Get the whole-food habit: lose fat and live longer by getting back to basic foods - Active Nutrition

Men's Fitness, June, 2002 by Matt Fitzgerald

Probably 85 percent to 90 percent of the degenerative conditions that plague us today, including heart disease, diabetes and several cancers, either did not exist or were rare before the 20th century and are a direct result of nutrition and lifestyle mistakes. Our biggest lifestyle mistake is inactivity. Our biggest nutrition mistake is moving away from a diet based in whole foods."

The man responsible for this melancholy mouthful is Udo Erasmus, Ph.D., author of Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill. He is one of countless nutrition experts who passionately recommend bringing your food choices closer to their natural source. In fact, the benefit of eating a diet rich in whole foods is the one thing every doctor, trainer and nutritionist agrees on. Just why are whole foods so important, in what ways do they benefit you, and, for that matter, what exactly are they? Let's tackle the second question first.

"Practically speaking, whole foods are foods that have not been modified from their natural state, or have been modified only a little bit, for example, through cooking," says Sheri Barke, R.D., a nutritionist at the Student Health & Wellness Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Foods that have been substantially modified are classified as processed foods. Cherries, for one, are a whole food. Cherry Pop-Tarts are not. (There goes breakfast.)

Human beings being human beings--i.e., creatures motivated by ease and instant gratification--we favor processed foods because they last longer in the pantry, look nicer, slice better, sell faster, and are easier to mass-produce than "whole" foods.

Yet there is a price to be paid for allowing convenience to govern our eating habits. Consuming too many of the wrong processed foods can make you fat and weaken your immune system, and may even slowly kill you. And for many of us, these man-made foods make up a huge percentage of what we eat every day.

Not all modern-day methods are bad. Pasteurization, for example, is a way of processing certain foods to make them safer to eat. But most forms of processing make foods substantially less nutritious and sometimes downright unhealthy.

"Our genetic material is a complete program containing all the information that is necessary to develop and sustain a human body for its entire life," explains Erasmus. "But it has two requirements. First, you must not poison the program. Second, you have to supply the building blocks that you need to build that body. When we process foods, we take essential nutrients out, and we introduce toxic molecules at the same time. So we're doing the two things we should not be doing."

WHOLE FOODS AND THE ACTIVE GUY

Athletes and fitness enthusiasts who care about how their bodies look and perform have even more reason to favor whole foods. Imagine two very similar men who work out several times each week with a nice balance of weights and cardio, and who share the goal of eventually looking like a MEN'S FITNESS cover model. The only difference between the two is that one guy eats a lot of processed foods and the other guy eats mostly whole foods. Who will end up more cover-worthy?

"There's no question, the guy eating whole foods will gain more lean muscle and strength and lose more fat," says Edmund Burke, Ph.D., author of Optimal Muscle Recovery. "Whole foods tend to be more nutritionally dense, so they supply more of the vitamins and minerals that assist in postworkout recovery and muscle building. Meanwhile, processed foods tend to be more calorically dense and to supply energy that doesn't last as long, and these factors lead to fat storage that will counteract the effects of exercise."

FOODS TO WATCH FOR

Grains: Among the most commonly processed foods in the American diet are the grains we eat in baked goods and in the forms of various sugars. Grains are processed to speed up the manufacturing of baked foods and to make them longer-lasting and more appealing in taste and texture.

"When grains are put through the process of refinement," says Barke, "they are stripped of their outer bran, which has all the nutrients, and they are stripped of their inner germ, which has all the fiber. All that's left is the starchy endosperm, which is rich in carbohydrate but not much else."

The vitamin enrichment meant to counter such tampering scarcely even begins to reverse the damage, largely because it cannot replace lost phytonutrients, which exist only in whole plant foods and are believed to promote health in many unknown ways. "There's a growing amount of evidence to suggest that it's not so much any one nutrient, but the particular balance of many nutrients in whole foods that makes them good for us," says Barke. "That's not something we can re-create in the laboratory."

Oils: Processed oils are also widely used and are even more harmful. Extra-virgin olive oil is currently the only unrefined bottled off sold on the mass market. All other bottled oils, according to Erasmus, are processed in ways that remove important nutrients (including lecithin and chlorophyll) and damage a small fraction of the oil's molecules, making them potentially toxic. Oils used in many packaged baked goods and snack foods and in restaurant frying are put through another process, called hydrogenation. This turns healthy, unsaturated fats into saturated and trans fats, which, says Erasmus, "have been linked to heart attack, diabetes, stroke, aneurysm, weakened immune system, liver dysfunction, reproductive problems, lower IQ, prostate cancer and breast cancer."