Food

Before we dig in, let’s start off with a little pop quiz. Answer the following questions based on your current beliefs about food. The answers appear at the end of Part I. Don’t cheat!

NUTRITION IQ QUIZ

True or False?

My guess is that most of you got most of the answers wrong. I certainly was taught that all these statements were true—and I believed it! But they are not true. Tragically, those myths contribute to our growing burden of obesity and chronic disease. The purpose of this book is to separate fact from fiction, to bust myths and tell the truth about what we know, what we don’t, and what we need to eat to thrive.

Starting at a young age, we are all taught that we should “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Yet many of us neglect ourselves by eating low-quality industrial food that robs our health, makes us heavy and sluggish, clouds our minds, and dampens our spirits. If we fed our neighbors like most of us feed ourselves, we would all be in big trouble.

Many of us focus primarily on work, hobbies, and friends and tend to ignore our basic needs for good food and regular fitness and deep relaxation and quality sleep. We don’t connect the dots between what’s on our plate and our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Food is not just calories; it’s medicine. And most of us don’t realize how quickly our health would bounce back if only we thought of it that way. The question, then, is, How do we eat to create abundance, health, joy, happiness, and energy every day? How do we eat to prevent and even reverse most illnesses?

Chronic disease affects half of all Americans—among the culprits are dementia, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, neurological problems, depression, attention deficit disorder, autoimmune disease, allergies, reflux, irritable bowel, thyroid disorders, hormonal and menstrual problems, and skin problems, including eczema, psoriasis, and acne. The costs are staggering. Medicaid and Medicare are the single biggest drain on our federal budget. Annual spending on health care in 2016 was $3.35 trillion, or $10,345 per person (nearly $1 in $5 of our entire economy). And 80 percent of that goes toward the ongoing treatment of chronic lifestyle diseases that are preventable and reversible.

We all know food can harm—that drinking soda and eating junk food is bad for us. But how many of us believe food can heal? How many of us believe that food can cure depression, diabetes, arthritis, autoimmune disease, headaches, fatigue, and insomnia? That it can prevent and reverse dementia and heart disease or a hundred other common diseases and symptoms?

This is the biggest scientific discovery since the germ theory of disease in the mid-1800s and the development of antibiotics in the 1920s: Food is medicine.

Food is the most powerful drug on the planet. It can improve the expression of thousands of genes, balance dozens of hormones, optimize tens of thousands of protein networks, reduce inflammation, and optimize your microbiome (gut flora) with every single bite. It can cure most chronic diseases; it works faster, better, and cheaper than any drug ever discovered; and the only side effects are good ones—prevention, reversal, and even treatment of disease, not to mention vibrant optimal health.

Yet, sadly, doctors learn almost nothing about nutrition in medical school. That is changing, as more and more physicians face the limitations of drugs and surgery when it comes to healing the lifestyle-related diseases that cause so much suffering today. As director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and The UltraWellness Center, and chairman of the board of the Institute for Functional Medicine, I am a strong advocate for practitioner education and clinical research to prove that the use of food as medicine is effective at treating chronic disease. I have treated more than 10,000 patients using food as my main “drug,” and its benefits far exceed those of any prescription I have written. These cutting-edge centers have created programs that rely on functional medicine. Instead of labeling and treating diseases based on their symptoms, functional medicine addresses the root causes of disease. And when it comes to chronic illnesses, the culprit is nearly always food. Don’t get me wrong: We still treat patients holistically using advanced testing, carefully selected combinations of supplements and medications, and other lifestyle tweaks to create balance and healing. But our main “drug” is food. It’s that powerful when applied correctly. Functional medicine is the best model we have for addressing our chronic illness epidemic. It is the medicine of why, not the medicine of what. It is about why you have the disease, not just naming what disease you have. It strives to treat the underlying cause of the disease, rather than merely suppressing its symptoms.

SO, WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE EATING?

Most Americans don’t eat food anymore. They eat factory-made, industrially produced food-like substances, or Frankenfoods, that contain trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, monosodium glutamate (MSG), artificial sweeteners and colors, additives, preservatives, pesticides, antibiotics, new-to-nature proteins, and heightened allergens caused by genetic breeding and engineering. We call these anti-nutrients. If someone were to hand you a plain box of food with only a nutrition label and ingredients list on the outside, you would have a hard time guessing what it is—you couldn’t tell if it was a Pop-Tart or a Pizza Stuffer. This should make us all stop and think.

