Top Tips for avoiding Leukocytosis (the increase of white blood cells)

A few of my followers were keen for a short/straight to the point article without having to read the full article. Here it is!

Here are my top tips for avoiding leukocytosis:

• Incorporate more raw foods into your diet by eating salads and raw vegetables and if you’re feeling really keen you might want to look into making your own vegetable juices..
• Stick to the 51% rule – Eat 51% of your food raw or very lightly cooked from categories 1 & 2 above. Try to reduce the amount of processed food you consume..
• Avoid soda drinks, artificial sweeteners, sweets, protein bars, bottled juices, margarine, spreadable butter, lunch meats, cured meats, commercial soy sauce, commercial vinegar, pasteurized dairy, pasteurized eggs, canned food, chips, baked goods, cereal, and crackers.
• Cook your food gently. Lightly steam veggies, slow boil grains, and slow bake other foods.
• Throw away you microwave and reheat your food gently.
• Avoid barbecued, grilled and fried foods or more realistically make it a treat once in a while.
• Minimise/eliminate alcohol consumption – tricky I know but try to make it a treat rather than an everyday occurrence.

Should we cook food?

How does cooking the food we purchase alter how good it is for us?

Studies have shown that when we cook our food, even if we lightly steam it, we to lose the enzymes in it that help us digest it.  You may have seen articles in newspapers and magazines claiming that “Raw” is the way forward and this article will examine the evidence and look at whether we should consider modifying not only the foods we buy but the way in which we consume them.

The first study to examine the effect of consuming cooked food on the body was way back in the 1930’s at the institute of clinical chemistry in Sweden when Dr Paul Kouchakoff showed that if you ate significant amounts of cooked food, your body would react to it as if it was a foreign organism. This is presumably because the cooking process has changed the structure of the food in a manner that the body cannot recognize. Therefore the body treats that food as if it’s a toxin,  which isn’t good  for your body to be doing to the food you’re hoping is going to nourish it.  This bodily process is an immune response, technically called digestive leukocytosis and involves the body generating white blood cell activity against cooked food.  

Unfortunately the news gets worse! – the vast majority of food, almost anything you find in a packet that you buy in the supermarket has already been cooked, processed, treated or refined by the manufacturer in a manner which elicits the same bodily response.  This is one of the main reasons people like me are trying to encourage you to prepare your meals from scratch.

Let’s get back to the science because what Dr Kouchakoff discovered back in the 1930’s enables us to choose certain foods and select the best way to cook them and eat them in specific proportions that allows the body to function as nature designed. 

In 1930 it was already known that cooked food caused a rise in the number of leukocytes (white blood cells), and this was thought to be a natural phenomenon.  However by analysing the blood of test subjects, Kouchakoff discovered that when raw food or food cooked at low temperatures was eaten, little or no increase in leukocytes (white blood cells) occurred. Whereas, in subjects that ate food heated beyond a certain temperature or refined processed food, the increase in leukocytes was significant.

Kouchakoff’s team tested many different types of food and consistently found that when consumed, raw food or food that was not refined caused no reaction in the blood—the body recognised these foods to be non-threatening. However, the response was starkly different for heated/refined foods. The worst offenders of all, heated or not, were foods that were refined, such as white flour and white rice, homogenized, pasteurized, and preserved.

This research has enabled us to identify 5 categories.  The elevation of white blood cells is graded according to the severity of the response.

Category 1 – No increase in white blood cell count (WBC). Raw foods or foods heated to 93 degrees Celsius or less.

Category 2 – Mild increase in WBC. Foods cooked at boiling temperature (100 degrees C) and slow cooked foods

Category 3 – Moderate elevation. Foods heated well above boiling temperature, such as baked goods, pressure cooked and canned foods.

Category 4 – Severe elevation. Refined foods such as white flour, white sugar, fried foods, carbonated soft drinks, alcohol, and table salt.

Category 5 – Violent reaction (equivalent WBC reaction seen in poisoning). Cured, salted and cooked meats, chargrilled meats. Microwaved foods and beverages, pasteurized foods including milk, dairy and fruit juices.  Foods with manmade chemicals including hydrogenated vegetable oil, margarine, MSG, Aspartame, artificial colourings and flavours etc

How do you minimise leukocytosis caused by your diet?

This may seem really obvious but try to stick to foods in categories 1 & 2 above, and eliminate as many of the those foods in categories 3-5,  Obviously this is easier said than done, as many of those foods taste fantastic and invariably are designed to be addictive  – more on that in months to come.

