Few foods can induce a craving like chocolate. From its aroma to how it melts in your mouth to what it does for your body — the whole experience is heavenly. The effects of chocolate are experienced by everyone, not just chocolate lovers.

In fact, studies have found that the unique smell of chocolate changes our brain activity and makes us more alert. Once the chocolate is consumed, its flavonoids work as prebiotics and improve digestive health. The flavonoids that make it into the blood stream help improve your insulin sensitivity, lower blood pressure, and prevent plaque from building up in your arteries.

Chocolate contains a unique combination of caffeine and theobromine as well. These two work together to protect brain function and improve mood without causing the sleep disturbances or other side effects caused by caffeine consumption.

After reading about all of the good that chocolate can do for us, you may be tempted to head to your corner store and buy some right now. But before you do, it is important to know and understand that most chocolate bars are terrible for your health.

Most Chocolate Bars are Unhealthy

The most popular form of chocolate is milk chocolate. Most milk chocolate bars only contain about 11% cacao with the remaining ~90% of the bar consisting of milk, sugar, and other unhealthy ingredients. If these chocolate bars were named honestly, they’d be called “Chocolate Flavored Sugar-Milk Bars”.

Not so attractive now, huh?

On top of that, the milk binds to cacao antioxidants (including the flavonoids we talked about earlier) and renders them inactive. So when the sugar in the milk chocolate bar spikes your blood sugar and increases inflammation, the flavonoids can’t save you because the milk ingredients made them inactive.

Isn’t Dark Chocolate Healthy?

Most dark chocolate bars are only 60-70% dark chocolate, which means that that the rest of it is made up of processed sugar and other dubious ingredients like soy lecithin and milk solids. Even the 85% or higher dark chocolate bars shouldn’t be considered healthy. They are highly processed and still contain some milk products, sugar, and other additives in an effort to make the chocolate less bitter and more palatable.

If you come across a chocolate bar produced with minimal, unrefined sugar and simple ingredients like cacao and vanilla beans, then at least the chocolate likely has some health benefits — but it will cost you.

These bars are expensive! Plus the processing that they went through before becoming pretty little bars will render some of the antioxidants in the cacao inactive.

After learning all of this, we are left only one good option — to make our own chocolate.

How To Make Your Own Chocolate

That’s right, you can make your own chocolate!

The best part is you won’t need any fancy machinery, and it won’t take up to seven days to make it (like it does in most chocolate factories).

All you need is cacao powder and coconut oil. Look for raw, organic cacao powder for your health, and make sure it’s fair trade for the health of others.

Step 1 — Melt and Mix

Melt the coconut oil in a pan at the low heat. Once the coconut oil is completely liquefied, mix in the same amount of cacao powder until you have a homogeneous chocolate mixture. The lower the heat, the more you preserve the health benefits.

Use a 1:1 ratio of cacao powder to coconut oil.

I recommend starting with a smaller amount like a quarter cup of each. Once you develop a delicious recipe, however, all restrictions are off — make as much chocolate as you want.

Step 2 — Experiment and Solidify

Now that you have your chocolate liquid, turn off the heat source and add in whatever you want to be in your chocolate.

You can put in a sweetener, mix in some nuts and seeds for some crunch, or add in some cinnamon and vanilla powder to make it taste even better. Dried fruit— like dried blueberries, cherries, goji berries, and mulberries — is another ingredient option that will add more flavor and health benefits to your chocolate.

Once you finish mixing in your extra ingredients, pour the mixture into a plate, cookie sheet, or container, and put it in the fridge until it solidifies (2-4 hours).

Step 3 — Eat and Enjoy

Go to the refrigerator, break off a piece of your chocolate, and enjoy.

Why Homemade Chocolate is Much Better Than Store-Bought Chocolate

Although it is easy to make chocolate at home, you may still be tempted to buy the dark chocolate on the grocery store shelves. This homemade variety will not look as “perfect” in that commercial way as store bought chocolate bars. The differing tastes and textures may take some getting used to for some, but it will taste amazing once you get your recipe down, and it will be so much healthier. In fact, if you are a frequent cocoa consumer, you’ll grow to prefer the taste of your homemade chocolate very quickly, and then you will probably despise pretty much everything else out there.

Coconut Oil — One of the Healthiest Sources of Fat

Coconut oil is the perfect fat to use when making chocolate because it solidifies and melts in your mouth like a typical chocolate bar. But this isn’t the only reason why it is part of our chocolate recipe.

Coconut oil has the highest percentage of medium chain triglycerides (MCTs) than any other fat source. But MCTs are technically saturated fat, so doesn’t this mean that they are “unhealthy”? This is where some knowledge of biochemistry comes in handy.

There are many different types of saturated fats, and they are processed by the body in different ways. MCTs (fats with 6-12 carbon atoms) are different from the long chain fatty acids (fats with more than 12 carbon atoms). This is because most of the MCTs are transported directly to the liver after digestion rather than flowing throw the lymph system of the body like long chain fatty acids.

Once the MCTs reach the liver they are converted into energy and other metabolites. These metabolites include ketone bodies, which can be used by the brain and heart as an immediate form of energy. The MCTs in coconut oil can also increase your feeling of fullness for a longer period of time.

Related: 35 Things You Could Do With Coconut Oil – From Body Care to Health to Household

Erythritol — The Safest Sugar Alternative?

Erythritol is considered by many to be the safest low-calorie sweetener. It is a sugar alcohol that is less sweet than sugar (70% as sweet as sugar), so it will not stimulate your appetite as much as sweeteners like sucralose (these artificial sweeteners do far more harm than good). There is debate amongst the natural health community, and within this magazine, as to whether or not stevia is a safer choice for most, or if erythritol is a better option. It likely depends on how you use them and your own gut health.

Studies have shown erythritol can cause nausea and stomach discomfort. These side effects were only found in people that consumed 50 grams of erythritol in one sitting.

To give you some context, 50 grams (about 4 tablespoons) of erythritol has the same sweetness as about 40 grams (3 and 1/3 tablespoons) of sugar. This is 16 more grams of sugar than you will find in a typical 1.55 ounce “Sugar Milk Bar with Chocolate Added”. One to two tablespoons of erythritol should be more than enough to make your homemade chocolate more palatable without getting any side effects.

But this doesn’t mean that you should buy any sugar alcohol or any form of erythritol and assume that it will be safe. Other sugar alcohols like xylitol tend to cause more side effects at lower doses than erythritol, and erythritol is commonly made from GMO cornstarch. If you don’t want a dose of negative side effects, GMOs, or pesticides with your sweetener than it is best to use non-GMO erythritol.

I like to use a small amount of erythritol, a tiny bit of stevia, and some raw honey for sweetening. I also like to mix the chocolate with the carob which has a natural sweetness to it. I don’t like it very sweet, and I like to throw in ginger, cayenne, cinnamon, and/or other herbs that can help keep the gut balanced. I like my chocolate to have quite a bit of kick to it, just like my smoothies. Be careful and patient with the honey. It’s even easier to cook the benefits out of honey than it is with chocolate. I don’t think erythritol is particularly good for you, and while raw honey has plenty of health benefits, for good health it should be eaten in very small quantities. I find the mix of the three works well for my tastebuds and my body.” – Michael Edwards

The Importance of Raw Organic Cacao Powder

Even if you don’t like the taste of chocolate, you may want to consume cacao powder as a way to reap all of the benefits that we talked about earlier in the article.

To ensure that you get all of the health benefits of cacao, it is best to buy raw organic cacao powder. Quality cacao powder is important because most cacao powders (and the cacao used to make chocolate) are processed with heat and alkali, which destroys cacao’s health-promoting antioxidants.

But what do you do if you want to keep caffeine and chocolate out of your diet?

The Many Benefits of Carob-based Chocolate

Although this article praises the medicinal properties of cacao, this doesn’t mean that you are missing out if you don’t eat it. In fact, carob powder may have even more health benefits than cacao powder. For example, carob powder is most well-known for its anti-diarrhea effects, but that is not all this delicious powder has to offer.

Like cacao powder, carob powder contains many flavonoids. One of the flavonoids it contains is quercetin, which is known to reduce allergy symptoms, prevent heart disease (like cacao’s flavonoids do), and protect against cancer. Carob powder also contains a compound called gallic acid which is known to scavenge free radicals and kill cancer cells.

If you compare these benefits with cacao powder, carob powder looks like it could be the winner here. After weeks of experimenting with using carob powder in smoothies and other recipes (that I usually put cacao powder in), I completely agree. Healthy dark chocolate tends to over-stimulate me, but when I use carob powder instead, I feel more satiated and energetically balanced.

Recommended Reading:

• The Case for Carob – This Chocolate Alternative Has A Lot to Offer
• One More Reason to Love Chocolate (Recipe Included)
• 35 Things You Could Do With Coconut Oil – From Body Care to Health to Household
• Is Caffeine Making You Fat?

Sources:

• Artificial Sweeteners — Harvard
• Critical review of the current literature on the safety of sucralose — Science Direct
• Toxicology of Rebaudioside A: A Review — UCLA
• Baking and Cooking With Sugar Substitutes — Diabetes Self-Management
• Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana) a bio-sweetener: a review. — Europe PMC
• Erythritol – Like Sugar Without The Calories — Authority Nutrition
• Gastrointestinal tolerance of erythritol and xylitol ingested in a liquid — Nature
• Serum glucose and insulin levels and erythritol balance after oral administration of erythritol in healthy subjects. — NCBI
• Digestion and absorption of fats — University of Washington
• The Properties of Lauric Acid and Their Significance in Coconut Oil — Springer Link
• Effects of medium-chain triglycerides on weight loss and body composition: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. — NCBI
• MCT Oil 101 – A Review of Medium-Chain Triglycerides — Authority Nutrition
• Chemistry and Biological Activities of Flavonoids: An Overview — Hindawi
• Health Benefits of Methylxanthines in Cacao and Chocolate — MDPI
• Daily cocoa intake reduces the susceptibility of low-density lipoprotein to oxidation as demonstrated in healthy human volunteers — Taylor & Francis Online
• Impact of alkalization on the antioxidant and flavanol content of commercial cocoa powders. — NCBI
• Isolation and structure elucidation of the major individual polyphenols in carob fibre — Science Direct
• Dark Chocolate — University of Michigan
• Human electroencephalographic (EEG) response to olfactory stimulation: Two experiments using the aroma of food — Science Direct
• Carob Powder: 9 Nutrition Facts and Health Benefits — Healthline
• Quercetin — University of Maryland

Women are the gatekeepers of the next generation. Their bodies handle dietary changes differently than men. For example, women tend to be more sensitive to the stresses of their environment as a way to ensure that a baby isn’t brought into an environment that it cannot live in.

