By Ashley Dance

Most effective diets cut out bread completely. Generally, this is because the bread that is available to consumers today does not contain adequate nutrients and is so refined that it is not processed properly in the body. Specifically white bread or even other types of bread that are chiefly made with enriched flour are the culprits.
White bread is made by removing the bran and the germ of the wheat kernel, using only the endosperm. The germ and the bran are the parts that contain all the nutritious parts of wheat. Nearly 20 vitamins and minerals are lost by removing these from the flour. Don’t be fooled by “enriched” breads. Only five of those nutrients are added back in, and they are: thiamine, niacin, folic acid, riboflavin and iron. These were added back into the flour because of an emergence of vitamin deficiency diseases in our country like pellagra and megaloblastic anemia. However, these are a synthetic form of the vitamins and are not as easily absorbed by the body as the natural source. The fiber content of enriched flour is next to nothing. Your body reacts to it as if it were sugar because it is so quickly processed. Therefore it significantly raises blood sugar, which can be a serious problem for diabetics. Make sure you always read the ingredients on packaged breads because many labeled as “multi-grain” or “whole wheat” contain mostly enriched flour with only small portions of whole kernels. So what kind of bread can you eat? Sourdough and sprouted grain breads are best.
Sourdough bread is, first of all, delicious and it’s nutritious. Who knew? Sourdough bread is made from whole grain flour, wild yeast and water and is allowed to ferment for awhile. The yeast bacteria need food to grow and produce more of themselves, however, complex carbohydrates are not easy for them to digest. So they must produce enzymes to be able to digest the food source available to them. When all this is happening, carbon dioxide bubbles are released which causes the bread to expand and rise. This reaction creates lactic acid, acetic acid and ethanol (alcohol). Lactic acid contributes to better digestibility of the bread, just like with the bacteria in the beginning of the fermentation. Acetic acid adds flavor and is a natural preservative, lowering the pH level of the bread and retarding mold growth. So sourdough bread naturally has a longer shelf life than white bread without having to add in tons of chemical preservatives. When made with whole grain flour sourdough bread retains all the vitamins of the whole wheat kernel plus the added enzymes which help your body slowly digest the bread and receive all the nutrients.
So then what is sprouted grain bread? Essentially it is wheat that is allowed to germinate, or sprout, before it is ground up. The benefits of this are that enzymes are created, vitamin content is increased and anti-nutrients like phytic acid, which binds up minerals preventing your ability to fully absorb them, are neutralized. Sprouted wheat contains four times the amount of niacin and nearly twice the amount of vitamin B6 and folate as non-sprouted wheat. It also contains more protein and fewer starches than non-sprouted grain. Therefore, it does not raise the glycemic index as much making it better for those with blood sugar problems. Sprouted grains are not ground all the way into flour, so they are considered flourless, however the wheat berries do contain gluten. Sprouted grain breads are often made with several kinds of sprouts such as millet, barley, oat and even lentil and soy. A great brand of sprouted grain products is Food For Life‚Äôs Ezekiel 4:9 line. This bread was inspired by the scripture in the Bible, which says, ‚ÄúTake also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it…” So they did, and it‚Äôs so tasty! It is thick, hardy and grainy, but in a good way!
Knock useless white bread out of your diet and switch to grains that will actually help your body!

Two words I would never put in the same sentence, unless the sentence started with avoid. The news story is all over the place and I feel like I should address it before I start getting, “I told you so” emails from you guys.

The article in question, found here: www.cnn.com

The article describes a college professor doing an experiment on himself to prove a point about calorie counting, one of the things I don’t promote as a useful means of maintaing your health. That being said, at the latter part of the article a nutritionist chimes in to say, “There are things we can’t measure,” which I would have to agree with whole-heartily.

To give you a little perspective here I will explain quickly my story. I eat whole fruits and vegetables, occasionally sprouted grains or spelt flour, raw grass fed milk and about 5 grass fed eggs a day. My numbers are normal as they say but about 3 years ago I put myself to an experiment to see if I could gain “mass” while lifting weights and not changing my diet but increasing the amount of food I took in. So in short, I took the above listed foods and ate them till I went from 145 all the way up to 205. Does that mean I was unhealthily pursuing my goal of muscle mass? No. Because I was keeping my food in the context of whole, nutritious, balanced and organic.

What difference does this make?
The difference is clear, my body never got addicted to the food it consumed because of refined sugars and other chemicals, but more so than that my body didn’t burn out it’s filters in the process of my weight gain. Eating non-nutritive sugary sweets such as twinkies will wreak havoc on your filters as well as your insulin production which affects so many other organs and systems in your body. That being said, when I stopped eating one extra meal I dropped twenty pounds in five weeks. I was finding my “perfect weight” or healthy weight that I believed I needed to be at to do my job correctly.