Fortunately there is more information that Dr Kouchakoff discovered that can help you reduce the immune system or white blood cell response. Dr Kouchakoff and his team discovered that if you consume 51% or more of each meal raw there would be no Leukocytosis.  Therefore if the majority of foods that you choose to eat are from category 1 there would be no immune system response from the rest of the food you eat.  But why do I need to bother I hear you ask? – I’m not ill, I don’t need to start eating raw food and I like eating white flour…

Well whilst you may not be ready to dive in and follow the information I’ve written above to the letter, remember that every step you make in the right direction will have a positive effect on your health. At some stage you may come back to this information and make further use of it.  If you want evidence that this does in fact work, it might help you to know that the bedrock of alternative cancer treatment (by the likes of the Gerson Institute and others) is fresh organic raw vegetable juicing to nourish the body with missing minerals, nutrients and micro nutrients, without causing any immune system response, allowing the body to heal itself.  Cooked foods and processed foods (that’s anything that comes in a packet) are not on the menu.  Don’t worry no one is recommending you eat raw meat!

Here are my top tips for avoiding leukocytosis:

• Incorporate more raw foods into your diet by eating salads and raw vegetables and if you’re feeling really keen you might want to look into making your own vegetable juices..
• Stick to the 51% rule – Eat 51% of your food raw or very lightly cooked from categories 1 & 2 above. Try to reduce the amount of processed food you consume..
• Avoid soda drinks, artificial sweeteners, sweets, protein bars, bottled juices, margarine, spreadable butter, lunch meats, cured meats, commercial soy sauce, commercial vinegar, pasteurized dairy, pasteurized eggs, canned food, chips, baked goods, cereal, and crackers.
• Cook your food gently. Lightly steam veggies, slow boil grains, and slow bake other foods.
• Throw away you microwave and reheat your food gently.
• Avoid barbecued, grilled and fried foods or more realistically make it a treat once in a while.
• Minimise/eliminate alcohol consumption – tricky I know but try to make it a treat rather than an everyday occurrence.

Is Fruit healthy?

Our History with Fruit

We’ve all been lead to believe that fruit is really healthy for us and the government recommends a minimum of 5 fruit and vegetables a day.  True guidelines for fruit and vegetables would be a lot higher, but those in the know feel that any amount above 5 a day would be overwhelming for many people. 

This article will examine the changing role of fruit in our diets over recent generations and look at the consequences of how we have changed our consumption of it and whether that change has contributed to our obese and sick society.

Fruit 100 years ago was consumed in a very different manner to the current situation.  For starters it was a seasonal treat enjoyed primarily at harvest time, and preserved in jams or fermented and stored in glass jars to last throughout the winter.  The older readers amongst you may remember that fruit wasn’t a year round commodity and there certainly wouldn’t have been the sheer variety of fruit on display all year round. Any fruit not grown in the UK would have been incredibly difficult to source and aside from the expense would only have been available during certain seasons.  In addition, not only do we now consume fruit all year round but fructose, the natural sugar within fruit, is often added as a sweetener to many processed foods which adds to the problem. 

We have also changed the fruit that we consume beyond all recognition – it was often sour in the old days, but we’ve bread it to be sweeter. Plus we’ve learnt how to eradicate our natural competitors for fruit, which means that we can pick it when it’s ripe, rather than lose half the crop to birds and insects etc.  If we do pick it early in order to store it for longer, we can pass a ripening gas over it, which causes yet more problems. The point is that the sweeter it tastes, the more sugar there is, and the greater problems it causes all year round to insulin levels in the body.  Insulin, in case you don’t know, is our fat storing hormone.  When insulin levels are elevated, we accumulate fat in our fat tissue; when these levels fall, we liberate fat from the fat tissue and burn it as fuel.  Our insulin levels are effectively determined by our carbohydrate intake (not entirely but for all intents and purposes) and fruit is a very rich form of carbohydrate.

Fruit and Frutose

It is however slightly more complicated than that, because generally speaking the sweeter the fruit the more fructose (natural sugar) there is, and fructose is metabolised in the body on a very different pathway to the majority of food we consume.  Fructose does not stimulate an insulin response directly and instead is metabolised into fat by the liver in much the same manner as alcohol.  The metabolism of significant amounts of fructose by your liver creates a host of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which drives up blood pressure and causes gout.