This is why it is important for women to pay attention to their menstrual cycles, especially when they make lifestyle changes like eating less or exercising more.  If the changes a woman makes are too stressful for her body, then menses are likely to shut down. When this happens, the body is focusing on self-preservation rather than diverting resources to maintain fertility. Maintaining fertility and making a baby are extremely energetically expensive for women, and raising children in a stress-filled, food-scarce environment is going to be too risky for the life of the mother and her child.

Much of the research, however, doesn’t consider the differences between men and women, especially the effects that dietary changes have on the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and child rearing. One specific diet that is gaining attention from many health practitioners and researchers is the low-carbohydrate diet. This diet requires you to limit or eliminate all high carbohydrate foods like grains, legumes, fruits, breads, sweets, pastas, and starchy vegetables from the diet. The goal is to stay below 130 grams of carbohydrates per day to shift the body into fat, burning more fat for fuel and reap all of the benefits that come with it, but does this apply to women as well?

The Most Common Causes of Stress that are Under Your Control

We already know that excess stress will cause fertility issues, but where does the stress come from? Stress can come from the environment, the food you eat, the thoughts you think, your relationships, and the things you do, but in this article, we will focus on a few common stressors that we have control over:

• excess exercise
• chronic emotional stress
• not eating enough calories
• restricting carbs

Each one of these factors can cause an unnecessary amount of stress that tells the brain that the environment is not safe to reproduce in. Reproductive function is then shut down, and the menstrual cycle becomes irregular or may even stop completely.

Becoming Regular Again

In American society, it can be difficult to feel at peace with yourself. Emotional triggers are lurking around every corner and the overly-simplistic health advice to exercise more and eat less has led many down a path of hormonal problems and other health issues. This is the unfortunate state of reality for many women, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t be healthy and happy regardless of what comes your way.

The path to taking back your health starts by listening to your body. An irregular or “heavy” menstrual cycle should be taken as a sign that something is off, and if your cycle stops completely, it is time to take note of what has changed in your life that could causing the stress instead of looking for ill-advised health advice.

Here are some simple ways to mitigate the stressors that may be causing fertility issues:

• Make sure you are eating enough so that you are full for at least 3 hours after the meal
• Exercise in a way that energizes you rather than destroys you
• Use meditation, breathing techniques, and cognitive behavioral therapy to relieve emotional stress
• Try stress-relieving herbal remedies

These suggestions, however, do not address one of the most sneaky causes of fertility issues in women — carbohydrate restriction.

The Menstrual Cycle on a Low-Carbohydrate Diet

Low blood sugar — which can be caused by the restriction of carbohydrates — will create a stress response in the body, and women tend to be much more sensitive to these shortages of energy. This is because women’s fertility depends on thyroid function and thyroid function relies on insulin (a blood sugar-lowering hormone) and glycogen (the storage form of sugar that is found in muscles and the liver).

On a low-carbohydrate diet, our insulin and glycogen levels will decline, which will slow down our thyroid hormone production. Impaired thyroid function will cause the hormones that start and maintain the menstrual cycle to decrease as well. If carbohydrates are restricted and thyroid function is poor, it can lead to amenorrhea, which is the term for when a woman has no menstrual cycle for 3 or more months.

Low-carbohydrate diets also cause lower leptin levels. Leptin is a hormone produced by fat cells that regulates appetite in men and women. Studies that were done on women, however, suggest that low levels of leptin can also cause irregular menstruation.

How often low-carbohydrate diets actually cause menstrual problems is unclear. One study, in particular, had 20 teenage girls eat a ketogenic diet (the lowest of low-carbohydrate diets) for 6 months. During this study, 45% of the girls experienced menstrual problems and 6 of them experienced amenorrhea. This suggests that menstrual irregularities may not be so irregular for women on a low-carbohydrate diet.

If your diet is causing menstrual cycle irregularities then it is best to increase carbohydrate intake until the menstrual cycle is back to normal. Experts suggest that women should consume around 75 to 150 grams of carbohydrates per day — an amount that may still be low enough to get all of the benefits of a low-carbohydrate diet.

What About Low-Carbohydrate Diets During Pregnancy?

After understanding how important carbohydrates are in keeping a woman’s menstrual cycle normal, it is reasonable to think that restricting carbohydrates during pregnancy will cause issues as well. Studies suggest that this theory is true.

One study concluded that a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet during late pregnancy may program the child to have higher than normal levels of cortisol throughout his or her life. This can lead to a greater incidence of depression, disease, and obesity. Another important finding from this study is that meat consumption consisting of around one pound of red meat per day during pregnancy can also cause health issues for the child. Other studies that were done on pregnant mice found that the ketogenic diet created many organ irregularities like a smaller brain and larger heart. It is uncertain if this effect will carry over to humans, but it is probably best not to try and find out.

Although the literature is scarce when it comes to the effects of low-carbohydrate diets on pregnancy, it is a good idea for pregnant women to increase their carbohydrate intake during pregnancy. The Institute of Medicine recommends a minimum of 175 grams of carbohydrates per day during pregnancy.

The Take-Away for Women

In general, stress causes menstrual cycle irregularities, which is a sign of infertility. Emotional stress, over-exercising, calorie restriction, and carbohydrate restriction are the common causes of menstrual cycle irregularities that we have the most control over. Eating meals that leave you feeling full and fulfilled for hours, exercising in ways that leave you feeling energized, and mitigating stress with meditation, breathing, cognitive behavioral therapy, and adaptogenic herbs should get your menstrual cycle back on track. If these suggestions don’t work, however, you may find the cure in increasing your carbohydrates. (This not an excuse to eat more processed junk food.)

If carbohydrate consumption is too low then it will cause hormonal changes that lead to menstrual cycle irregularities. This is why it is important for women to eat enough carbohydrates to ensure a normal menstrual cycle (75 to 150 grams of carbohydrate per day). A pregnant woman and her child may benefit from a slightly higher carbohydrate intake than normal. A minimum carbohydrate consumption of 175 grams per day is suggested for healthy child development during pregnancy.

But before closing this article and grabbing the nearest starchy snack, it is important to know where you should get your carbohydrates from. If you source your carbohydrates from processed foods like candy, cookies, and potato chips, then you will cause even more stress to your body in another way that will lead to health problems other than infertility. It is important to get your carbohydrates from high-quality whole food sources. For example, your main source of carbohydrates should be from starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes, peas, or squash and (soaked and sprouted) legumes like black beans and lentils. Fruit is also a good source of carbohydrates, but it is best to limit fruit consumption.

This article is meant to serve as a guideline that can point you in the right direction if you are confused. Some women will be able to eat a ketogenic diet without problems, while others can’t go below 15o grams of grams of carbohydrates without having issues with their thyroid gland and menstrual cycle. In general, you will be healthy, fertile, and lose weight if you increase your intake of non-starchy vegetables and herbs, decrease your consumption of high carbohydrate and low fiber foods like fruit juices and sweets, and mitigate other forms of stress by using meditation and breathing techniques.

Recommended Reading:

• Galactagogues Foods, Herbs, and other Ways to Increase Breast Milk Production
• New Study Suggests Women Could, and Maybe Should, Eat While In Labor
• Shaken Baby Syndrome – Child Abuse or Vaccine Injury?
• Considering Home Birth
• SIDS and SUID

Sources:

• Do Very Low-Carb Diets Mess Up Some Women’s Hormones? — Authority Nutrition
• Effects of a ketogenic diet during pregnancy on embryonic growth in the mouse — NCBI
• Dietary Reference Intakes: Macronutrients— National Academies
• Maternal consumption of a high-meat, low-carbohydrate diet in late pregnancy: relation to adult cortisol concentrations in the offspring — NCBI
• Is a Low-Carb Diet Ruining Your Health? — Chris Kresser
• Roles of ghrelin and leptin in the control of reproductive function. — NCBI
• Functional hypothalamic amenorrhea and its influence on women’s health — NCBI
• Hypercortisolemia and Depression — Research Gate
• Effects of Physiological Hypercortisolemia on the Regulation of Lipolysis in Subcutaneous Adipose Tissue — JCEM
• Hypercortisolemia and Infection — Infectious Disease Clinics
• What causes amenorrhea? — NIH

If orange is the new black, then low-carb is the new low-fat. The hysteria about fat and how it “clogs” your arteries has died off and a new fad has taken its place — low-carbohydrate diets. This fad, on the other hand, has sufficient evidence to back it up.

The scientific literature on low-carbohydrate diets is seemingly endless and highly conclusive. Studies comparing low-fat diets to low-carbohydrate diets have even shown that low-carbohydrate diets pose no greater risk to cardiovascular disease than low-fat diets. Low-carbohydrate diets have also been found to be a healthy diet option for most people, especially those who:

• are overweight or obese
• are sedentary
• have epilepsy
• have certain forms of cancer
• have cardiovascular disease
• have polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), fibroids or endometriosis
• have been diagnosed with type 1 or type 2 diabetes
• have a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s

A typical low-carbohydrate diet limits the daily intake of carbohydrates to between 60 and 130 grams. This is done by excluding or limiting most grains, legumes, fruits, breads, sweets, pastas and starchy vegetables from the diet and replacing them with meat, poultry, fish, eggs, non-starchy vegetables, nuts, and seeds. When we eat in this way, our bodies begin to change dramatically — especially for those who habitually eat plenty of carbohydrates with each meal.

Why is it so Good for You?

Before you ditch carbohydrates to follow this fad, it is important to consider why so much good can come out of following a low-carbohydrate diet. The most important thing that these diets do is restrict your sugar intake tremendously. The modern diet is inundated with sugar, and many experts agree that this is making us sick more than any other factor. As the national consumption of sugar continues to increase, most consumers have no idea how much sugar they’re getting on a daily basis. For most people, as soon as they start a low-carbohydrate diet their health improves tremendously just by cutting out all the excess sugar.

