After years of personal experimentation, research, and polling people on their day-to-day eating habits and weight gain, I have a new mantra: “Man made foods = Body fat and bad health!” It sounds extreme, but you’ll understand why I’ve adopted this mantra in a moment.

We’ve all heard that there are foods that are supposed to be “healthy” for us and are not as great as we’ve been let to believe they are. Take whole grain bread for instance. Yes, assuming you can see the whole grains, it is healthier than white bread or brown bread colored with molasses. (Oh, you mean you thought all brown bread was whole grain? Wrong! That’s a food manufacturers trick to make us believe that their bread is whole grain when it really isn’t. Sneaky, isn’t it!)

But even the organic sprouted wheat berry bread that you find in the finest natural food stores contains one of those ingredients that has been debated as to whether it is really healthy or even fit for human consumption: wheat. (Corn and Soy are two others.)

Now I’m not siding with anyone by saying that wheat is bad or not healthy for us. But like most foods that must be processed to be consumed, in my experience, it probably isn’t a good idea to eat too much of it, and it actually causes me to build up a stomach when I eat it regularly in moderation.

For years I suspected that wheat based products were keeping me from being as lean as I wanted to be. In 2009, I cut wheat out of my food choices completely in favor oats and I got as lean as ever. Last year in October when I was doing my Wolverine Workouts, I performed a conservative test on myself since I hadn’t eaten wheat in so long to see what would happen.

The results: after only one month of including minimally processed bran cereal and organic sprouted wheat berry bread in my daily routine—which does not contain the processed flour that we attribute to weight gain—I’d put on almost 5 pounds right in my belly in spite of only eating 2400 – 2700 calories per day.

Obviously, things didn’t go as I’d planned. Oh well, at least I figured it out fairly quickly and eliminated the culprit for good. And since I’m fairly lean anyways, I knew I’d blast the extra pounds off in no time.

Fast forward to this January, I’m back to eating sweet potatoes, brown rice, red potatoes (eaten cold for a lower glycemic index), and fruits and vegetables along with my chicken and lean beef. Funny thing, not only did I start getting leaner once I stopped consuming wheat based products (man made foods), but I was doing it while eating 3000 calories a day!

That’s right! I was eating more food and getting leaner. How can that be?

Simply stated: unprocessed foods are easier for the body to use for energy, while processed foods are typically harder on the body because they contain additives, preservatives and/or other ingredients (chemicals) that are foreign to the body.

Speaking of foreign ingredients, MSG is one of those additives that is considered to be a “natural flavoring” and in many cases is NOT listed on food labels or is hidden behind crafty names. Yet, scientists have used MSG to fatten up lab mice and make them obese.

Check out this link here if you want to read a study on it: The induction of obesity in rodents by means of monosodium glutamate.

In case you didn’t catch that, let me repeat it again: Scientists have used MSG to fatten up mice on purpose!

What’s the problem?

Granted, you and I are not lab mice. But if MSG induces obesity in them, in spite of NOT having any calories, what do you think it does to us? I don’t really think I need to say. And that’s just one problem with MSG.

Another issue with MSG is that it is classified as an excitotoxin*, which has been linked to brain cell death, migraines and other serious health issues. (Aspartame is also a very popular excitotoxin* and a common ingredient in many sweet, low calorie foods and beverages.)

I could go on and on about MSG, Aspartame and other additives and/or preservatives in many of the man made foods today and how they make us fat or ruin our bodies, but you get the idea: They’re not good for our health and we should avoid them whenever possible.

One more HUGE problem I want to touch on with man made foods is the nutrition labels food manufacturers provide us with. They’re supposed to be “transparent” and tell us what is in our food by law. Problem is, food manufacturers use so many chemicals, additives and preservatives that we can’t even pronounce that it almost doesn’t matter. Not to mention, the labels don’t really tell us the truth anyways.

Take a look at the image of the food label on the right. The first ingredient is sugar, and different forms of sugar are listed in at least three other places if you look closely. (Dextrose, Invert Sugar and Corn Syrup)

Yet, the label tells us that it has 0 grams of sugar—in spite of it being the first ingredient, which is an indication that sugar is what the product contains the most of. (By law, the first ingredient on the list is supposed to be the most prominent in the food.)

Today, to really understand what is in our food, we either have to be a scientist or research each ingredient individually. Seriously? Like most busy people, I don’t have the time to conduct research to find out what they’re putting in food. I just want to eat!

That’s one of the main reasons why I like natural foods. Assuming we buy them organic and in their natural state, sweet potatoes have one ingredient: sweet potatoes. As do brown rice, red potatoes, chicken, beef and other natural foods.