Why would nature have created this anomaly in our metabolism turning fructose directly into fat? – A number of experts hypothesise that in nature fruit was available only at harvest time and would not have lasted throughout the winter.  In places like the UK , when the ground freezes nothing grows, therefore our ancestors would have eaten the only thing available in winter to survive, which was meat and fish including the organs that contain many essential nutrients. Failing that our ancestors starved in the winter and therefore the human body was designed to store the energy in fruit as body fat, so that we survived the cold winter months.  The body fat created therefore not only kept us warm but fuelled us through winter when food was scarce.  Whilst this is just a hypothesis it provides a compelling argument for why fructose within fruit is metabolised in a different manner to many other nutrients. 

Fruit and our health

Fruit however is not the evil nutrient that is to blame for making western society fat. Instead it is the quantity and type of fruit consumed all year round in conjunction with other sweet foods and drinks along with over- consumption of carbohydrate foods that has made society fat over the last 40 years.  Fruit is healthy for you, provided that you are not already overweight, have high blood pressure or gout.

You will maintain a healthy weight and therefore a healthy body if you eat a nutrient dense diet whilst minimizing calorie dense foods – which simply means eating meat/fish/eggs and other great protein sources, with a variety of non-starchy vegetables as the basis of your diet.

Top tips for fruit consumption

1. If you are overweight fruit should be considered a caution food, along with sweets or sweet drinks, and carbohydrates including bread, rice, pasta and starchy vegetables.
2. Limit your intake of fructose to 25g per day – you will easily mange this if avoid all processed food but check labels on all processed foods not just for fructose but any sugar or artificial sweetener and reduce or eliminate your consumption. The relative fructose content of fruit can be found easily on the internet, if you’re feeling really keen.
3. Consume fruit as your sweet treat instead of consuming sweets/chocolate – I know that’s difficult!
4. Consume your fruit at the end of a meal.  This will slow down the release of the sugars in the fruit.
5. If you are eating fruit as a snack have some fat in the form of organic peanut butter or cheese before you eat it.  This will slow down the release of sugars into the blood stream.
6. Limit your consumption of fruit juice – Linus Pauling the original promoter of vitamin c, showed that vitamin c is significantly reduced in orange juice after 90 seconds of being squeezed; therefore anything that you buy in a store is simply sugary water.
7. If you insist on drinking freshly squeezed fruit juice, limit yourself to one small glass.  It’s a lot easier to over consume and spike your blood sugar levels by consuming fruit juices than with the bulky fibre contained within the whole fruit that creates satiety.

More interest in Frutose and which Fruit contains the most?

Frutose Fruit content

Fruit Serving Size Grams of Fructose Limes 1 medium 0 Lemons 1 medium 0.6 Cranberries 1 cup 0.7 Passion fruit 1 medium 0.9 Prune 1 medium 1.2 Apricot 1 medium 1.3 Guava 2 medium 2.2 Date (Deglet Noor style) 1 medium 2.6 Cantaloupe 1/8 of med. melon 2.8 Raspberries 1 cup 3.0 Clementine 1 medium 3.4 Kiwifruit 1 medium 3.4 Blackberries 1 cup 3.5 Star fruit 1 medium 3.6 Cherries, sweet 10 3.8 Strawberries 1 cup 3.8 Cherries, sour 1 cup 4.0 Pineapple 1 slice (3.5″ x .75″) 4.0 Grapefruit, pink or red 1/2 medium 4.3

Fruit	Serving Size	Grams of Fructose
Boysenberries	1 cup	4.6
Tangerine/mandarin orange	1 medium	4.8
Nectarine	1 medium	5.4
Peach	1 medium	5.9
Orange (navel)	1 medium	6.1
Papaya	1/2 medium	6.3
Honeydew	1/8 of med. melon	6.7
Banana	1 medium	7.1
Blueberries	1 cup	7.4
Date (Medjool)	1 medium	7.7
Apple (composite)	1 medium	9.5
Persimmon	1 medium	10.6
Watermelon	1/16 med. melon	11.3
Pear	1 medium	11.8
Raisins	1/4 cup	12.3
Grapes, seedless (green or red)	1 cup	12.4
Mango	1/2 medium	16.2
Apricots, dried	1 cup	16.4
Figs, dried	1 cup	23.0

Read my FULL ARTICLE ABOUT FRUIT AND FRUTOSE

Source: Mercola Website 2012

 

 