For example, two pieces of bread on a sandwich will have around 30 grams of refined carbohydrates, that small bag of potato chips has around 15 grams, and if you have a cup of “healthy” fruit juice with that, you will have over 75 grams of processed carbohydrates in one meal. This causes an unhealthy, unnatural spike in blood sugar that stimulates fat gain and inflammation. If you eat processed carbohydrates and starchy foods like this at every meal (most Americans do) then your body will be in a state of chronic inflammation, which leads to more fat gain and disease. On top of all that, excess sugar creates the perfect environment for fungus, parasites, and pathogenic bacteria to thrive and further deteriorate your health.

On the other hand, if you give yourself the simple rule of staying below 130 grams of carbohydrates per day, you will eat less high carbohydrate foods and have a higher chance of eating healthier lower carbohydrate and high fiber foods like leafy greens and other vegetables. To put it simply, the secret behind the success of low-carbohydrate diets is in the shift from eating refined foods to eating more plant foods. This is because vegetables and other plant foods have vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other components like flavonoids that promote the health of our cells. In fact, vegetables help us deal with higher carbohydrate meals by reducing blood sugar spikes, lowering inflammation, and helping the cells use the excess carbohydrates as fuel. This is why demonizing carbohydrates is short-sighted. It is important to look at why things work rather than just following the propaganda of another diet fad.

Related: Healthy Alternative Sugars and More

What many low-carbohydrate aficionados won’t tell you, however, is that not all of the changes experienced on a low-carbohydrate diet are going to be positive. When carbohydrates are restricted, it is stressful for the body because you are forcing it to find another way to fuel itself. This can cause side effects, like nausea and headaches, that are commonly called the “keto flu”. The lack of carbohydrates will also lead to fluid and mineral loss and hormonal changes that can cause health issues if the diet is not implemented correctly.

Must Read: What Causes Chronic Inflammation, and How To Stop It For Good

Fewer Carbohydrates Means More Stress

When you first start a low-carbohydrate diet, your body will look for more sugar to burn for fuel. Without getting enough carbohydrates from food, your blood sugar levels decrease and your body responds by increasing its cortisol levels.

Cortisol is a glucocorticoid hormone that is released by your adrenal glands to ensure you have enough energy to survive when food is scarce. When you have low blood sugar levels, your brain sends a signal to your adrenal glands to release cortisol. The cortisol binds to cells throughout your body to stimulate a process called gluconeogenesis, which is what your body uses to convert protein and fat into sugar for fuel.

Eventually, the body will adapt by burning fat for fuel instead of protein — a process called ketosis. The body uses ketosis to preserve muscle mass and glycogen (the body’s sugar stores) during times of carbohydrate and/or protein restriction. It will, however,  take a couple of days for your to body enter ketosis, which will leave you feeling stressed, fatigued, and weak in the mean time.

After learning about this, low-carbohydrate diets start to lose their appeal because of the stressful burden they put on the body. Yet, research doesn’t back up this belief. One specific study found that cortisol increase on a ketogenic diet (the lowest of low-carbohydrate diets) was insignificant when compared to the cortisol levels of people on a moderate and high-carbohydrate diet.

Related: Understanding Stress, Chronic Stress, and Adrenal Fatigue

Another concern with low-carbohydrate diets is that they may cause a buildup of excess ammonia in the body that is caused by burning protein for fuel. Theoretically, this ammonia buildup will lead to kidney and brain damage, however, in case studies done on patients with genetic defects that reduced their ability to process ammonia, the ketogenic diet was well tolerated and still effective. Other studies were done on healthy individuals who were on the ketogenic diet for 6 months or less, and there was no evidence of kidney damage.

It is also important to understand the effects that cortisol has on your mineral levels. When cortisol is released (like it is during carbohydrate restriction), it prevents cells from releasing sodium and increases the rate of potassium excretion. This can lead to constipation, fatigue, and weakness — three of the most common side effects caused by a low-carbohydrate diet (and chronic stress in general). The small increase in cortisol release, however, is not solely responsible for the increased mineral and water needs that people have on a low-carbohydrate diet.

How Low-Carbohydrate Diets Cause Mineral Loss and Fluid Loss

Low-carbohydrate diets act as a diuretic in many ways that are much more potent than the effects that cortisol have on potassium levels. This is why studies address dehydration as the most common early-onset complication of a ketogenic diet. Let’s explore why this is the case by learning about the two powerful mechanisms that give low-carbohydrate diets their diuretic effect.

Insulin and Sodium are Intimately Linked

Insulin is a hormone that lowers our blood sugar when it is too high. Its main job is to get the sugar into cells before it causes problems. Insulin also acts on the kidney to promote sodium reabsorption.

Insulin levels tend to be much lower in people who are on low-carbohydrate diets, which is part of the reason why low-carbohydrate diets are beneficial for people with diabetes and obesity. Unfortunately, this is also the reason why low-carbohydrate diets have a strong diuretic effect. The lower levels of insulin lead to more sodium loss. The sodium will then draw more fluid into the kidney for excretion. This is unlikely to lead to low levels of sodium, especially if you have salt on your food. But if you have symptoms like nausea, headaches, confusion, and fatigue that aren’t going away after restricting carbohydrates, it is best to increase your unrefined salt and water intake.

The Relationship Between Water, Glycogen, and Ketones

Humans are designed to handle short periods of starvation with some assistance from liver and muscle glycogen — the storage form of sugar in the body. Once we start a low-carbohydrate diet, our body tends to rely on glycogen for energy. For each gram of glycogen used, twice this amount is lost in the water. This is because glycogen (as well as all other carbohydrates) retain and attract water.

Related: Intermittent Fasting: The Best Breakfast May Be Eating Nothing At All

Once the body is in ketosis, it is finally able to spare glycogen, but the water loss still continues. This is because the ketones that are created from burning fat will attract more water to the kidneys for excretion.

When you are on a low-carbohydrate diet, you will have lower insulin and glycogen levels and higher ketone levels. This will cause your body to retain much less water and fewer minerals than it did before. This is why it is essential to maintain adequate fluid and mineral intake, especially in the beginning of a low-carbohydrate diet.

Fluid and mineral loss, however, are not the only things to consider when you restrict carbohydrates. When the body finally adapts to a low-carbohydrate diet, many changes occur that can lead to unexpected side effects.

The Longterm Problems Caused by Low-Carbohydrate Diets: Carbon Dioxide and Thyroid Function

Dehydration and mineral depletion are the main culprits for the short-term side effects that are common with low-carbohydrate diets. With some extra water, salt, mineral supplementation, and vegetable intake, these side effects are likely to disappear. After your body adapts to carbohydrate restriction, however, other changes will arise that may cause issues.

Ketosis and Low Carbon Dioxide Levels

When we burn fat as our primary source of fuel, carbon dioxide levels in the body drop. One study confirms this fact of biochemistry by finding that ketogenic diets led to a significant reduction in carbon dioxide output compared to a Mediterranean diet. The researchers even suggest the ketogenic diet as a potential treatment for respiratory issues like Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Yet this doesn’t mean that lowering carbon dioxide levels is a good thing for everyone. Carbon dioxide is essential for maintaining health — it isn’t a waste product.

Carbon dioxide helps us use oxygen more efficiently, dilate blood vessels, and protect cells from damage. It also aids vitamin K in helping us with blood clotting, bone and teeth mineralization, growth, energy utilization, and hormonal health. Does this mean that only people with respiratory issues should be on a low-carbohydrate diet?

After looking through the research, it’s easy to find a clear answer — at least for the short-term. No studies on low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diets reported any complications related to lower carbon dioxide levels. This is due to the fact that the body has a powerful buffer system that keeps your blood pH and carbon dioxide at healthy levels. The long term effect of having slightly lower than normal carbon dioxide levels, however, is not known.

To find out if having lower carbon dioxide levels will cause problems in the long term, we can look to the biochemistry to find clues. Without sufficient carbon dioxide to dilate blood vessels, we rely on nitric oxide, which can inhibit enzymes necessary from energy production. In the long-term, this may contribute to the metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity that low-carbohydrate diets are used to fix. The decrease in carbon dioxide levels may also lead to more inflammation and disease in the long-term, due to the decrease in protection and vitamin K activation.

If having lower levels of carbon dioxide concern you then breathe into a paper bag — seriously. By breathing into a paper bag for one to two minutes you will increase your carbon dioxide levels. This was actually shown to promote blood flow through the tiny blood vessels of the retina, so it is likely to cause positive changes throughout your body as well.

Even if you don’t feel comfortable breathing into a paper bag, your body still has the ability to adapt to having lower carbon dioxide levels especially if you take slow gentle breaths in and out your nose throughout the day. The type of food you eat also can shift your oxygen and carbon dioxide levels slightly. For example, you may notice that you can breathe easier after eating a healthy salad than after eating a burger with fries.

If you do experience negative side effects from restricting carbohydrates, however, it will most likely be caused by dehydration and mineral loss. Occasionally, the side effects can persist due to the impact that low-carbohydrate diets have on thyroid health.

Low-Carbohydrate Diets and Thyroid Health

Carbohydrates, carbon dioxide, and thyroid function are intimately connected. When there are adequate levels of glucose and glycogen in our liver, the production of T3, a thyroid hormone, increases. When T3 is released, it stimulates development, growth, metabolism of almost every cell of the body.

When there are lower levels of glycogen and sugar in the liver, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol are secreted from the adrenal glands to regulate heart rate, body temperature, and mobilize energy instead of thyroid hormone. If this becomes the primary strategy for energy production, it will lead to muscle loss, impaired brain function, and excess organ stress.

To prevent your thyroid from crashing on a low-carbohydrate diet, it is important to consume enough calories from fat and protein. This will give your body enough fuel so that it can spare its glycogen, maintain thyroid function, and save you from unnecessary stress. If you are still feeling sluggish and tired after eating plenty of fat and protein, it is best to increase your carbohydrate intake by having black beans, sweet potatoes, or other starchy whole foods with your dinner.

Must Read: Hypothyroidism – Natural Remedies, Causes, and How To Heal the Thyroid

The Take-Away

In the same way that we have adapted to a diet that has carbohydrates, our bodies have the ability to thrive when carbohydrates are restricted as well. The body can use carbohydrates, proteins, and fat for fuel depending on what is available to it, but it is important to realize that each source of fuel creates different effects in the body. By understanding these effects and what is behind them, you can find a diet that works for you at this particular time in your life.

