Food RULES!

I am Andrew Johnston.

But to give you a little more detail, I'm also sliced Fuji apples, full fat plain goat milk yogurt, and a scoop of peanut butter--all organic, of course. Who are you?

Oh, I'm sorry. You probably don't have enough context to understand that question. Try this:
Last night, I was a piece of bratwurst, some sauerkraut, broiled broccoli with olive oil and celtic sea salt, and a few sliced of raw mango that were the bomb!

Now can you tell me who you are? No, no--Wait--let me guess: Some of you are...cold cereal and skim milk. Others of you are probably a bagel or maybe a breakfast bar with coffee. And there's probably a few of you who are, well, nothing.

You are what you eat, people. I know it sounds cliche, but what else do you call turning over two million red blood cells every second? Our skin every 3 days? Our bones every 3 weeks? Our entire bodies every year? The building blocks of all this cellular turnover is what we consume at any meal. And as I'm fond of saying, you cannot make chicken salad out of chicken shit.

I know, I know--that language is a little offensive. But is it any worse than what we're stuffing our face with everyday? 90% of the money spent on food in this country is spent on fast food. But I gotta tell you straight up: You cannot buy health at the drive thru! Items ordered off a 99 cent menu just don't make good eye balls and they don't make quality brain cells. In fact, if you're spending more to buy one gallon of gas than you're willing to pay for a meal, you better hope your coffin can fit a BMW.

And I'm not just throwing Ronald McDonald under the bus. Food manufacturers in this country have put their bottom lines above our health, convincing us we can subsist almost entirely on just 4 foods--corn, soy, wheat, and dairy.

Those first three foods we're not even really designed to eat. Research shows it takes the human genome 100,000 years to change 1/10th of 1%. Yet we've only been farming for the past 10,000 years--that's a flash in the pan as far as human evolution is concerned. Most of us have not developed the capacity to effectively digest and assimilate the gluttony of grains we're guzzling down our gizzards.

So, if most of us can't thrive off of food that has been farmed for over a millennium, what do you think happens when humans consume crap that's been invented in some lab a few years ago? I'll tell you what happens:

2 out of 3 of us get fat.
1 out of 2 of us get cancer.
Adult onset diabetes has to be renamed Type 2 diabetes because it shows up with alarming frequency...in elementary school children!
4 billion prescriptions get written each year--that's about 12 for every man, woman, and child in America. Which means for every person out there who takes no drugs, someone is popping 24!

We're sick people. And we're sick because we're eating crap! C.R.A.P.--Caffeine, Refined flour, Alcohol, Pasteurized dairy and juice. Additionally, the average American eats approximately 150lbs of carcinogenic food additives each year including pesticides, artificial colors/flavors, and preservatives.

All of these processed non-foods rob us of nutrition: to digest this mountain of C.R.A.P., the protein, vitamins, and other essential nutrients our food should have provided are stolen from our tissues. This creates inefficient organs, weaker muscles, and brittle bones and teeth. We’re literally starving to death on full stomachs! Unsatisfied on a cellular level, we’re constantly hungry and looking for nutrition somewhere. How do we find it? We EAT! And we EAT! And the food manufacturers know this. They have scientists on their payroll. (and a quick aside--anytime scientists are making your food, YOU are the experiment!).

Everyone knows about Lay's Potato Chips, right? Bet you can't eat just one. The reason? A part of your brain called the appestat is being manipulated. See, the appestat measures 51 nutrients in the body which should be present at any one time to create satiety. So if the big food conglomerates put in a little more salt or a little more sugar or whatever industrial chemical, you'll eat more. And if you eat more, they sell more--it's simple economics!

But here's where it gets interesting: what we put into our mouths is recognized by the body as either a food or a toxin. Food supports and nourishes the body, allowing a miraculous array of chemical reactions to take place to run our metabolic machinery. Toxins, on the other hand, must be eliminated before they can reach dangerous levels and threaten our very survival.

Of course, it takes nutrition from REAL food to “take out this trash.” When these nutrients are unavailable, which is what happens from eating typical, processed to death non-foods (foods so void of nutrition that they take more from the body than they give), the body cannot get rid of these toxins. Thankfully, Nature has provided us with an ingenious method to store these toxins safely until such factors are present that allow us to eliminate them. It’s called FAT!

That’s right—one of fat’s major roles in the body is to attract toxins and store them away from the body's essential organs. So just like a farmer fattens a cow more quickly by feeding it grains instead of grass, humans, too, get fat when we consume things we weren’t...designed...to eat. And you don't have to have MD behind your name to realize that none of us were designed to eat amyl acetate or amyl butyrate or any of this other chemical crap! Hell, to pronounce most of these words you need a tongue which can do back flips (and if you have one of those tongues...and you're a female, CALL ME!!!).

Speaking of pronunciation, here are my food rules to follow when it comes to eating for health:

–if you cannot pronounce an ingredient in a food, don’t eat it.
–if God didn’t make it, don’t eat it.
–if it hasn’t been on this earth for 5000+ years, don’t eat it.
–if it won’t keep your dog alive, don’t eat it.
–the more ingredients in a food, the worse it is for you.
–the longer the shelf life of a food, the worse it is for you (fermented foods are one exception).
--the more health claims made about a food, the worse it is for you

Think about it people! When's the last time you saw a commercial for broccoli? Never--because no one needs to be convinced that broccoli is good for them! Look at me. I don't advertise. All my clients come to me by word of mouth, and business is booming, baby! Because all I'm doing...is speaking the truth. And the truth is, everyone needs...a little Vitamin A.

Hey--maybe I'll add that to my list of Food Rules...