In comparison you may be thinking, “well, you just reduced calories”, on the surface you’d be right, but there’s so much more to it, especially given the parameters I personally place on holistic well being. If you are going to just simply count and cut calories you are going to leave yourself open to all sorts of sickness and diseases like cancer, diabetes and early death. Skinny and obese people alike get diabetes and cancer and crohns and all sorts of sickness and disease. Yeah, that is how seriously I take refinement, chemicals, and GM foods. These foods are NOT time tested – just like the “twinkie diet”! There is no way of completely testing this long term, but if there was mind you, there couldn’t be any protein shakes and vegetables on the side like the professor said he had.

You can lose weight counting calories, it’s not practical but it can be done. You can’t gain or maintain whole health just counting calories and not the quality of the content you are eating. It will NOT be a conclusive answer to overall health, which is what we strive to do here at Life Fitness Academy.

*This article was written by Ashley Dance.

In this day and age, nearly everyone in America knows that sodas are bad for them, especially the diet ones. The problem is that they don’t know exactly why it is unhealthy, so they drink them anyway. Not anymore! Read on to be enlightened.

Let’s first list the ingredients in Diet Coke: Carbonated Water, Caramel Color, Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavors, Caffeine, Aspartame (NutraSweet), Potassium Benzoate and Citric acid.

In America, most of the phosphoric acid produced (about 80%) is used in the production of agricultural fertilizers, with the remainder being used for detergent additives (about 10%), cleaners, insecticide production, and cattle feed additives. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not consume a chemical used in cleaners and fertilizers. It also inhibits calcium absorption in the body, which can be extremely detrimental to middle-age women who are already experiencing bone loss.

Potassium Benzoate is a preservative. Who knows what those “natural flavors” are either!

Next up is the caffeine. Caffeine is addictive and many Americans openly admit to being addicted to it. It is also a diuretic. That along with the sodium in diet drinks actually dehydrates you rather than quenching your thirst. Dr. Harris Stratyner said in an article on the ABC news website, “People do indeed become addicted to caffeine very rapidly, and they also withdraw from caffeine very rapidly. It can make their sleep patterns disturbed; it can make them restless, wired and anxious.”

The ingredient that is the most dangerous, however, is aspartame. Aspartame is unstable and breaks down in the can. It decomposes into formaldehyde, methyl alcohol, formic acid, diketopiperazine and other toxins. Formaldehyde, the same chemical that is used to preserve dead bodies, binds to fat cells, actually making it harder to lose weight. Aspartame also inhibits the production of serotonin, which could potentially cause depression. Ralph Walton, MD of Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, believes aspartame inhibits serotonin synthesis by decreasing the availability of the precursor L-tryptophan, a finding borne out in another research team’s 1987 experiment on rats, as reported in an article by John McManamy.

In addition, the sweet flavor of the aspartame elicits an insulin response. The body expects sugar in the bloodstream, and it isn‚Äôt there. The insulin blocks the fat burning hormone HSL (hormone sensitive lipase). Instead of using those fats as fuel, the body will begin to pull amino acids from muscles, which is more taxing on the body and can leave you feeling tired, cranky and sluggish after awhile. Armen Hareyan reports that Professor Terry Davidson and associate professor Susan Withers at Purdue University found that artificial sweeteners disrupt satiety, the feeling of being full. Their results, published in International Journal of Obesity showed that “mouth feel” plays a crucial role in the body’s ability to count calories and that when we consume artificial sweeteners we disrupt the body’s ability to count calories based on sweetness. This can cause you to inadvertently crave more food, often more sugary food, and you will eat more than you would normally if you didn‚Äôt drink that Diet Coke. This has been confirmed in a study conducted on rats at Purdue University. Davidson and Withers found that rats that were fed artificial sweeteners consistently ate more than the group fed high-calorie sweeteners. Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP writes in her article called, ‚ÄúDiet soda-How healthy is it?‚Äù that Sharon P. Fowler, MPH, and colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio have compiled data that provided surprising results. Fowler found that for each can of diet soft drink consumed per day, the risk of obesity went up by 41%.

When you drink a diet soda, it is true that you are not consuming any calories in that beverage. Yet you are essentially sabotaging your body. You may crave and consume more calories, which cannot be burned off because of the formaldehyde, and the blocking of the HSL hormone. After all that, it can make you tired and cranky because of the interference of serotonin production, therefore making you unwilling to do any exercise to get rid of all that fat in the first place! Let’s kick the caffeine addiction and stop drinking Diet drinks as an easy step toward a healthier lifestyle!