Low-carbohydrate diets cause you to lose vital minerals and fluids, which can lead to fatigue, weakness, headaches, dehydration, constipation, and diarrhea. This is why it is important to increase your water, salt, and mineral intake when you are on a low-carbohydrate diet.

Long-term side-effects are much rarer, but you may still experience fatigue and weakness that aren’t linked to mineral loss or dehydration. If this is the case then it is important to check your thyroid function, eat more vegetables, and have some starchy plant foods with dinner.

In general, you will experience little to no side effects if you have enough fat, protein, salt, water, fiber, vitamins, and minerals in your diet. The simplest way to do this is by eating plenty of non-starchy vegetables— like leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables, a moderate amount animal products from animals that live a healthy life on an organic pasture, and only raw and minimally processed whole foods. In fact, if you follow these rules, you won’t even have to count carbohydrates.

Recommend Reading:

• Gluten, Candida, Leaky Gut Syndrome, and Autoimmune Diseases
• Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included
• How to Detoxify and Heal the Lymphatic System
• Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones
• How to Cure Lyme Disease and Virtually Any Other Bacterial Infection, Naturally

Sources:

• Dietary Intervention for Overweight and Obese Adults: Comparison of Low-Carbohydrate and Low-Fat Diets. A Meta-Analysis — PLOS
• Low-carb diet: Can it help you lose weight? — Mayo Clinic
• Is a Low-Carb Diet Ruining Your Health? — Chris Kresser
• The Dangers of Fat Metabolism and PUFA: Why You Don’t Want to be a Fat Burner — Journal of Evolution and Health
• Insulin’s impact on renal sodium transport and blood pressure in health, obesity, and diabetes — American Journal of Physiology
• Metabolic characteristics of keto-adapted ultra-endurance runners — Metabolism
• Long-term effects of a ketogenic diet in obese patients — NCBI
• Long-term effects of ketogenic diet in obese subjects with high cholesterol level. — NCBI
• The Effects of a Ketogenic Diet on Exercise Metabolism and Physical Performance in Off-Road Cyclists — NCBI
• The Ketogenic Diet: An Effective Medical Therapy With Side Effects — Sage Journals
• The Physiology of Stress: Cortisol and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis — Dartmouth
• The Ketogenic Diet Is Well Tolerated and Can Be Effective in Patients with Argininosuccinate Lyase Deficiency and Refractory Epilepsy — NCBI
• Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance — JAMA
• Low potassium (hypokalemia) — Mayo Clinic
• High fat, low carbohydrate, enteral feeding lowers PaCO2 and reduces the period of ventilation in artificially ventilated patients. — NCBI
• Rebreathing into a bag increases human retinal macular blood velocity. — BMJ
• THE RELATION BETWEEN GLYCOGEN AND WATER STORAGE IN THE LIVER — JBC
• Protection of Acid–Base Balance by pH Regulation of Acid Production — The New England Journal of Medicine
• Effects of Twenty Days of the Ketogenic Diet on Metabolic and Respiratory Parameters in Healthy Subjects — Springer Link
• Effect of Ketosis on Respiratory Sensitivity to Carbon Dioxide in Obesity — The New England Journal of Medicine
• Effects of Twenty Days of the Ketogenic Diet on Metabolic and Respiratory Parameters in Healthy Subjects. — NCBI
• Food for Thought: The Ketogenic Diet and Adverse Effects in Children — NCBI
• The metabolic effects of low-carbohydrate diets and incorporation into a biochemistry course — Wiley Online Library
• Beyond weight loss: a review of the therapeutic uses of very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diets — Nature
• Long-term effects of a very-low-carbohydrate weight-loss diet and an isocaloric low-fat diet on bone health in obese adults — Nutrition
• Weight and Metabolic Outcomes After 2 Years on a Low-Carbohydrate Versus Low-Fat Diet: A Randomized Trial — Annals of Internal Medicine
• The mechanism of anti-osteoporosis effects of 3-hydroxybutyrate and derivatives under simulated microgravity. — NCBI
• Progressive bone mineral content loss in children with intractable epilepsy treated with the ketogenic diet. — NCBI
• HUMAN HEALTH RISK ASSESSMENT OF CO2: SURVIVORS OF ACUTE HIGH-LEVEL EXPOSURE AND POPULATIONS SENSITIVE TO PROLONGED LOW-LEVEL EXPOSURE— NETL
• Effect of supplementing a high-fat, low-carbohydrate enteral formula in COPD patients. — NCBI
• The ketogenic diet: adolescents can do it, too. — NCBI
• Mechanisms of Ketogenic Diet Action — NCBI
• Low-Carb Side Effects & How to Cure Them — Diet Doctor
• Mechanism of Action and Physiologic Effects of Thyroid Hormones — Colorado State University
• Roles of ghrelin and leptin in the control of reproductive function. — NCBI
• Functional hypothalamic amenorrhea and its influence on women’s health — NCBI
• Hypercortisolemia and Depression — Research Gate
• Effects of Physiological Hypercortisolemia on the Regulation of Lipolysis in Subcutaneous Adipose Tissue — JCEM
• Hypercortisolemia and Infection — Infectious Disease Clinics
• The effects of a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet on the polycystic ovary syndrome: A pilot study — NCBI
• Effect of a low-carbohydrate diet on appetite, blood glucose levels, and insulin resistance in obese patients with type 2 diabetes. — NCBI
• Effects of Low-Carbohydrate vs Low-Fat Diets on Weight Loss and Cardiovascular Risk Factors — JAMA
• Nitric Oxide Can Alter Brain Function — Science Daily
  

What are you thinking about?

Me? Oh, I’m just thinking about what to write next (and how meta this sentence is). Meanwhile, you are wondering where this article could possibly be going.

Those thoughts happened spontaneously — painting the crowded canvas of our reality with meaning — only to be replaced by another thought in the next moment. But how does this happen and why is it happening?

During this article, we will co-pilot your brain together to explore your cognition and answer the intriguing question — what, how, and why do we think? With a deeper understanding of your cognition — a term we use to describe the range of mental processes relating to the acquisition, storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information — you will be able to make yourself healthier, happier, and wiser.

What Are We Thinking

What we think is easy enough to describe. If I tell you to think of candy, you use your cognitive abilities to retrieve the information related to the term “candy.” You are overcome by thoughts, feelings, and memories that are related to your past experiences with candy (the taste, the feeling, your favorite kind of candy, etc.). This process was made possible by cognitive abilities you used in the past to acquire and store information, and you probably didn’t notice that this process took place until something triggered the memory of that past experience.

Now, as you think about candy, your memories may seem completely accurate, but you are, in reality, manipulating the information in your mind based on many unconscious and conscious factors. You are probably thinking about what it tastes like and looks like, but you are likely to forget about how much it costs, what is written on the package, and the promise you made to yourself about eating “healthy.” This is a perfect example of your cognitive ability to retrieve information and manipulate that information, and it happens every time you remember something.

In the split second after you read the word “candy,” you experienced every facet of cognition unconsciously, but as I took you through your cognitive processes you were able to experience it consciously. By making our cognitive processes conscious and understanding what affects cognition, we can harness its power to relieve suffering and better our lives in every way. But before we do, we must first develop a more intimate relationship with the most powerful tool we have — our brains.

How Are We Thinking

In your brain, you will find about 100 billion nerve cells called neurons. Each neuron consists of a cell body and branch-like projections (one axon and multiple dendrites) that send and receive messages from other neurons.

Neurons send messages by transmitting electrical impulses across tiny gaps called synapses. These messages and the pathways that are formed between neurons are the physical components of your cognition.

In our first three years of life, our brain has up to twice as many synapses (think neural connections) as it will have in adulthood. These synapses help accelerate our learning by forming neural networks so that we can adapt to our environment as quickly as possible. Our genetics provide the basic blueprint for our synaptic connections, but our environment and how we adapt to it ultimately determine the neural connections in the brain. For example, when I mentioned the word “candy,” your neural connections that are related to the term “candy” fired together and created the experience of a past memory, thought, and feeling. But If you have never heard of candy before, your brain will try to find what it means by using contextual clues. For example, you read earlier that candy has a taste, so that must imply that candy is a certain type of food, right? There is no relevant experience of candy stored in your brain, so it tries to construct one from the context it is given. Once you have a candy bar, however, that experience is stored as neural pathway in the brain. That new neural pathway may be triggered to fire the next time someone mentions candy, which provides you with a little taste of the pleasure or pain you experienced the last time you had a piece.

This example explains the “what” behind the formation of our cognitive abilities. Neurons wire together and form intricate connections and fire together to convey a thought, feeling, and/or memory, but why does this happen?

Why Do We Think So Much?

Although the purpose of cognition is a complex topic that is hotly debated, let’s keep it simple. Cognition is necessary for our survival. The ability to acquire, store, manipulate, and retrieve information allows us to adapt to the environment we live in.

Most animals have these cognitive abilities, but consciously manipulating cognition may be an ability unique to humans. This statement, however, may not be true. Some neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, argue that the freewill we think we have over our cognition is just an illusion. Much of what we think, feel, and do is dictated unconsciously by our genetics, our past experiences, and our environment in such a way that it makes us the victim of our brain rather than the victor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmO5uwzFg0M

On the other hand,  a group of researchers conducted four experiments that may provide evidence against Sam Harris’s contention. These researchers found that we can consciously control the way unconscious stimuli affects our behavior. This means that you can completely change your reaction to unconscious stimuli like what happens in your brain when you read the word  “candy.”

We can easily rewire our neural connections to create the feeling of disgust rather than excitement when we think of candy. We can also use the power of intention, along with nutrition and environmental changes, to enhance our cognition.

How to Enhance Your Cognition

Even if we don’t have freewill, we can still use our internal environment, external environment, and self-awareness to enhance our cognition and better our lives.

1. Change Your External Environment

Your environment has much more power over your brain than you think. Your brain is using your senses to pick up information from your environment every 13 milliseconds. This constant flow of information triggers specific thoughts, feelings, and reactions that you don’t notice until you experience the thought, feeling, or reaction. This suggests that one of the most powerful ways to better your cognition is by changing your environment.

When it comes to hacking your environment here’s a simple principle you can follow — make the things that you should do easier than the things you shouldn’t do.