How to get Good Sleep – 10 Tips

1. Get to bed by 10pm and aim to be asleep by 10.30pm (this is a struggle even for a committed health geek like myself!)
2. Try not to watch late night TV, particularly the news, which is almost always bad news or anything scary, and eliminate bright lights in the hour before bedtime.  Remember anything that increases cortisol levels before bedtime will affect your sleep and the amount of growth and repair your body is capable of.
3. Aim to get 8 hours of sleep minimum each night.
4. Sleep in a room that is completely dark.
5. Avoid stimulants including caffeine, sugar and nicotine after lunch.
6. Drink plenty of water
7. Exercise – the appropriate level of exercise for you will generally help you sleep better at night.
8. Try unplugging all electrical appliances in your bedroom and keep mobile phones well away from you even if they are turned off.
9. Keep a sleep diary and note down the foods and drinks that disrupt your sleep and those that help you to sleep well and wake up feeling rested.
10. If you have the ability to cat nap during the day to catch up on lost sleep, aim for a 20minute stint of shut eye.

Why is Sleep so important?

We hear all the time that sleep is important for our health, but no one really explains why and what affect a lack of sleep has on the body.  This article will attempt to explain the importance of sleep without actually sending you off to sleep as a result of reading it – at least that’s my goal.

I’ll start with my own recommendations for sleep as part of any fat loss (not weight loss) and overall health programme and then explain why it’s important.

“Get to bed before 10.30pm at least 5 nights a week and aim to get at least 8 hours of sleep each night.”

Why is it important to get to sleep before 10.30pm?

The cycles of night and day or dark and light, are controlled by movements of the sun and planets in what is known as a circadian rhythm.  Humans as well as almost every living creature on earth have followed these natural rhythms for hundreds of thousands of years.  That was until Thomas Edison mass produced the light bulb and electricity was plugged into every home.  Nowadays there’s a mass of late night TV and bright lights at the touch of a switch, but these changes have only occurred over the last 150 years or so.   Yes I know we’ve known about fire for over 5000 years, but the last 150 years is really when we have started changing our sleep habits as a result of technology.

Our hormonal systems have not changed at all in the last 150 years, which means that whenever light stimulates your skin or eyes, regardless of the source, your brain and hormonal system think its morning.  In response to light your hormonal system releases cortisol, a powerful hormone that prepares the body for movement, work, combat or whatever is necessary for survival.  This disrupts what should be happening because as the sun goes down cortisol levels decrease allowing the release of melatonin (your sleep hormone) and an increase in the levels of growth and repair hormones.  Physical repair of the body mostly take place while you’re asleep between 10pm and 2am.  After 2am the immune and repair energies are more focused on psychogenic (mental) repair which lasts until we awaken. Therefore if you don’t go to sleep until late, you miss out on the really important growth and repair phase, which can lead to a whole host of health problems on top of making you feel tired and lousy, even if you did manage to get 8 hours of sleep.

Why do we need 8 hours of sleep?

Chicago University did a brilliant study a few years ago which demonstrated the problems with getting less than 8 hours of sleep each night.  One group of adults was given a maximum of 5.2 hours of sleep every night for 8 nights whilst the control group was given a minimum of 8 hours sleep.  After just 8 days both groups were given a high carbohydrate breakfast.  The sleep deprived group had to release 40% more insulin than the control group and it took them 50% longer to get their blood sugar under control , even though they had 40% more insulin! Even more amazing is that this study records what happens to the body after just 8 days of between 5-6 hours of sleep each night, whereas in reality many people get less than 8 hours sleep every night of the week.

Insulin is your primary fat storing hormone, and the Chicago university study proves that sleep deprivation makes you insulin resistant, or in other words it makes you store more of a proportion of everything you eat as fat.  You’ll also no doubt have noticed that after a bad night’s sleep you crave crap sugary food all day and that’s again down to Insulin.

Top 10 tips to get Good Sleep

Easy on the Grains (Body Fat)

In April I wrote about the “hidden sugars” in processed foods and the problems they cause in the body.  Sugary foods when consumed are converted rapidly into blood glucose.  It may however surprise you to hear that any carbohydrate based food goes through the exact same process as sugar.  The only debate going on between dieticians and nutritionists is how quickly different carbohydrates break down into glycogen – you may have heard of the glycaemic index which attempts to rate how quickly foods are broken down into sugar in the body.

A long list of studies over the past several years have confirmed that highly processed grains found in breads, pasta, cereals, potatoes, and rice, not fats, are what is making the western world fat .  I have even worse news for you, so called healthy grains like whole wheat, brown rice and brown bread can spike your blood sugar levels quickly also, slowing down your metabolic function and promoting weight gain.