Sources:
-“Caffeine Nation: Diet Coke.” August 4, 2007. abcnews.go.com/GMA/PersonalBest/story?id=3447205&page=1
-Hareyan, Armen. “Diet Coke is a Joke.” www.emaxhealth.com/11/586.html
-Martini, Betty. “Diet Coke and Aspartame.” www.lightparty.com/Health/DietCokeAspartame.html
-McManamy, John. ‚ÄúDon’t Drink the Diet Coke.‚Äù www.mcmanweb.com/diet_coke.html
-Pick, Marcelle OB/GYN NP “Diet soda — how healthy is it?” www.womentowomen.com/healthyweight/dietsoda.aspx
-Shakhashiri. “Chemical of the Week.” www.scifun.org/chemweek/pdf/Phosphoric_Acid.pdf

From: Extraordinary Health (Jordin Rubin)

They call it a safe food additive that’s been used for a century as a preservative to ensure products remain free of fungi or bacteria, but sodium benzoate (E211) doesn’t do much in the way of preserving health. In fact, studies indicate that it can damage DNA, leading to neurodegenerative diseases, accelerated aging, liver damage and may heighten hyperactivity in children or cause hives, asthma or other allergic reactions in sensitive individuals.

Let’s take a closer look at this supposedly safe additive that’s infiltrated our diets and lifestyle. One of the most disturbing findings on the adverse health effects of sodium benzoate is that it can damage and shut down vital parts of DNA in a cell’s mitochondria. Mitochondria, by the way, consume oxygen for cells to function healthily and to generate our body’s energy. In other words, sodium benzoate can bring our health to a halt at the cellular level.

Peter Piper, Ph. D., a professor of molecular biology and biotechnology from the University of Sheffield, has been studying the negative effects of sodium benzoate since 1990. Piper says, “The mitochondria consume the oxygen to give you energy, and if you damage it—as happens in a number of diseased states—then the cell starts to malfunction very seriously. And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA—Parkinson’s and quite a lot of neurodegenerative diseases, but above all, the whole process of aging,” says Piper.

Sodium benzoate, as well as other food additives, can also have a negative effect on kids. According to many experts, sodium benzoate can cause heightened hyperactivity in children—and not just for those kids who are ADHD. It applies to kids in general and can mimic ADHD symptoms, even in kids who are normal.

Jim Stevenson, Ph. D., a professor of psychology at Southampton University, author of a study published in a 2007 edition of the Lancet, says: “This [the effects of sodium benzoate on hyperactivity] has been a major study investigating an important area of research. The results suggest that consumption of certain mixtures of artificial food colors and sodium benzoate preservative are associated with increases in hyperactive behavior in children.”

Sodium benzoate has health risks on its own, but it can turn into a carcinogenic, or cancer-causing, chemical called benzene if it’s mixed with ascorbic acid (vitamin C), as is the case with many carbonated beverages or fruit drinks. Add some heat to these soft drinks or sodas—such as cartons sitting in a warehouse or garage in hot temps, or even in your car during hot spells—and benzene levels can spike. How long soft drinks have been exposed to light or how long they’ve been on the shelf may increase benzene levels, too.

The truth is that benzene is identified as a Class A carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and prolonged exposure can cause death, blood disease such as leukemia, bone marrow damage, anemia (due to a decrease in red blood cells) as well as excessive bleeding and immune system suppression, leading to greater susceptibility to infections. Those are just the most serious benzene effects, though. Benzene can also cause dizziness, tremors, rapid heart rate, headaches, drowsiness, confusion, unconsciousness, stomach irritation, convulsions or vomiting.

The amounts of benzene floating around in our soft drinks may astound you. In short, the levels are often unlawfully high. An investigation by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) uncovered the FDA’s data on benzene in soft drinks. It indicated that 79% of diet soda samples tested over a six-year period from 1995 through 2001 were contaminated with benzene at levels above the federal limit for benzene in tap water of 5 parts per billion (ppb).

Here’s how it panned out: The average benzene level was 19ppb, which is nearly four times the tap water standard. The maximum benzene level detected was 55 ppb, which is 11 times the tap water limit. One cola drink, however, was off the charts with benzene, coming in at 138 ppb, about 27 times the tap water limit.

Soft drinks aren’t the only products containing sodium benzoate, however. Some foods naturally contain sodium benzoate, while others—like conventional processed foods, salad dressings, condiments, pickles, cough syrups and even most mainstream manufactured vitamins—have sodium benzoate added.

Be sure you check out a product’s ingredients label prior to buying it or ingesting it. You don’t want this explosive chemical in your diet.