Here’s an example from my life. To make sure that I don’t eat highly refined food, I never buy it. If my family buys refined foods that are tempting to eat, I will make it more difficult for me to eat them and easier to eat healthy food. To do this, I make the food I want to eat easily accessible and put it in places where I will not see any unhealthy options. This removes candy eating triggers from my environment, which reduces the chance that I will eat candy again.

Other ways to hack your environment are to use essential oils like rosemary, listen to music, and experience nature. The smell of rosemary essential oil has been found to increase alertness and quality of memory, so diffusing it in your workplace may help boost your cognitive performance. Music has potent effects on our brain as well. The effect of music is so potent that it is being used in the treatment of cognitive disorders like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers suggest that the positive effects of music include a calming effect due to the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Binaural auditory beats and apps like brain.fm may also help you improve focus and creativity.

Related: Understanding Essential Oils: A Complete Guide For Beginners

Another potent cognitive enhancer is nature. Studies have shown that simply looking at a picture of nature stimulates the vagus nerve, which improves mood and self-esteem and reduces blood pressure.

But what happens when we can’t change our environment? You’re not at home, you’ve run out of rosemary oil, the only sound you hear is a jackhammer from the construction workers on the street, and the closest tree is miles away. What can you do?

2. Develop Self-awareness

You can use self-awareness to thrive in any environment. Self-awareness is your conscious knowledge of your own character, feelings, motives, and desires. By developing self-awareness, you can become conscious of the feelings, motives, and desires that are stealing your cognition away from things that are more important.

To develop self-awareness, direct your focus with specific questions. Dr. Relly Nadler suggests asking yourself five simple questions:

• What am I thinking?
• What am I feeling?
• What do I want now?
• How am I getting in my way?
• What do I need to do differently now?

These questions will help you shift your focus and find a better way to act now and in the future. You can also use these questions to assess past experiences so that you can plan a new action for the future. Using the questions in this way can help you use your present cognition to enhance your future cognition.

The most popular way of developing self-awareness is through meditation. By simply sitting and focusing on your breath and nothing else for 10-30 minutes every day, you will train your brain to be less reactive, which reduces stress and enhances cognitive function.

Must Read: How To Be Happy

3. Change Your Internal Environment

You cannot out think poor nutrition. No matter how peaceful your brain and environment are, you will always have poor cognitive function if you aren’t healthy.

For example, if you eat candy and other refined foods every day, your body will be in a chronic state of inflammation as it tries to save your cells from oxidative damage due to free radicals and other oxidants found in the refined foods.

Eating more fruits and vegetables can increase cognitive function, especially cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and kale. When we chew cruciferous vegetables, a compound called sulforaphane is created. This compound is designed to protect the plant from small predators. In humans, it sets off a cascade of processes in the body that detoxify and protect the cells from oxidative damage. After the damage is healed, you can use Lion’s Mane mushroom extract to prevent the loss of cognitive function, while inducing nerve growth factor — a neuropeptide that maintains a healthy brain and grows nerve cells.

Related: Sulforaphane – Why Your Cells Need Cruciferous Vegetables

Supplementing with vitamin B1 and coconut oil also help boost cognitive function by ensuring that your neurons have sufficient energy. Coconut oil contains medium chain triglycerides, which provide an alternative fuel source for brain cells and may prevent neural cell death. Vitamin B1 helps your neurons use energy sources, like sugar, more efficiently. To prevent cognitive loss — especially if you have Alzheimer’s disease — it may be best to supplement with vitamin B3 and curcumin from turmeric. All of the other B vitamins also play an essential role in preventing the loss of cognitive function while improving general health as well, and for we recommend taking a B vitamin complex that has all of the Bs as opposed to just one or two B vitamins, which can throw your body out of balance.

But before you start adding these supplements to your shopping cart, it is important to note that the most effective methods of improving cognition are free.

Increasing your physical activity can improve brain volume and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 50% and learning a new skill forms new synaptic connections and prevents the loss of synaptic connections and brain volume as we age.

Related: How to Improve Brain Health and Reduce the Risk of Alzheimer’s

To take advantage of both of these benefits at once, go to a movement class, practice a sport, play a new sport, take up yoga. Your brain will thank you by being sharper and more efficient than it ever was before.

If you experience a rapid change in your behavior and/or notice no effect from making the changes suggested in this article, you may have something else going on. So it is important to consult your doctor and get the proper referral.

Putting It All Together

By changing your environment, developing self-awareness, and nourishing your inner environment with brain-boosting foods, you can enhance your cognition and live a life that consistently makes you happier, healthier, and wiser.

Related Reading:

• How to Increase your IQ with the Right Foods, Herbs, Vitamins
• How to breathe
• Mental Health, Physical Health & B Vitamins – Nature’s Valium
• The Fascinating Bacteria in our Gut, and How it Affects Our Whole Lives

Brain Supplements:

• Shillington’s Brain Tonic
• B Complex – Thorne Research
• Shillington’s Cayenne Tincture
• Krill Oil
• Omega-3 w/CoQ10 – Thorne Research

Sources:

• Neurons — Pub Med Health
  Baby’s Brain Begins Now: Conception to Age 3 — The Urban Child Institute:
  How Do We Think — Wonderpolis
• Conscious control over the content of unconscious cognition — Science Direct
  Music Therapy Enhancing Cognition — Alzheimer’s Association
  Man In Nursing Home Reacts To Hearing Music From His Era — Music & Memory
• The effects of views of nature on autonomic control. — NCBI
• What Was I Thinking? — Dr. Relly Nadler
•  COCONUT OIL: NON-ALTERNATIVE DRUG TREATMENT AGAINST ALZHEIMER´S DISEASE — Europe PMC
• B Vitamins and the Brain: Mechanisms, Dose and Efficacy—A Review — NCBI
• PILLAR 3: EXERCISE & BRAIN AEROBICS — ARPF
• Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation — Psychosomatic Medicine
• Binaural Auditory Beats Affect Vigilance Performance and Mood — Science Direct
• Music for the Brain — Brain.fm
• Compounds for dementia from Hericium erinaceum — Journals on the Web
• In the blink of an eye — MIT News

Healthy animals mean a healthy environment, right? What about concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)? These “factory farms” must be cancerous to the environment.

This all seems like common sense, but our common sense can sometimes lead us in the wrong direction.

Gassy Cows and Global Warming

Many studies point to the fact that the production of beef pollutes the atmosphere with more greenhouse gases than the production of any other food. This is because cows are ruminants — a type of animal that acquires nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting their food in a specialized stomach. Because of this fermentation process, cows burp, fart, pee, and poop persistently throughout the day, which adds more greenhouse gases — like methane gas and nitrous oxide — to the environment.

Although fluorinated gases that are commonly used as refrigerants and aerosol propellants are the most potent and longest lasting greenhouse gasses, methane gas and nitrous oxide still have a 25 and 300 times greater impact respectively on global warming than carbon dioxide. Cows and other ruminants also eat plenty of oxygen-producing, carbon-dioxide-absorbing plants.

The Case Against Raising Healthy and Happy Cows

At this point, you may be thinking that cows that live long and healthy lives on pasture are bad for the environment, and you are not alone. Dr. Bill Ripple is a prominent ecologist known for his work researching the roles of large carnivores in ecological systems around the world, and he agrees with you.

Ripple took his expertise to climate change and found that pastured cattle contributed two to four times more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than cows raised in CAFOs.

This isn’t even the worst of it. Cattle have also been found to destroy ecosystems with their grazing. In 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banished grazing cattle from a 278,000-acre refuge called Hart Mountain to try to restore the ecosystem that was presumably destroyed by grazing cattle. After two decades, trees, shrubs, and flowers flourished providing a beautiful environment for birds, antelopes, and other species to thrive.

This suggests that healthy and happy cows destroy the environment in multiple ways. They produce potent greenhouses gases with their inefficient digestive system and make it hard for ecosystems to thrive. But what do you do if you want to have a big juicy steak and stop global warming?

Bill Ripple’s findings suggest that you should get that steak from a sick and diseased cow that is confined to a jail cell and has a shorter lifespan. Or just give up steak all together and become a vegetarian or vegan. Problem solved!

Hold on, what about all of the cattle? Even if we don’t eat them they will still be grazing, burping, and farting. Should we — dare I say — kill them?

The Bigger Picture: Joel Salatin and Sustainable Farming Practices

The amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside.” – Joel Salatin

That’s a brief excerpt from Joel’s rebuttal to the assertion that sustainable grass-fed beef is bad for the environment.

Joel Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia — a farm that produces pasture-raised, beyond organic beef, pork, poultry, eggs, and rabbits.

In his rebuttal, Joel continues by explaining that “…wetlands emit some 95% of all methane in the world.” If you were to fact-check his statement you’d find it to be true, which suggests that if you are going to blame happy and healthy livestock for global warming, you should blame nature as well. Better yet, blame your trash, too — it should know by now not to produce methane gas.

But still, according to Dr. Ripples, findings at Hart Mountain, Salatin’s farm should be struggling to maintain lush green pastures. Although this may be true for other farms that Salatin claims are under “neanderthal management”, Polyface farms uses many different methods like rotational grazing to get the most out of the land while keeping it lush and fertile.

Regardless of what Joel Salatin says, CAFOs are still known to be a much more efficient use of land, and the animals they produce add much less greenhouse gas to the atmosphere due to their shorter lifespans.

Should we just give up on raising happy and healthy livestock?

CAFOs are a NONO

It is a fact that CAFO beef produces less greenhouse gas emissions than grass-fed beef, but this reductionist approach to climate change leaves out many other factors.

For example, animals raised in CAFOs are usually fed GMO soybean, GMO corn, and GMO grain feed. GMOs themselves may not be an issue for the animal (which is debatable), but these GMO crops are covered in pesticides. These pesticides contaminate the meat, the soil, and the water, while the synthetic fertilizers that are used contribute a substantial amount of nitrous oxide — the second most potent greenhouse gas — to the atmosphere.

These growing practices deplete the soil of its nutrients and mycorrhiza ( soil probiotics), which causes us to use more pesticides and fertilizers to yield the same amount of food. These poor farming practices contribute 75% of all the nitrous oxide found in the atmosphere.

The way that animal waste is handled in CAFOs is also a problem that contributes excess nitrous oxide and methane gas to the atmosphere. The manure and urine often accumulate into a “poo lagoon” that contaminates the soil and water with pesticide and antibiotic residues, methane, and nitrous oxide.