Dr Bernstein (world leading expert in diabetes)

““Simple sugar” does not mean just table sugar; that’s why I prefer to call them fast-acting carbohydrates.  Breads and other starchy foods, such as potatoes and grains, become glucose so rapidly that they can cause serious postprandial increases in blood sugar”

In fact all grain products except pure bran are converted so rapidly into glucose by the enzymes in saliva and further down in the digestive tract that they are, as far as blood sugar is concerned, essentially no different than table sugar or even pure glucose.

Eliminate Grains, starches and sweets

The side effects of our over consumption of grains can be seen in our collective weight gain and more importantly high levels of disease – look around you now many people are overweight, which invariably means they have an insulin problem.   Total elimination of the food groups detailed above is ideal if you are overweight, but even if you are not over weight drastically reducing your consumption of these foods you will help you lose body fat and gain significant health benefits. 

This sounds remarkably like Atkins – how do I get the energy I require?

There are in fact plentiful supplies of carbohydrates in non-starchy vegetables, which release their energy into the body in a much slower manner than bread rice pasta and potatoes.  That way you get the energy you require without using one of the body’s last ditch emergency responses advocated in the Atkins regime called ketosis – where the body breaks down fat in the absence of carbohydrates.  In varying degrees ketosis can lead to muscle breakdown, nausea, dehydration, headaches, light headedness, irritability, bad breath and kidney problems.

Normalizing Insulin levels

Your body produces insulin to keep your blood sugar at the appropriate level to keep you healthy, which literally stops you from dying when you eat concentrated sugars.  Over time the more grains starches and sweets you eat the higher your insulin levels become (even more so if you don’t exercise).  And elevated insulin levels are toxic to the body, eventually leading to all sorts of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes and obesity not to mention a myriad of hormonal disorders.

How can you tell if you have raised insulin levels and are overweight?

There are tests that your doctor can carry out to prove whether you have a problem 1) a fasting blood sugar level test and 2) a blood insulin level test, which are both inexpensive.  I prefer to take your hip/waist ratio and in fact you can do this yourself by measuring your own hip and waist measurements

Dr Bernstein’s Insulin Resistant Ratio

Women – If your waist line is 80% or greater than your hip measurement.

Men – If your waist line measures the same as your hip measurement therefore 1:1

This ratio is taken again from world leading diabetes specialist Dr Bernstein and is far more important than BMI (Body mass Index) as it measures the amount of dangerous visceral or organ fat which is a high marker of insulin resistance and a whole host of other diseases.  Your goal is then to normalise your blood sugar levels, therefore reducing insulin levels in the blood and reducing your waist line, rather than simply losing weight – in actual fact the best form of exercise for someone who is overweight is resistance based exercise aimed at getting you to build muscle not lose weight!

Top tips for normalising blood sugar, insulin levels and body fat

1. Eliminate all grains, starchy foods and sweets.
2. Exercise – at least 2 resistance based exercise routines per week, and 3 cardio sessions where you pump the body (walking is acceptable!)– remember your lymphatic system cannot work unless you move.
3. Work out your nutritional type and stick to it, and unless you come out as a carbohydrate type avoid complex carbohydrates (rice, pasta, potatoes and bread) at all times.
4. Eat a wide range of non-starchy vegetables with every meal.
5. Fruit is a caution food if you are insulin resistant (all but avocado) as they contain lots of natural sugar called fructose.
6.  If you are performing vigorous and sustained exercise you may need to include some complex carbohydrates – never let yourself go into ketosis described above.  

Is Hidden Sugar Making Us Unhealthy And Fat?

We all know that sugar is bad for our teeth but did you know how bad it is for your body? Over consumption of sugar in all its myriad forms causes the following problems:

• Weight gain leading to obesity
• Insulin resistance leading to type 2 diabetes
• The most dangerous form of cholesterol
• Significant liver damage.
• Premature ageing
• Immune system suppression
• Plus it’s as addictive as Cocaine!

There are many more problems associated with over consumption of sugar than those listed above, but hopefully you get the picture.  Many recent studies have shown that as the amount of sugar consumed has increased over the last 30 years society has become fatter, generally unhealthier and more prone to heart disease than ever before.  Yes folks its sugar that’s making us fat and unhealthy not the consumption of fat itself.

Where is the sugar coming from?