For example—this “food” item has thirty-seven ingredients. Read them and then see if you can guess what it is:

Of course you can’t tell, because it is not real food. It is a food-like substance. In fact, it is Twinkies.

Should we really be putting this in our bodies?

Now let’s look at another example—see if you can guess what this is:

Pretty obvious, right? An avocado doesn’t have an ingredients list or a nutrition facts label. Neither does a steak. They are just food.

The food industry has invited itself into our homes and encouraged us to “outsource” our food and cooking. They got us out of the kitchen altogether. We have raised at least two generations of children who don’t know how to cook a meal from scratch using real ingredients and who spend more time watching cooking on television than actually cooking. Today’s industrial food-like substances have hijacked our taste buds and brain chemistry. Sugar is highly biologically addictive. And not by accident. Food giants have taste institutes, where they hire “craving experts” to identify the “bliss points” of foods to create “heavy users.” (These are terms companies use internally to describe what they do.) A top executive at Pepsi told me how excited he was that they had learned how to grow and harvest human taste buds in the lab. It would allow them to easily road test their new products and create even more addictive drinks or junk food. Our industrial food system, sponsored and supported by our government policies, has taken over our bodies, minds, and souls. It’s like the invasion of the body snatchers. Most of us have no clue. And worse, most of us blame ourselves for our bad habits, cravings, and weight gain.

Health is the most basic human right and it has been taken from us.

COOKING OUR WAY OUT OF OBESITY AND DISEASE

I have been writing about, lecturing on, and using food as medicine for a long time, and I’ve seen the health benefits in thousands of my patients. But it wasn’t until I participated in the movie Fed Up that I took a step back and realized just how bad the epidemic of industrialized food has gotten in our country. The film exposes how the sugar industry drives our obesity epidemic, and I was asked to go to South Carolina to talk to a low-income family about their health. I looked at this family’s health crisis, tried to understand the root causes, and worked to help them pull out of their scary downward spiral. Three of the five were morbidly obese, two had pre-diabetes, and the father had type 2 diabetes and kidney failure and was on dialysis. The family survived on disability and food stamps (or SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). They were under financial stress and felt hopeless. This vicious cycle of poverty and poor health affects more than 150 million Americans (including tens of millions of children) who are in some way struggling with the physical, social, and financial burden of obesity, chronic disease, and their complications.

And so it was with this family. The mother, father, and sixteen-year-old son were all morbidly obese. The teenager had 47 percent overall body fat, and his belly was 58 percent fat. To provide some perspective, the normal range for total body fat for a man is 10 to 20 percent. He said he was worried he would soon be 100 percent body fat. His insulin levels were sky-high, which drove a relentless cycle of sugar cravings and food addiction, leading to the storage of more and more belly fat. Obese at sixteen, he had a life expectancy thirteen years shorter than those of kids with healthy body fat, and he was twice as likely to die by the age of fifty-five as were his healthier friends. His father, at age forty-two, had renal failure from complications of obesity. The whole family was at risk.

They desperately wanted to find a way out but didn’t have the knowledge or the skills to escape the hold industrialized food had on them. They blamed themselves, but it was clear they were not at fault. They were victims.

When I asked them what motivated them to want to change, the tears began to flow. The father said he didn’t want to die and leave his wife and four sons. His youngest boy was only seven years old. The father needed a kidney transplant to save his life but wouldn’t be eligible until he lost forty pounds, and he had no clue how to lose the weight. None of the family members knew how to cook. They didn’t know how to navigate a grocery store, shop for real food, or read a label. They had no idea that the frozen chicken nuggets they were buying had 25 different ingredients and only one of them was “chicken.” They had been hoodwinked by the “health claims” on the packaged foods that were making them fat and sick—including “low-fat,” “diet,” “zero trans fats,” and “whole-grain.” Whole-grain Pop-Tarts? Cool Whip with zero trans fats?