When we consider all of the evidence, both Bill Ripple and Joel Salatin are right. Pasture-raised cattle — without a doubt — produce more greenhouse gases than any other animal. But — at the same time — livestock can be raised in a way that is much better for the environment (as a whole) than CAFO-raised livestock.

The beyond organic farming practices that farms like Polyface and White Oak Pastures use are making it possible for this to happen — making it possible to have healthy meat, healthy humans, and a healthy environment at the same time.

Must Read: Understanding and Detoxifying Genetically Modified Foods

The Future of Food Production

Joel Salatin is ahead of his time when it comes to farming. He uses ingenious methods that work together with nature to create healthy meat and a healthy ecosystem.

For example, instead of letting the manure and urine sit in “poo lagoons” and contaminate the water, it is used as a natural soil fertilizer. The bugs and pests that are attracted to the manure and urine are then eaten by the chickens, who act as natural “pesticides”. This helps maintain the health of the soil and foliage while reducing the amount of methane gas and nitrous oxide that is released into the atmosphere. Joel also moves the animals to different pastures so they do not overgraze specific plots of land. By doing things in this way, he maximizes efficiency and maintains a healthy ecosystem.

As Joel Salatin’s methods — and the methods of many other farmers like Will Harris at White Oak Pastures — continue to evolve, we will be able to ensure a happy and healthy life for us, the animals, and the environment without the need for CAFOs and mono-cropping.

But we still didn’t figure out how to stop global warming, and the solution is not to keep cows from burping, farting, pooping, and peeing.

Related: Permaculture Agriculture – The Transition to a Sustainable Future

The Real Cause of Global Warming

Although this article focuses heavily on the effects that meat production has on the environment — here’s the punchline — agriculture (including livestock) only contributes 9% to the total greenhouse gas emissions.

This is why you can’t blame the cow for burping and farting so much — the problem is us.

We dug out fossil fuels that weren’t a part of the environment anymore and added them back to the atmosphere at such rapid rates that we are causing the planet to change just as rapidly. Even 7.5 billion cows burping and farting at the same time couldn’t do that.

The solution to global warming doesn’t solely rely on our meat consumption. Saving our planet requires a multi-faceted approach.

How To Stop Global Warming

It all starts with using less electricity and gas and using more energy from renewable resources. Rather than driving to the gym to get your exercise, combine exercise with other activities you will do anyway. To conserve electricity, use natural light or lights that are powered by a hand crank or the sun.

When it comes to food, buy the highest quality food that is as local as possible. High-quality, bio-dynamic, or beyond-organic foods are much better for your health and the health of the environment, and eating local ensures that less gas will be used to get the food to your house. But what about meat?

When it comes to eating meat, moderation is key. Meat — without a doubt — is packed with nutrition, but most of us consume much more meat than is necessary.

An NPR article from 2012 found that the United States had the second highest meat consumption in the world — consuming 270.7 pounds per person every year. This works out to 3/4 of a pound of meat per day. But how do we know how much meat is enough?

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — “…to effectively combat malnutrition and under-nourishment…” — they suggest consuming 20g of animal protein per person per day.

This means that eating around 1/4 pound of lean meat or fish or 3 eggs a day is just enough to prevent some vitamin and mineral deficiencies. It would be even better for the environment, however, to limit your consumption of beef and replace it with other animal proteins that have the lowest environmental impact like eggs, mussels, and oysters.

A Better Lifestyle for You and the Environment

Let’s make the complex topic of climate change simple. Here are some practical steps you can use to build a life that is healthy for you and the environment:

• Source all of your foods from local organic farms
• Combine your daily exercise with practical tasks to cut down on gas and electricity
• Get all of your fruits and vegetables from beyond organic and/or bio-dynamic farms
• Get all of your animal products from sustainable farms like Polyface or White Oak Pastures
• Limit your animal protein servings to a quarter pound of meat a day
• Eat most of your animal proteins from animals that have the lowest environmental impact like eggs, mussels, and oysters.
• Reuse, repurpose, and recycle as many food scraps as possible to limit the amount of methane produced by landfills. To find out how, read our article on how to reduce food waste.
• Limit your use of air conditioners (especially in cars) and aerosol sprays to reduce the amount of fluorinated gas that accumulates in the atmosphere.
• When cooking your food, follow the suggestions here, Does Meat Cause Cancer? Yes and No…

By making as many of these adjustments as we can, we will improve our health, animal health, and environmental health — so that we can clean up the mess that we created.

Recommended Reading:

• Is Wheat Poison? What’s Behind the Rise of Celiac Disease and Gluten Intolerance
• How to Cure Lyme Disease and Virtually Any Other Bacterial Infection, Naturally
• Textile Industry’s Health and Environmental Impacts – What Are You Wearing?
• Can Progressive, Cutting-edge Organic Agriculture Feed Everyone?
• My Journey into Organic Farming

Sources:

• Joel Salatin responds to New York Times’ ‘Myth of Sustainable Meat’ — Grist
• No, Grass-Fed Beef is Not Better for the Planet — Forks Over Knives
• Why Go Organic, Grass-Fed and Pasture-Raised? — EWG
• Meat Consumption — FAO
• Understanding Global Warming Potentials — EPA
• Overview of Greenhouse Gases — EPA
• Ruminants, climate change and climate policy — Climate & Clean Air Coalition
• A Nation Of Meat Eaters: See How It All Adds Up — NPR
• Meatifest destiny: How Big Meat is taking over the Midwest — Grist
• How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming? — Skeptical Science
• Main sources of fluorinated gas emissions — What’s Your Impact

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

If you don’t eat cereal for breakfast, you will be overcome by the greatest evil — masturbation.

Oh, and cereal will make you more efficient and productive, too.

These were the beliefs that started the commercialization of breakfast and breakfast cereals in the early 1900s. These ideas were proposed by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, an early Seventh-day Adventist and the inventor of corn flakes. With the help of his credentials, his brother’s mass-marketing of the corn flakes, and the magazine he edited called Good Health, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was able to popularize his idea that a “whole grain” breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Although most of us already know how bad cereal is for our health, the idea that breakfast is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle is still popular more than 100 years later. This has been confirmed by that fact that — in 2011 — 9 out of 10 people in the United States reported eating a daily morning meal. A plethora of scientific studies, on the other hand, support the 10% of Americans who skip breakfast and provide irrefutable evidence that breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. We can start to uncover the reasons why with a Nobel Prize.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut

How to Harness the Power of a Nobel Prize Winning Discovery

Last year, the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for discovering some of the mechanisms of autophagy or — in layman’s terms — how the cell devours itself. At first, this sounds like a horrendous discovery, until you consider what is really happening.

When our cells undergo the process of autophagy, damaged proteins are recycled and invading microorganisms and toxic compounds are removed. This means that autophagy plays an important role in stopping the aging process, reversing disease, and preventing cancer, but it doesn’t happen all the time. Fasting, protein restriction, and carbohydrate restriction are the three main ways that can initiate different autophagic processes — all of which are not the same. This is part of the reason why skipping meals like breakfast can be better for you than eating three or more meals throughout the day.

Enter Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is a fancy term that we use to describe the process of skipping meals. The most popular intermittent fasting strategy is fasting during a 16-hour window of time and eating two meals during the remaining 8 hours. Let’s say, for example, your last meal was at 6 pm last night, and you ate nothing else after that. To start an intermittent fast, simply restrict eating until 10 am the next morning.

There are many different variations of intermittent fasting. Dr. Dom D’Agostino, the well-known ketogenic diet researcher, suggests doing a longer intermittent fast for 3 days, 3 times a year. This means not eating for 3 days, and eating normally until the next fast.

Dr. D’Agostino also recommends daily intermittent fasts. He says that it is ideal to have one or two meals after fasting for most of the day to reap the benefits of intermittent fasting every day.

Clean Your (Cell’s) Room

Part of the reason why intermittent fasting promotes health is because you can use it to activate the processes of autophagy that are brought about by carbohydrate restriction, protein restriction, and fasting.

If this scientific jargon is throwing you off, think about what you do when your room is dirty. You may clean it in your spare time or have a set time on the weekend to clean it, but what happens when the weekend comes and you are busy with endless obligations? You spend so much of your time fixing the car, helping your mother and doing everything else you have to do that you have no time to clean your room. After a week without cleaning, your room is just a bit dirtier than usual, but after a month of being too busy to clean, your room is filthy. Dirty, smelly clothes are all over the floor, dust is everywhere, and you ran out of underwear (again).

This is what happens to our cells when we eat three or more meals a day that completely fulfill our need for calories. Even if you are eating the healthiest of foods, your cells still can get backed up with inessential proteins and toxic compounds. So what can you do?

To make sure that you clean your bedroom, you stop allowing yourself to be consumed by other obligations – you free up your time. To make sure that your cells can clean themselves, you enter a fasted state.

Fasting will not only activate autophagy in your cells, it will also increase your ketone levels — an alternative fuel source for your body and brain. You can even boost ketone levels and autophagy by adding in low-intensity exercise (like walking and cycling).

Refeeding Syndrome — When Fasting Goes Too Far

Health complications can arise when you fast for longer than 5 days. One of these complications is called refeeding syndrome, which is caused by potentially fatal shifts in fluid and electrolyte balance that can happen when we eat after a period of undernourishment. Refeeding syndrome happens because the concentration of fluids and minerals in our body relies heavily on what we eat. For example, low carbohydrate diets, like the ketogenic diet, increase the excretion of vital minerals like sodium and potassium.

Fasts that are shorter than 5 days, however, aren’t likely to cause issues — especially if you sip water with a pinch of unrefined salt in it throughout each day and break your fast with a low carbohydrate meal that is filled with mineral rich foods. A meal with dark leafy greens, avocado, and salmon with some unrefined salt, for example, would be an ideal way to break a longer fast. But what about muscle? It’s only common sense that consuming no protein and fewer calories will lead to an unhealthy amount of muscle loss. That’s right — it is only common sense.

Intermittent Fasting and Muscle

Two paradigm-shifting studies have recently been published on the effects of intermittent fasting. One group of researchers studied the effects that 16 hours of intermittent fasting had on resistance-trained males. They found that muscle mass stayed the same, fat mass decreased significantly, and the males who fasted for 16 hours a day burned more fat for fuel compared to the control group that only fasted for 12 hours. This suggests that intermittent fasting can help us rely more on our fat stores for fuel rather than carbohydrates from food.

