Read Your Labels

This article was pubblished by Dr. Joseph Mercola in January 2005.Click on a link below to read more about whole food, ingredients and nutrition
	Avoid These Ingredients
	Are Just Any Fruits And Vegetables Okay?
	Whole Food Nutritional Supplements
	Synthetic or Isolated Nutritional Supplements

Top ingredients to limit or avoid all together:

• Sugar - 5 Grams = 1 Tsp. Especially High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Hydrogenated Fats (Trans Fats)
• Aspartame - (NutraSweet)
• Nitrates and nitrites
• Monosodium Glutamate - (MSG)
• Dyes and colorings
• Products that say "Refined, Enriched and /or Fortified."..

Sugar depresses immunity. Studies have shown that downing 75 to 100 grams of simple sugar solution (about 20 teaspoons of sugar, or the amount that is contained in two average 12-ounce sodas) can suppress the body's immune responses. The immune suppression is most noticeable two hours after ingestion, but the effect was still evident five hours after ingestion.

Hydrogenated fats/trans fats: Despite unsaturated oil's origin, once you've zapped it with high-pressure hydrogen, heated it or treated it with chemical solvents it turns into a saturated fat and behaves that way in the body. This hydrogenation process is how vegetable oil is turned into margarine. Hydrogenated fats contain another kind of fat that falls outside the saturated and unsaturated categories. It’s called "trans fatty acids". It's basically a molecule that has its head on backwards. For your arteries, Trans fats are as bad as (or worse) than saturated fats. Many studies have shown that tran's fats raise cholesterol levels in the blood.

Even if a label says it's low in heart damaging saturated fat, it may still contain a large amount of tran's fats. tran's fats raise the level of LDL (bad) cholesterol, while reducing the level of HDL (good) cholesterol. tran's fats have been shown to decrease the body’s ability to produce natural substances that regulate many of the body's functions. tran's fats and hydrogenated fats may interfere with the ability of the cells of the body to metabolize the fats that are good for you. This may damage cell membranes of vital structures, such as the brain and nerve cells.

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Are Just Any Fruits And Vegetables Okay?
No, and here's why...

• They need to be Raw because enzymes are only found in Rawfoods. Enzymes act as catalysts for the 10,000 functions per second that our cells undergo. Cooking destroys enzymes. Meat is cooked, milk is pasteurized, grains are baked, and nuts are roasted. Fruits and vegetables are the only other source of enzymes, and most of us cook those too.
• Variety is important. Each fruit and vegetable has a unique composition of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, phytonutrients, and trace elements. Most people eat only the 3 or 4 fruits and vegetable they like. They may be missing some important fuel. Kale is the #1 anti-cancer vegetable. I don’t eat it, do you?
• Produce needs to be Vine Ripened. Not only does this create the beautiful bright colors of our fruits and vegetables, it allows the nutrients to develop in the food so our bodies can absorb them.
• Fruits and vegetables need to be Fresh! 75% of the nutrients are lost within 5 days after picking. Most of the produce in the market was picked weeks ago, before it was ripe, and before the nutrients had a chance to develop. Then it was allowed to sit on trucks and in warehouses where even more nutrients were lost.

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Whole Food Nutritional Supplements

Whole food supplements are what their name suggests: Supplements made from concentrated whole foods. The vitamins found within these supplements are not isolated. They are highly complex structures that combine a variety of enzymes, coenzymes, antioxidants, trace elements, activators and many other unknown or undiscovered factors all working together synergistically, to enable this vitamin complex to do its job in your body.

Nutrients from within this complex cannot be taken apart or isolated from the whole, and then be expected to do the same job in the body as the whole complex is designed to do.

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Synthetic or Isolated Nutritional Supplements

Isolated nutrients or synthetic nutrients are not natural, in that they are never found by themselves in nature. Taking these isolated nutrients, especially at the ultra-high doses found in formulas today, is more like taking a drug. Studies show the body treats these isolated and synthetic nutrients like xenobiotics (foreign substances).

By the same token, food-based supplements are never treated like this by your body. For example, your urine will never turn florescent yellow, no matter how much meat (a good source of B vitamins) you eat. This sort of rapid excretion happens only with foreign substances in your body.
Not only are isolated nutrients treated like drugs or other chemicals by your body. Like drugs, they can create problems for you too. Nature does not produce any nutrient in an isolated form. The nutrients in foods are blended together in a specific way and work best in that format. For an isolated nutrient to work properly in the body, it needs all the other parts that are naturally present in the food too.

If the parts are not all there from the start, they are taken from the body's stored supply. This is why isolated nutrients often work for a little while, and then seem to stop working. Once your body's store of the extra nutrients is used up, the isolated nutrient you're taking doesn't work as well anymore. Worse yet, a deficiency in these extra nutrients can be created in your body.

*The article on this page is a copy from the eHealthy News You Can Use newsletter (January 19, 2005, Issue 604) published by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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