, lower your HDL, or “good,” cholesterol, and stiffen your artery walls so they can’t respond to pressure changes as well. Because of results like these, the Harvard School of Public Health has estimated that trans fats could be causing as many as thirty thousand premature heart disease deaths every single year. Yes, this chemical increases a Twinkie’s shelf life, but it decreases your shelf life! Despite the link between trans fats and heart disease, the FDA recently estimated that more than 40 percent of all food products still contain them.

  Some products are simply labeled “fat-free” for sales purposes. Many candies, from Peppermint Patties to Twizzlers, are advertised, perversely, as “low-fat” foods (as if this makes eating candy a healthy choice for dinner). Coca-Cola, in this sense, would be a low-fat food, as would a bucket full of corn syrup. These deceptive ads play on one of the most entrenched of our dietary assumptions—the notion that you’ll be thin and healthy if you eat low-fat products.

  Toss them all, except for the real foods that can also advertise themselves as low fat: buttermilk (which is low fat by definition), molasses, and vegetables.

  No Faux Drinks!

  All sodas are faux. I know it’s hard, but if you want to lose your weight and regain your health, you’ve got to break this habit. In fact, avoiding soda—even diet soda—is one of the simplest things you can do to take back your health and let go of that weight. For example, Sharon Fowler at the University of Texas Health Science Center recently reported that the more diet sodas you drink, the greater your chances of being overweight! There was a “41 percent increase in the risk of being overweight for every can or bottle of diet soft drink a person consumes each day,” Fowler says.

  In addition to causing weight gain, the ingredients can contribute to osteoporosis. One proposed cause for this is that phosphoric acid siphons calcium from your system. Every cell in your body needs calcium, so if soda robs it from you, your body robs it from your bones.

  No Bones About It

  “In 5,398 college alumnae, 2,622 former college athletes and 2,776 nonathletes, … a statistically significant association between nonalcoholic carbonated beverage consumption and bone fractures” (from the Harvard Center for Population Studies).

  SCIENCE-TO-ENGLISH TRANSLATION

  Drink more carbonated beverages, get more bone fractures.

  What happens when your bones run short of calcium? You can get fractures, breaks, and osteoporosis, and this happens in the young as well as the adult population. In 2003, the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research reported that carbonated soft drinks and bone density are essentially buckets in a well—when one goes up, the other goes down. The researchers found it didn’t matter whether this was the diet or regular variety.

  No Faux Veggies (aka Supplements)!

  I was once interviewed on a radio station where the host playfully listed all the reasons some people dislike the French so much. “But the main reason
,” he ranted, winding up for his punch line, “is that they eat all that food we wish we could eat, and it still doesn’t make them fat … and they do it on purpose!”

  His comments reminded me of Dr. Paul Rozin’s work on the psychology of food across cultures—particularly between French and American perspectives. In one telling experiment, Rozin compared American and French attitudes toward consuming supplements versus foods. He asked a number of people whether they would rather take a pill to satisfy their nutrient needs, or just eat food. The largest contrast in the entire study was between French males (who could not imagine such a thing) and American females (who were largely okay with the idea).

  This finding, of course, reflects our love/hate, loathing/craving relationship with food that reduces the act of eating to a necessary evil of molecule-input for our bodily machines. For too many of us, eating is not about joy and discovery and flavor and celebration, but a chore and an errand. Why else would we rather have the “red wine pill” instead of a glass of wine? Yes, they’re actually making a “resveratrol” pill now to substitute for red wine!