Another study showed that combining 20 hours of fasting with resistance training resulted in an increase in muscle mass, strength, and endurance, and all of this was achieved by eating ~650 fewer calories per day than normal.

The benefits of intermittent fasting translate to untrained overweight and obese individuals as well. One study published in Obesity Reviews found that eating fewer calories is effective for fat loss, but it does come with some muscle loss. However, if the subjects fasted for 24 hours and ate as much as they wanted on the next day for a period of 12 weeks, they lost significantly less muscle mass.

Yes — you read that correctly — 24 hours of intermittent fasting without any resistance training and these subjects were able to preserve more muscle mass than the subjects who ate fewer calories every day without fasting at all. This finding contradicts our common sense, but when we dig deeper into autophagy we can find the mechanism behind this result.

Autophagy and Muscle Loss Prevention

Before a Nobel Prize was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi in 2016, other researchers were discovering wonderful things about autophagy. In 2009, an article entitled “Autophagy Is Required to Maintain Muscle Mass” was published in Cell Metabolism that described how deactivating an important autophagy gene resulted in a profound loss of muscle mass and strength. This happened because autophagy is an essential process that the muscle cell uses to clean up damaged proteins and mitochondria before they reach the point where they can’t function any longer and die.

At first glance, this seems counter-intuitive because we tend to assume that the nutrients we eat will repair the damage, but this is not how things work in reality. Think about it like this — if you want to refurbish a room, it is best to clean the room and remove the old furniture before you put the new furniture in. The same thought process applies to your cells. We must use intermittent fasting to let autophagy clean the cell before we put in new furniture, and if we don’t, our cells can become cancerous.

Intermittent Fasting and Cancer

Although there is little to no literature on the effects of 2 or 3-day fasts on muscle loss in humans, many clinical trials are currently being conducted on the effects that fasting has on cancer patients.

In initial case studies, patients who were going through chemotherapy treatment voluntarily fasted for anywhere between 48 to 140 hours. Each patient reported fewer side effects and an improved quality of life regardless of how long they fasted. This implies that fasting for 2 to 7 days can have a protective effect on the cells in the body while they are undergoing intense bouts of toxicity.

Other studies have shown that fasting was as effective as chemotherapeutic agents in delaying the progression of different tumors, and it increased the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic drugs against melanoma, glioma, and breast cancer cells. Although this research may not directly apply to your life, it confirms that intermittent fasting can help prevent cancer and help support your body in times of toxic stress.

The Takeaway

It’s okay to skip breakfast. In fact, you may experience more health benefits by doing so. Although you will feel hungry at first, your body will adjust by activating autophagy and using more fat and ketones for fuel.

Dr. Dom D’Agostino, a popular ketogenic diet researcher, suggests doing a longer intermittent fast followed by shorter daily intermittent fasts. His fasting protocol includes fasting for up to 3 days, 3 times a year with a shorter 16 to 20 hour fast on the days before and after the longer 3-day fasts.

However, you can still get the benefits of intermittent fasting by fitting different methods into your lifestyle. For example, Dr. Krista Varaday — a researcher who has conducted many research studies on fasting — suggests using alternate day fasting, which consists of eating less than 500 calories on fasting days and eating normally on non-fasting days. Dr. Mercola, on the other hand, proposes a less strict approach to fasting — consisting of a 13 to 18 hour fast a couple days a week or more.

Whether you are fasting for 16 hours or 3 days, it is important to stay hydrated with distilled water that includes a pinch of mineral-rich unrefined salts. Break your fasts with vitamin and mineral rich foods like organic vegetables, leafy greens, nuts, seeds, pastured animal products like eggs, and wild caught seafood like salmon and sardines.

But Remember — All Intermittent Fasts Are Not The Same

Before you start fasting, it is important to know that each method will have different effects on different people. In general, longer fasts — like a 3-day fast — tend to increase autophagy and ketone levels much more than a shorter fast. Shorter fasts — like a 16-hour daily fast — have a smaller impact on ketone levels and autophagy, but they tend to do a great job at decreasing your daily caloric intake and increasing the likelihood that your body will burn fat for fuel.

The shorter fast is simple and easy enough to implement, but the 3-day fast seems daunting and difficult (at first). This is why I provided you with an example of one of my favorite 3-day fasting protocols that make it simple and easy.

Practical Protocol: Tim Ferris’s 3 Day Fast

If you want a simple guide to boost your ketone levels and activate autophagy, try this 3-day “fasting” protocol that Tim Ferris adapted from Dr. D’Agostino and wrote about it his book Tools of Titans:

Thursday Evening

• Eat a normal dinner and make that the last meal of the day. Go to bed as normal.

Friday Morning

• Get out the door and walk within 30 minutes of waking.
• Bring at least 1 liter or more of water with some added unrefined salt in it, and sip as you walk to avoid cramping.
• Walk for 3 to 4 hours, sipping water as needed.
• Arrange phone calls for your walk to make the time productive.
• The idea behind the walk is that you use up your glycogen stores, forcing your body to move more quickly into deep ketosis (when your body is burning ketones for fuel). The quicker you get into ketosis, the less time you spend feeling tired and starved.

Friday Day (post walk)

• Consume MCT oil 2-3 times throughout the day.
• Tim suggests C8 (Caprylic Acid) Quest Nutrition MCT Powder. This provides you with energy until you reach ketosis.

Saturday Morning

• Upon waking, Tim suggests testing your blood ketones with a ketone blood testing kit like the Precision Xtra. Your ketones should be at 0.7mmol or greater.
• If you’re at 0.7mmol, proceed with your fast.
• If you’re under 0.7mmol, consider going for another extended walk, and then re-test.

Saturday & Sunday Day

• Add further MCT oil or coconut oil if you need a boost, but do your best to only have water throughout the day.
• Incorporate some salts in your water throughout the day. This can either be in the form of table salts, or via a specially formulated solution such as SaltStick electrolyte replacement pills.

Sunday Evening

• Tim suggests breaking the fast with whatever meal you choose.

This process can be used as a way to get you into ketosis more quickly so that fasting is much easier. Each time you do an intermittent fast, your body will get better and better at using fat and ketones for fuel, which will lead to less hunger, more fat loss, and less muscle loss. If you can’t go without fat for the full 3-day fast,  it’s okay, you will still reap many of the benefits of fasting by not having any carbohydrates or protein.

Recommended Reading:

• Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included
• How to Detoxify and Heal the Lymphatic System
• Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones
• Candida, Gut Flora, Allergies, and Disease
• How to Cure Lyme Disease and Virtually Any Other Bacterial Infection, Naturally

Sources:

• Corn Flakes Were Part of an Anti-Masturbation Crusade – Mental Floss
• Tim Ferriss – 3 Day Fast Protocol Details – Get into Ketosis Quicker and Easier — Eat. Move. Hack.
• How long can a person survive without food? — Scientific American
• Top 10 Foods Highest in Phosphorus — Healthaliciousness
• Neuroprotective and disease-modifying effects of the ketogenic diet — NCBI
• Refeeding syndrome: what it is, and how to prevent and treat it — NCBI
• Discoveries of Mechanisms for Autophagy — Nobel Prize
• Effects of eight weeks of time-restricted feeding (16/8) on basal metabolism, maximal strength, body composition, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk factors in resistance-trained males — BioMed Central
• Time-restricted feeding in young men performing resistance training: A randomized controlled trial. — NCBI
• Intermittent versus daily calorie restriction: which diet regimen is more effective for weight loss? — NCBI
• Autophagy Is Required to Maintain Muscle Mass — Cell
  Fasting Cycles Retard Growth of Tumors and Sensitize a Range of Cancer Cell Types to Chemotherapy — NCBI
• Fasting and cancer treatment in humans: A case series report — NCBI
• What if you got cancer today? Here’s how Tim Ferriss’ podcast guest, Dom D’Agostino, responded — Eat. Move. Hack.
• Physical exercise increases autophagic signaling through ULK1 in human skeletal muscle — American Physiological Society
• Acute nutritional ketosis: implications for exercise performance and metabolism — BioMed Central
• How lobbyists made breakfast ‘the most important meal of the day’ — The Guardian
• Does anybody eat cereal for breakfast anymore? — CNN Money
• Peak Fasting — How Long Should You Intermittently Fast? — Mercola
• 31 Million U.S. Consumers Skip Breakfast Each Day, Reports NPD — NPD

We cannot truthfully say that meat causes cancer.

It’s not that simple.

Although many studies have linked meat consumption, particularly of red and processed meat, to cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and a shorter lifespan, this does not mean that meat consumption causes these issues.

It is important to consider the other factors that contribute to these findings, like the fact that meat-eaters tend to exercise less, eat fewer vegetables, and smoke more than vegetarians and vegans — who tend to be more health conscious.

In studies where the researchers accounted for these factors, there was a weak correlation between red meat and cancer and a stronger correlation between processed meat and cancer.  This appears to be the general consensus, though there are some studies that find no association between meat and cancer and others that suggest that meat promotes health.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut

For example, one study conducted in Austria found people who did not eat meat to be less healthy (in terms of cancer, allergies, and mental health disorders). Red meat was also found in another study to be essential for maintaining muscle mass and cognitive function in elderly women.

With all of this conflicting information, how can we possibly know if meat is good or bad for us?

The truth is we will never know unless we consider what could be behind the positive and negative findings of these studies. First, let’s start with what meat in its purest form does to the body.

Recommended:  Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones

Meat Does Not Create Cancer

Hypothetically, if we ate raw meat from healthy animals that are completely free of all additives, chemicals, and infectious bacteria and parasites then there is no way that it can create cancer.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, meat is an effective way to combat malnutrition and under-nourishment. This is because meat promotes health by providing us with complete proteins, minerals, vitamins, co-enzymes, antioxidants, and fats that are essential for our health. In fact, organ meats from pastured animals like beef liver are filled with more minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and amino acids than many of the healthiest and most popular plant foods.

But organ meats are a rare commodity now. Instead, we tend to have the least healthy cuts of meat (muscle meat) from sick and diseased animals that are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). This means that the steak that you love so much and the chicken breast that you thought was healthy is coming from the least nutritious part of an unhealthy animal that has trace amounts of antibiotics and pesticides in it from what it was fed.

