What you’ve seen in most grocery stores is not real food.
The dose makes the poison. Even water can kill you if you drink enough.
"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”- Paracelsus
Our world is full of poisons, or toxins, and sometimes it seems that we are doing everything in our human power to fill it up with more. It’s not that I believe there is some big evil genius plan to slowly poison us all to death, but when you read about the ways in which we are inundated with toxins in this modern world, and the research we have proving the toxic effects of various substances that we still use, it’s sometimes difficult to think otherwise.
Even a lot of the stuff with just one ingredient is so far removed from it’s natural state, so heavily processed, genetically modified, pesticide laden or ‘fortified’ that it still isn’t food.
Here is an example of what I mean:
It’s not fair. It’s not cool. It’s not right. It’s an abomination. But it’s the truth.
Apples are picked unripe, sprayed with a chemical to ripen and preserve them, waxed and stored for UP TO A YEAR before being sold.
Oranges are dyed with Citrus Red #2, as well as other common fruits like apples and blueberries. Many of these dyes have been linked to cancer.
Raw chicken from grocery stores is routinely washed in bleach to preserve it.
USDA requires eggs to be washed in hot water and chemical sanitizer before being sold in grocery stores. The EU has outlawed this practice due to safety concerns.
Grocery store meat is gassed with carbon monoxide, at least 70% of it. Yes, that is what comes out of the exhaust on your car, what we have alarms for in our houses because of how deadly it is. But it’s probably fine to eat it, right?
I’m going to stop there before I scare you off of eating completely. Suffice it to say that our food supply has been tampered with. It’s been adulterated. A lot of what we have on offer here, in the U.S. at least has been heavily perverted from it’s natural state. Even the foods that have “just one ingredient.” Conventional foods have been poisoned from the ground up.
If it’s not injecting dye into fruit, or dipping our meats and eggs into chemical baths, it’s pesticides that have been proven carcinogenic for more than 50 years [glyphosate]. It’s raising animals in confinement on an unnatural diet that makes them so sickly that we “have to” inject them with vaccines, antibiotics, growth hormones, “vitamins” and other unnatural, toxic substances so that they can survive until the slaughter.
And that’s just the “unprocessed” stuff. When you go into the bulk of the grocery store, where processed foods abound, you will find even more devils lurking in the details. You’ll be hard pressed to find a “food” with fewer than 5 ingredients. Even harder to find an ingredient list that isn’t populated by hard to pronounce, mystery ingredients that have no business in a human diet. Which is unfortunate because it’s hard enough for most people to wrap their heads around avoiding “vegetable oils”, and it can be a gargantuan feat to remove the rest of the toxins in our diets.
But, the dose makes the poison, right?
If you’re only having a ‘little bit’ of something then you’re fine, right?
I wish it were so. The chemical soup I listed above is only a fraction of the chemicals, heavy metals, and other toxins we take in every day. Through our food, our water, our personal care products, our air, our indoor surroundings, and our electronics. Most of these toxins are extremely difficult for our bodies to detox as well, since they are synthetic chemicals that have been only recently— within the last 50-250 years— introduced into our world, and our food supply. Our bodies are struggling to keep up with the detox demand this modern world has created.
The dose of toxins each of us takes on in our daily modern life is unimaginable, very difficult to trace, or add up, and it’s overwhelming our delicate systems and microbiomes. And it shows. Despite all of our modern “advancements” we are sicker than ever before, we are experiencing outrageous amounts of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer for how ‘evolved’ we are. Instead of looking at what has been ADDED to our diets, and environments we are inventing suspicions of the foods we evolved on for millions of years.
This information can feel overwhelming if it is new to you, and that’s okay! It is overwhelming that manufacturers can get away with this stuff, that even our “one ingredient foods” have been tampered with, and that we have to fight for our right to eat real foods, and use natural substances. It’s a lot to take in, and I don’t think any of us would’ve chosen this, were we offered true consent. Unfortunately, in today’s world your consent is held in your dollar, your signature, and your participation.
The bad news is that in my lifetime, I will never be totally free of these toxins of modern existence, even if I tightly, carefully, obsessively controlled every aspect of my being. After all, they have found microplastics in every corner of the globe, it’s in our air, and our water, and even our blood at this point.
So no amount of militant control of self or environment will “save me.”
The good news is, my body is always adapting, detoxing, and seeking healing.
The best antidote to this modern world is prioritization, trusting your body, and slowly shifting back into ancestral ways of eating and living. What I mean by that is learning what the most toxic substances in your life and diet are, and prioritizing their removal as you are able to. Attuning to your body when you eat, drink or use a product, how does it feel? Finally, shifting back into ancestral ways of eating and living, meaning eating the largely animal-based diets of our ancestors, getting sunlight, spending time in nature, grounding, movement outdoors, and reducing artificial light exposure and NNEMFs. Which can all be made quite simple, but will take some time to implement, and that is okay! Take your time. Because having grace with your pace is a crucial ingredient. Our bodies are already being overwhelmed with toxins, no need to overwhelm them with stress!
So, what do I do? How do I start?
Real, whole foods are meant to be eaten as close to their original state as possible in most cases [even raw], like with animal products [meat + dairy + eggs], honey, and fruit.
Vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds are meant to be prepared carefully to mindfully reduce their anti-nutrients and render them more bio-available.
Plant foods are meant to be survival foods, eaten for short periods of time in season, when ripe.
They are meant to be fermented, soaked, or cooked, and to only make up about 30% of our diet by calories.
Herbs are medicinal, they are meant to be supplemented as flavor, and support.
Water should be heavily mineralized, or “hard” and ideally should account for anywhere from 10-20% of our daily mineral intakes, up to 50% of certain trace minerals.
Salt should also be an excellent source of trace minerals, especially sodium, which is an electrolyte.
When we eat this way there is no right or wrong, because our bodies tell us what we need as we need it. When you are eating the real, nutrient dense, nose-to-tail foods of your ancestors there is no such things as too much. These foods are rich and full of life and dense nutritive value, and our bodies have innately ingrained, deeply intelligent systems that understand their own limits to keep these nutrients in balance. Much more intricate and nuanced than any tests humans will ever design.
Which is just one of a million reasons why it’s essential to eat our meals mindfully in a peaceful state with attention to regulating our breath, because our bodies will tell us when we are finished, and that will usually happen before we feel “full.”Especially in America, where we are used to stuffing our gullets endlessly. We are taught to eat constantly, and make sure to eat until we’re full. But I don’t believe that being full is the best goal.
“Being full” is a concept built on volume out of a nutritionally deficient society. Quantity over quality. It’s more difficult to take your cravings seriously if you are always full of volume, they may begin to seem excessive [which is why I believe there seems to be such a vendetta against cravings in our culture]. You may begin to mistrust them, always telling you that you need more, even though you are full of volume. But what if our goal was not “fullness”—that feeling of being stuffed all the way up into your esophagus— but rather being satiated, which is the feeling of having had enough of everything you need. Often this feeling is reached long before the feeling of being stuffed, leaving us with energy to continue our day, giving our body a reasonable amount of food to process in the short duration of the digestive process, and perhaps most importantly, giving us time to begin listening to our body’s next rounds of cues and cravings.
Whereas being full is distracting. It’s often uncomfortable, and overwhelming; demanding all of your attention, zapping energy reserves from the rest of your body to concentrate them on your gut for this massive undertaking of digestion. Furthermore, stuffing in this way often leads to your digestion being forced to rush through the process, or allowing your meals to sit in your stomach and ferment, which is one cause of gas + bloating. Neither being a good option for you.