Here’s a fun little fact about food labels, serving sizes, and marketing: In 2003, the food lobby coerced the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into allowing food companies to label their products as trans-fat-free if the product had less than ½ gram of trans fats per serving. So, the makers of Cool Whip can state that it is a trans-fat-free “food” because there is less than ½ gram of trans fats in a 2 tablespoon serving, despite the fact that Cool Whip is mostly made up of trans fats. They can legally lie. Finally, in 2015, the FDA ruled that trans fats are not safe to eat, or non-GRAS (GRAS is an acronym for generally recognized as safe). But they’ve given the food industry a long time to get trans fats out of products. So beware. Read ingredients lists and don’t eat anything with the word “hydrogenated” on the label.

The parents in this South Carolina family grew up in homes where practically everything they ate was either fried or came from a box or can. They made only two vegetables—boiled cabbage and canned green beans. They didn’t have basic cooking tools, such as proper cutting boards to chop vegetables or trim meat. They had some old, dull knives that were hidden in the back of the cupboard and never used. Everything they ate was premade in a factory. They lived on food stamps and disability payments, spending about $1,000 a month on food, half of which went toward dining out at fast-food restaurants—that was their main family activity! They were trapped in a food desert and a cycle of food addiction. The conversation has changed now that science has proven that processed foods—and especially sugar—are addictive. When your brain is hooked on drugs, willpower and personal responsibility don’t stand a chance. But there is a way to break the cycle with real whole food.

THE CURE IS IN THE KITCHEN

I realized that the worst thing I could do to this family was to shame or judge them, prescribe them more medication, or tell them to eat less and exercise more (a subtle way of blaming them). Instead, I wanted to teach them to cook real food from scratch and show them they could eat well on a tight budget and feel satisfied.

When I looked through their fridge that first day, I was surprised to see a bunch of fresh asparagus. The mother explained that she used to hate them. “Once I had asparagus out of a can; it was nasty,” she said. “But then a friend told me to try one off the grill, and even though I didn’t want to, I tried it and it was good.” My theory about vegetables is this: If you hate them, then you most likely never had them prepared properly. They were canned, overcooked, boiled, deep-fried, or otherwise highly processed and tasteless mush. Just think of overcooked Brussels sprouts or tasteless canned peas. The worst!

So we got the whole family washing, peeling, chopping, cutting, touching, and cooking real food—whole foods like carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, salad greens, and even asparagus. I showed them how to peel the garlic, cut the onions, and snap the asparagus to get rid of the chewy ends. I taught them how to sauté the asparagus with garlic in olive oil, how to roast sweet potatoes with fennel and olive oil, and how to make turkey chili from scratch. We all cooked together. The family even made fresh salad dressing from olive oil, vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper, instead of dousing their greens in the bottled dressings laden with high-fructose corn syrup, refined oils, and MSG that they once favored.

The youngest boys came running into the kitchen, lured away from their gaming consoles by the sweet, warm smells of chili and roasting sweet potatoes, fragrances that had never wafted out of their kitchen before. We all sat down at their table to eat the freshly prepared food, and they were surprised at how delicious and filling it was.

After a happy, healing meal of real food, cooked in less time and for less money than it would have taken them to drive to Denny’s and order deep-fried chicken nuggets, biscuits, gravy, and canned green beans, the nearly “superobese” son turned to me in disbelief and asked, “Dr. Hyman, do you eat real food like this with your family every night?” I said, “Yes, we do.” This child had been struggling with getting healthy, hoped to go to medical school, and wanted to help his family. I think it became clear that if this family were to simply choose real food, cooked at home—even on a budget—they would be on the right path to achieving these dreams and so much more.

When it came time to head home, I left amid tears of relief and of hope for a different future for this family. I gave them my Blood Sugar Solution Cookbook and a pocket guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget from an organization I work with called the Environmental Working Group. Five days after I left, the mother texted me to say that the family had already lost eighteen pounds collectively, and they were making turkey chili again. When I checked in nine months later, the family had lost 200 pounds collectively. The mother had lost one hundred pounds. The father had lost forty-five and was able to get a new kidney. The son had lost fifty pounds but had gone to work at a fast-food place and gained it back. However, he is back on track—and he went from a high of 338 pounds to 210 pounds—a 128-pound weight loss. And now he is applying to medical school!

If a family living in one of the worst food deserts in America and surviving on food stamps and disability income can do this, then any family can.

COOKING OUR WAY OUT OF THIS MESS ONE MEAL AT A TIME