These antibiotics and pesticides are toxic to the body, but we can most likely handle them in small quantities. What renders the meat cancerous is when we process it and cook it in ways that create highly carcinogenic compounds. These compounds are the main culprit for the association between red and processed meat consumption and cancer.

Related: How to Detoxify From Antibiotics and Other Chemical Antimicrobials

How We Prepare Our Meat Causes Cancer

Heterocyclic amines, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, methyl carbonium, advanced glycation end products, and acrolein are all carcinogenic compounds that are formed at some level when we process and cook our meat. Each compound creates chaos in its own way within the body that can either indirectly or directly mutate genes and cause cancer.

Related: Advanced Glycated End Products

Acrolein and Advanced Glycation End Products Don’t Discriminate

Acrolein, for example, has been found to directly mutate genes, which can lead to cancer formation. Smoking is known to cause lung cancer because acrolein is created when tobacco is burned. The acrolein is then inhaled into the lungs, causing genetic mutations in lung cells that lead to cancer.

Acrolein is also created when we expose carbohydrates, vegetable oils, animal fats, and amino acids to high heat. This partially explains why fried foods and overcooked or burned meat are toxic to the body. Advanced glycation end products are another cancerous compound that is formed when we cook our foods (not just meat) at high temperatures.

Why Smoked Meat, Deli Meat, and Grilled Meat is Bad For You

Heterocyclic amines, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and methyl carbonium are the carcinogenic compounds that are most often found in processed, smoked, and cooked meats. Heterocyclic amines and polyaromatic hydrocarbons are both formed when the meat is cooked at high temperatures, and polyaromatic hydrocarbons can also be formed during periods of low oxygen exposure. You will find polyaromatic hydrocarbons in high amounts in smoked meats and fish. This makes these popular foods highly carcinogenic.

You may not have heard of methyl carbonium before, but you are probably familiar with its distant relatives, nitrate and nitrite. Nitrates and nitrites are commonly added to processed pork products like bacon to maintain their color and prolong shelf-life, but when these compounds interact with amino acids they can form nitrosamines.

So why does it matter? It doesn’t, especially for the body, because nitrates, nitrites, and nitrosamines aren’t toxic at all. But if nitrosamines degrade any further they become methyl carbonium, which is highly toxic to the body.

Methyl carbonium, heterocyclic amines, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, advanced glycation end products, and acrolein are by no means the only carcinogenic compounds that are created through cooking and processing meat, and some of them can still be found in high quantities in vegetarian and vegan diets. For example, cooked vegetable oils and plant foods can be a potent source of acrolein and advanced glycation end products.

This means that even if you are eating a vegan diet you will not be able to escape from pro-inflammatory carcinogenic compounds that can cause cancer — so what can you do?

How To Make Meat Healthy

It is actually simple and easy to reduce the carcinogenic compounds in your food.

First, marinate your meats in lemon juice, vinegar, herbs, and spices. This acidic marinade helps to prevent advanced glycation end products from forming, while the herbs and spices have a high antioxidant content that will keep the other carcinogenic compounds from forming when the meat is exposed to heat.

When it comes to cooking your food, it is best to replace your frying pan and grill with a slow cooker, steamer pot, or sous vide. Boiling, poaching, stewing, and steaming is the healthiest way to cook your meat, while frying, broiling, grilling, roasting, and smoking renders the meat carcinogenic.

It is also better to cook your meat at low temperatures and consume with other herbs and vegetables to ensure that carcinogenic compounds that are in your food will meet the extra antioxidants from the plant foods.

But it is important to mention that even if your meat contains no cancer causing compounds, it can still lead to the growth of existing cancer cells due to something called IGF-1.

Meat Can Feed Cancer

IGF-1, also known as insulin-like growth factor,  is a protein that has growth promoting effects on every cell in the body. This makes it essential for the growth and development of muscle and brain cells, and the healing of damaged tissues.
When we consume a high amount of complete protein — which is found mainly in animal products — IGF-1 levels will rise accordingly to help our cells use the amino acids from the protein. This is exactly what we need our body to do to maintain the health and growth of our cells, but there is one problem.

IGF-1 does not know the difference between your cells and cancer cells, so it can aid the growth of cancer cells as well. This is why high protein diets are linked to a higher risk of all-cause and cancer mortality — and the high protein content of meat explains why it has been linked to an increased risk of cancer.

This also means that meat is not the primary culprit for the association between cancer and meat consumption. Meat is just pointing to the fact that the combination of high amounts of toxic compounds with high IGF-1 levels will create the perfect environment for cancer to form and grow. In other words, cancer can be created and grown with or without meat consumption. What really matters is how you prepare your food and how much protein you are consuming.
Fortunately, we have already learned how to lower our exposure to toxic compounds in food — and that is relatively easy — but is there a way to hack your IGF-1 levels?

Related: Foods, Vitamins, and Herbs That Kill Cancer

Hacking Your IGF-1 Levels to Starve Cancer

Although low levels of IGF-1 are correlated with lower rates of cancer, IGF-1 is still important to have at high levels at the right time. When we are adults, the right time for IGF-1 to be at high levels is when our cells need to heal from a workout or any other form of physical trauma is done to the body.

This means that if you time your protein consumption in response to when you need it most (before and after resistance training), you will increase IGF-1 at the right time so that you can build the cells that need it the most while preventing cancer cell growth. Although this is just a theory, it may be the best way to get the most health promoting effects from your meat.

On days that you don’t workout, it may be best to consume mostly plant foods and limit your protein consumption to below 20% of your daily caloric intake to keep your IGF-1 levels low and quality of health high. After the age of 65, however, protein seems to be more important for health and longevity — so people in this age group can benefit from consuming more than 20% of their calories from protein.

Increasing your activity levels is also another important tool you can use to maintain lower IGF-1 levels. To do this you can go for walks, take a hike, or do any other form of low-intensity aerobic activity everyday. Not only will this help reduce your cancer risk, it will improve your overall health and reduce your risk of other diseases — like diabetes — as well.

Putting it all Together

The meat we eat and what it does to our body is a complex issue that depends on the individual who is eating the meat, the quality of the meat, and how the meat is processed and cooked — so to say that meat causes cancer or does not cause cancer is an oversimplification. As we understand cancer more deeply and the effects that meat consumption has on our body though, we will soon be able to know who would benefit from eating more meat, who should limit their meat consumption, and if there is anyone that would be healthier by not eating meat at all.

One thing we do know for certain is that the way we cook and process meat can create carcinogenic compounds that directly and indirectly cause cancer. To prevent these cancerous compounds from forming — simply marinate your meat in lemon juice, vinegar, herbs, and spices, cook it at low temperatures, and eat your meat with a variety of vegetables, herbs, and/or fruit. This will allow you to get almost all of the health promoting benefits of eating meat while balancing deleterious effects.

We are also certain that high IGF-1 levels will lead to more cancer growth. Complete proteins — like those found in meat — cause an increase in IGF-1 levels. If we keep our IGF-1 levels low throughout the day, we can prevent cancer growth.  We can do this by limiting our meat consumption to when we need to recover from resistance training and by increasing our levels of low-intensity activity like walking.

We dug deep into the science in this article, but the science has little to say about the effects of 100% grass-fed red meat consumption vs. conventional, GMO grain-fed red meat consumption on human health. We can, however, make some sound assumptions based on the differences between each type of meat.

Does Quality Really Matter?

When researchers compared grass-fed beef to conventional, grain-fed beef, grass-fed beef had elevated precursors for Vitamins A and E, more of the health-promoting fatty acids CLA and Omega 3s, and more cancer-fighting antioxidants such as glutathione and superoxide dismutase. Conventional grain fed beef, on the other hand, has much lower levels of this health promoting compounds, while simultaneously providing us with more inflammatory fats like omega 6s, a small dose of antibiotics, and a higher risk of bacterial infection from salmonella.

This is part of the reason why many studies find meat to increase the risk of cancer because they use meat from sick, fat, and unhealthy animals.

When it comes to promoting health and preventing cancer, 100% grass-fed and grass finished pastured red meat is the best meat to have. Make sure you prepare it in the ways that we discussed earlier in this article to ensure that you don’t have any unhealthy compounds with your healthy meat.

Recommended Reading:

• Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included
• How to Detoxify and Heal the Lymphatic System
• Cure Cancer Naturally

Sources:

• IGF-I: A Key Growth Factor that Regulates Neurogenesis and Synaptogenesis from Embryonic to Adult Stages of the Brain — NCBI
• Chemicals in Meat Cooked at High Temperatures and Cancer Risk — National Cancer Institute
• Association between red meat consumption and colon cancer: A systematic review of experimental results — Sage Journals
• CLONAL EVOLUTION IN CANCER — NCBI
• Diets and selected lifestyle practices of self-defined adult vegetarians from a population-based sample suggest they are more ‘health conscious’ — NCBI
• Meat consumption and mortality–results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. — NCBI
• Does red meat cause cancer? — Examine
• Mortality in vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians in the United Kingdom. — NCBI
• Red and processed meat consumption and risk of incident coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes mellitus: a systematic review and meta-analysis. — NCBI
• Nutrition and Health – The Association between Eating Behavior and Various Health Parameters: A Matched Sample Study — PLOS One
• Effect of Low-Intensity Aerobic Exercise on Insulin-Like Growth Factor-I and Insulin-Like Growth Factor-Binding Proteins in Healthy Men — Hindawi
• How can I make red meat healthier? — Examine
• Advanced Glycation End Products in Foods and a Practical Guide to Their Reduction in the Diet — NCBI
• Effect of Carcinogenic Acrolein on DNA Repair and Mutagenic Susceptibility — Journal of Biological Chemistry
• Acrolein — NCBI
• Low Protein Intake is Associated with a Major Reduction in IGF-1, Cancer, and Overall Mortality in the 65 and Younger but Not Older Population — NCBI
• A review of fatty acid profiles and antioxidant content in grass-fed and grain-fed beef — BioMed Central
• Determination of macrolide antibiotics in meat and fish by liquid chromatography–electrospray mass spectrometry — Science Direct
• Effect of feeding systems on omega-3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid and trans fatty acids in Australian beef cuts: potential impact on human health. — NCBI
• Meat and cancer: meat as a component of a healthy diet — ProQuest
• Liver: nature’s most potent superfood — Chris Kresser
• Meat Consumption — FAO