See what I mean?

By eating natural, I’m NOT putting chemicals or other additives into my body and the wheat weight is disappearing. And long term, what we put in our body is one the determining factors in how long we live and how healthy we are. After all, the human body was made to process food—not food like products.

“Man made foods = Body fat and bad health!”

Any questions?

*If you want to know more about excitotoxins, and I highly recommend that you do get educated on them because they may be quietly destroying your family’s health, simply Google the word “excitotoxin” and you’ll come up with plenty of educational links. Here are a few to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitotoxicity

http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/review-excitotoxins-taste-kills

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7854587

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Recently, I went to the grocery store and it occurred to me that the “real” food area of most grocery stores is getting smaller and smaller. By “real” food, I mean the area where you can find all of the fruits, vegetables and natural foods that are unprocessed and come from the earth in their natural state.

The rest of the store, as far as food is concerned, is filled with man made food like products that are boxed, bagged, packaged or preserved in some other way: breads, bagels, snack foods, cereals, baked products, etc. (Many of which claim to be “healthy” for us!)

Although most of us believe that this is how food is supposed to be because we’ve grown up watching commercials that have told us what is cool to eat and drink since we were children, go back to the years before 1950 and you’ll discover that the world was a very different place—before mass production of food products became popular, and obesity, heart disease and diabetes began destroying the health, bodies and lives of the people we love.

Back then, when you went to the market (it was usually called a market instead of a grocery store), you would typically make a daily trip to get all of the fresh foods and ingredients you needed to make breakfast, lunch or dinner that day.

Sure there were canned foods, bread and a few baked products. But for the most part, almost everything at the market was fresh and unprocessed—the way nature intended it to be. And back then, before labs came up with ways to preserve food almost indefinitely, even bread had a shorter shelf life. But today, food products can last for weeks, months or even years without spoiling.

Foods are made to last for greater convenience, right? So what’s the problem?

First and foremost, regardless of what food marketers and manufacturers want us to believe, we are NOT eating real food. And if it has more than one ingredient, in most cases, it is NOT natural. Once something has been added or its natural state has been altered in some way, it becomes a processed food product.

In essence, in my opinion anyways, processed means man made foods. And natural, according to food manufacturers and marketers anyways, means minimally processed. Natural should mean natural, but the FDA allows them to get away with their slick marketing because of the economic benefits product sales create.

Sad, but true!

And although food manufacturers would never admit it, it is the processing and preserving of foods that is causing most of our health problems today. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but if you’re still eating processed foods, you may not completely understand the health risks many of them pose.

I say this because I had heard it all too. I assumed because it was on the shelf and it was popular it must be safe and good for us to eat. The FDA (government) wouldn’t allow companies to sell us products that would be bad for us. They care about us and they’re looking out for our best interest, right?

Wrong!

Today, the words natural, whole grain and healthy are regularly abused. We would like to think that the FDA (government) is looking out for our health before the well being of our economy. Unfortunately, economics (money) comes before people these days—which is really stupid because we end up paying for it double time with health care expenses and loss of productive time at work.

Call me a health nut if you want, but since I was 14, when I started figuring out that it was the food that had made me obese, I’ve watched a lot of people become obese, get sick or even die because of illnesses and diseases that have been attributed to processed food products, additives and/or preservatives.

At the age of 13 I was almost 200 pounds at only five feet tall—a cheeseburger away from a heart attack. And I’d probably be over 400 pounds and digging my own grave if I’d continued eating like most American’s into my adult years: hotdogs, pizza, burgers and fries, soda and plenty of snacks.

The truth is that we’re all busy and sometimes it seems like creating the time to prepare a meal isn’t possible. But what we need to realize is that we need to make the time because our health is everything. Without health, we can’t work, we can’t spend quality time with the people we love, we can’t do the things we enjoy and we can’t enjoy our life.

If that’s the case, what’s the point of living?

Next time you’re having a meal or a snack, take a good look at it and ask yourself if it is making you healthy. And if not, is it worth your life? A snack once in a while is okay, but in today’s society, food marketers and manufacturers want us to snack all of the time because it feeds their profits.

Asking yourself if every snack or meal contributes to your health may sound extreme, but in the end, that’s the price we pay if we spend our life eating unhealthy foods—even if we’ve been innocently led to believe that they are healthy.

Want to know what foods you should be eating or avoiding? Check out these articles:

Are carbs making you fat?

Sugar… the choice of a new generation

3 tips to start losing weight now

Can I eat whatever I want if I exercise?

Do low carbohydrate diets work?

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