The primary source is sugary drinks like sodas and juices.  However you may well avoid these already and cut out sugar in your tea/coffee and look to avoid eating sweets too often.  However you’re more than likely still consuming an unhealthy amount of sugar in your diet, if you eat processed or pre-packaged foods.   Many people simply check the fat levels of products, but forget to check the sugar that’s been poured in to many foods. 

Take a look at the list below, all sugar content is given per one hundred grams of product. I’ve included Coca Cola as the bench mark of a “seriously sugary product”, but I’m not just picking on any one manufacturer – Pepsi has slightly more sugar at 11g per 100g!

Percentage of sugar in 100g of:

Coke – 10.6%
Tropicana (orange) – 10%
Innocent (strawberry & banana) – 10.5%
Activia (strawberry) – 13.5%
Yeo Valley fat free organic (Vanilla) – 14.1%
Branston pickle original – 23.9%
Heinz ketchup – 23.7%
Heinz salad cream – 17.5%
Kraft light honey and mustard dressing – 13%
Sainsbury’s cream horseradish sauce – 23.4%
Uncle Ben’s sweet & sour sauce – 18.1%
Weight Watchers tikka massala – 6.3%
Special K – 17%
Frosties – 37%
Rice Crispies – 10%

Notice that the majority of products listed above have higher sugar values that Coke! Drinks in general have high sugar values and even supposedly healthy fruit juices have dangerously high levels of Sugar, considering they’re in liquid form and mainly consumed without the fibre present in the actual fruit.

Even products that market themselves as healthy such as Activia and other yoghurts that have “Organic” in the title actually have incredibly high sugar levels (natural or otherwise) which makes them anything but healthy to your insulin levels.  Heinz tomato ketchup has 24g of sugar per 100g, that’s over double the volume of sugar than Coke!

Cooking sauces on the other hand seem to have quite a low content at first glance, however taking Uncle Ben’s sweet and sour sauce as an example it  has 18.1g per 100g, but a 500g jar contains 90.5 g of sugar! – even  the smaller Weight watchers jar of Tikka Massala sauce contains 22gramms of sugar in total, and they’re supposed to be in the business of weight loss!

So why have our foods become more sugary?

There are a number of factors behind the increase in sugar, sugar substitutes like corn syrups and artificial sweeteners. 

1. Back in the 1970’s one poor piece of scientific research incorrectly identified fat as the cause of heart disease and many other health problems, and governments jumped on this study as the means of keeping us healthy. Consumers were warned about the dangers of fat and encouraged us (in fact they still do!)to consume low fat products such as semi-skimmed milk and manufacturers were asked to reduce the amount of fat in their foods.
2. Alongside this shift towards low fat foods, supermarket shopping has thrived in the UK and with it the demand for foods to have a long shelf life, which meant taking out the fibre within the food (as that’s the part that goes off quickly) and adding salt.  After the fat and fibre have gone anything tastes rank, particularly with added salt, therefore manufacturer’s added sugar to disguise the taste.
3. Manufacturers also discovered that the sweeter their products tasted the more consumers liked them; therefore they increased the sweetness further, whilst ironically often marketing them as low fat products! 
4. The price of Sugar was very volatile back in the 70’s, and manufacturers were looking at other ways to sweeten their products and in 1975 High Fructose Corn Syrup was invented, which created a very cheap and price stable method of sweetening. Artificial sweeteners such as Aspartame and NutraSweet (and others) have also subsequently been invented and used widely, and cause massive problems in their own right.

Since the 1970’s we have seen record levels of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and general ill health, alongside the ever increasing amount of sugar in our diets.  We may be living longer, but we’re fatter and more unfit as a nation than ever before!

 It is clear from the research that it is the volume of sugar in the diet that causes so many problems and the point of this article is to highlight the level of sugar present in our food.  In my view the UK RDA (recommended daily allowance) guidelines for sugar are set way too high at 120g for men, 90g for women and 85g for kids.  If your goal is weight loss or you just want to be healthier, I would encourage you to consume no more than 30g per day! (That’s being generous!)

Top tips for avoiding sugar

• Get rid of all sugary liquids including fruit juices, fizzy drinks, sports drinks and significantly reduce your alcohol consumption (it’s derived from sugar) and drink pure water.
• Cook all food from scratch so that you can control what goes in your food and avoid cooking sauces!
• Remember the slogan “the longer the shelf life the worse it is for you”.  Eat your carbohydrate with fibre – generally in nature where there is sugar there is fibre.  Whilst fruit has fibre it’s still a caution food, therefore eat it at the end of a meal or on it’s own with a few nuts or a small piece of cheese.
• Read all labels carefully and check for carbohydrate and sugar levels – a general rule is anything with a high starch or sugar value is a caution food and be cautious of all foods labelled “low fat” – they generally have high levels of sugar instead or worse artificial sweeteners!
• Organic doesn’t necessarily mean healthy – check the sugar content, as natural sugars also cause insulin problems.
• Check for sweeteners such as Aspartame – they are even worse for you than sugar!

TOP 10 TIPS FOR HEALTHY FAT LOSS

Yes, not weight loss, fat loss there is a big difference!

1. Eat according to your metabolic type – ok so i’ve been harping on about metabolic typing for a while now but it really is a simple way of establishing what food works best as your fuel for your own biochemically individuality. – if you haven’t taken the test yet it is free and takes no more than 15 mins go online http://nutritionaltyping.mercola.com/ (remember to click off the newsletter if you don’t want daily emails…)
2. Cut down on the amount of Fructose in your diet – i could write a whole book on why fructose is so bad for you and it probably will appear as an article here in the future, but safe to say that anything that has HFCS (High fructose corn syrup) or labelled as syrup in the ingredients you should avoid.  Fructose is a naturally occurring sugar in fruit, so many people assume it’s healthy, unfortunately the metabolic pathways it follows causes a chain reaction of hormonal responses that suppress your hunger hormone grehlin bypasses your fat storing hormone insulin and messes with your sateity hormone Leptin – trust me you want these hormones working with you rather than against you.  Aim to reduce your intake of fructose down to 15g a day by only consuming fructose in the form of fruit only – no juices do not count..
3. Eat some healthy fats and never eat anything that says low fat on the label! – if it says that it’s more than likely got loads of sugar or anything ending with -ose on the label and or sugar substitutes such as corn syrup .  When food manufacturers take out the fibre (the section of the food that de-creases shelf life) and fat (because society thinks it’s bad for them)  processed food tastes horrible, so they pile in lots of salt and sugar/sugar substitutes to make it taste nice again.  Furthermore your body needs fat for a whole host of reasons,  it isn’t the demon that the medical profession and pharmaceutical companies will have you believe, Trans fats or hydrogenated vegetable oils are bad for you and you’ll find these hidden away in processed food and fast food, as it’s really cheap for manufacturers to make.
    Consume moderate amounts of the following fats and oils – natural meats, fish, and poultry, butter (please avoid margarine!) coconut oil, lard, olive oil, avocado, nuts and nut oils. 
4. Watch those carbohydrates – really important if you’re a protein type or mixed type but even if you come out as a carbohydrate type in the metabolic typing test monitor the quantity of carbohydrates that are on your plate.  Remember that volume of the food is as important as the Glycemic Index (GI) of the food you are consuming. Your fat storing hormone insulin will be released if you over consume foods with a high glycemic index. 
5. If you’re hungry eat something! – This particularly applies to women, who are designed to store fat better than men to enable them to survive the entire cycle of pregnacy without food, men are designed to only survive for three months.  This natural hormonal mechanism harks back to an age before farming when we were hunter gatherers and it enabled us to survive without food for periods of time.  In modern times if you restrict your diet too severely or simply miss meals your body may be tricked into thinking that there’s a famine and therefore will order the hormones to store a proportion of food consumed, as fat.  There’s more bad news I’m afraid, each subsequent time you diet or restrict calories the body stores even more fat, therefore you become even fatter  – this explains the yo-yo diet phenominum. 
6. Eat slowly – a whole host of studies have proven that if you eat slowly you’ll reduce your total consumption, some studies claim by as much as 10%.  Furthermore digestion begins in your mouth, and the more that you chew your food the greater the likelihood that your body will be able to draw out the vitamins and minerals it requires as well as to produce the energy that everyone requires to live life to the full.  Food that isn’t properly chewed may end up being dealt with by the liver, costing you even more energy to process. 
7. Prepare as much food from scratch as possible, as processed foods are full of ingredients that aren’t good for you.  Anything that you don’t recognise or struggle to pronounce on the label, you can rest assured that your liver won’t like it, and the longer the shelf life is the worse the food is for you….these are just a couple of slogans used by world renowned holistic health practitioners such as Paul Chek. 
8. Move/Exercise whatever you want to call it, anything you can manage is better than nothing! – You don’t have to exercise in a gym, but you do need to move in order to get those hormones working on your side.  Setting aside just 2 hours a week is sufficient to get hormones working for you provided that you’re doing the right kind of exercise. Two to three 20 minute all over body resistance exercise routines a week and two to three 20 minute cardio routines will do the job – just make sure that you consult your GP before starting any exercise routine. 
9. Make sure you’re fully hydrated – it was the subject of Decembers newsletter, if your de-hydrated you will more than likely have less energy that you should have and struggle to keep all your vital bodily functions happening simultaneously.
10. Get to bed before 10.30pm at least 5 nights a week and aim to get 7-8 hours of sleep each night. If you have the ability to cat nap during the day to catch up on lost sleep aim for a 20minute stint of shut eye.  It may help you to keep a diary of the amount of sleep you get to identify how much sleep you’re getting in the first place.  Bodily repair and and growth happens in the hours of sleep before 2am and in fact 90% of your growth hormone is released during this time- therefore miss this crucial period of slow wave “delta” sleep and you’ll more than likely wake feeling tired in the morning.
     

Hydration and De-hydration

 Hydration is key to the human body and many articles trot out the old analogy that you can survive without food for months, but without water you’d die after a few days to illustrate the importance.  Let’s face it water is in plentiful supply in the uk and what happens when we allow ourselves to get de-hydrated is the major issue, rather than actually dying!  So let’s go a little deeper – Did you know that there are around 10 billion biochemical reactions happening every second in the human body, 100% of which are dependant on water.  Therefore as soon as you become dehydrated your entire biochemical system is compromised, causing a decrease in energy production and compromising your immune system, nervous system, circulatory system, digestive system and eliminative system.  

As you can imagine choosing which system to shut down over the other is a tricky business for the body, therefore it has a few ways to obtain or retain fluid outside of what we eat and drink. Salt plays a number of roles in the body and most people are aware that one of them is to retain water.  Another mechanism often used is to squeeze the colon to obtain fluid – yes that’s right the body squeezes its own faeces and recycles the water present in order to keep the biochemical system working.  Aside from sounding unpleasant this results in both constipation and the absorption of toxic fluids into the bloodstream.You’ll know when this is happening or happened when you finally manage to go to the loo you’ll either see pellet/rabbit drops or very dried out solid poops!

So how do you avoid de-hydration? 

The Food standards authority recommends that in climates such as the UK, we should drink approximately 1.2 litres (6 to 8 glasses) of fluid every day to stop us getting dehydrated. Dr F.Gatmangghelidj a renowned hydration expert suggests that for normal hydration you should follow the following formula for calculating the amount of water you should consume: 

Your body weight in KG x 0.0333 = litres per day  (e.g. 70kg x 0.0333 = 2.33 litres) 

Now that’s a lot of water every day – it’s my belief  that the exact amount of water a human needs is highly individual, and the quantity you need to drink depends on the condition of the person, the amount of physical exercise, and on the environmental temperature and humidity. 

My advice:

Start the day with a glass of water – believe it or not while the body shuts down for a good nights kip an awful lot of repair work takes place and re-hydration first thing is important, not only if you’ve had a drink or two the night before.

From then on look to consume 1-2 glasses of water in-between meals throughout the day and look out for the following signs to tell you whether to keep drinking or cut back consumption.

If you’re feeling thirsty and or the colour of your urine is dark yellow and you’re not passing much fluid then keep drinking! 

If you’re urinating more than 5 times a day you might want to reduce your water consumption but first check two things:

1. How much caffeine do you consume? – Caffeine can act as a mild diuretic forcing the body to pass clear water.  The diuretic effect of caffeine is a highly debated phenomenon amongst the experts.  However if you’re urine is clear (that means without colour) it’s more than likely acting as a diuretic.
2. What’s the quality of your water like? – It should have a total dissolved solids value (TDS) of greater than 300 – most decent bottled water will have this reading on the side.  If you’re unsure add a pinch of unrefined sea salt to each litre of water you drink – note I didn’t recommend sodium chloride/table salt.  It’s the minerals in the sea salt that your body needs, and adding salt will assist in the maintenance of electrolyte and energy levels, and help retain water, rather than pass it straight back out of the system.  Salt requirements are highly individualised, therefore make sure you cannot taste the salt and if you already salt your food and or eat a lot of processed foods you may cause more harm than good.  If you exercise and sweat a lot then salt on your food and in your drink may help improve energy levels.