The Dirty Dozen - nice to know !

The Dirty Dozen
By Jordan Rubin

No matter what time of year, you will be stealing from your future and robbing your health if you eat any of these foods that I call the “Dirty Dozen.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these are among your favorite foods to eat. Nor would I be surprised if you find my list of “Dirty Dozen” foods to be controversial. When you eliminate these foods from your shopping list and/or toss out what’s left in your cupboards and refrigerator, however, you will take a major step toward excellent health and reaching your perfect weight.

The following “Dirty Dozen” items should never find a way onto your plate:

1. All pork products
Did you just sit up in your chair? I’m sure I got your attention because America loves pork. Fast-food establishments have watched their earnings sizzle by topping every hamburger and chicken sandwich in sight with strips of salty bacon; they go by names like Bacon Mushroom Melt, Big Bacon Classic, Cravin’ Bacon Cheeseburger, Mesquite Bacon Cheeseburger, and Arch Deluxe with Bacon. America’s favorite pizza toppings are pepperoni (a pork product) and Hawaiian (pineapple and Canadian bacon). Only the Chinese, who have four times our population, consume more pork meat than us.

I’ve met people who have told me they have an emotional attachment to bacon for breakfast and pork chops with mashed potatoes and gravy for dinner. That was how they were raised, and maybe you feel the same way. Marketed brilliantly as “the other white meat,” pork chops and pork ribs are usually the most inexpensive meats on display at the supermarket. Many folks eat pork three times a day: ham and eggs in the morning; a “BLT” sandwich—bacon, lettuce, and tomato—or a bacon-topped burger for lunch; and pork “barbecue” or pork tenderloin for a hearty supper. Others love snacking on pork rinds—the cooked skin of pigs. (I think I’m going to lose my lunch.)

So what’s my beef with pork? My aversion to sowbelly is partly based on a pig’s physiology. A pig’s fast-acting physiological makeup and instinct allow them to eat any swill thrown at their muddy feet. Well, maybe swill isn’t the right word. Actually, I’m thinking about the old saying: Happy as a pig in slop.

As for their physiology, pigs have a simple stomach arrangement. Whatever a pig eats goes straight into a simple stomach, where’s it’s rudimentarily digested and pushed out the back end. Total transit time: four hours.

Now compare the pig’s digestive tract to animals that are OK to eat, such as cows, goats, sheep, oxen, deer, buffalo, and so forth. These animals put their vegetarian diet—they usually chomp on grasses, alfalfa, and hay—through a “wash and rinse cycle,” thanks to a stomach and a secondary cud receptacle available for the task. Instead of a speedy four hours to digest and eliminate their waste, these animals take a more leisurely twenty-four hours.

Another reason I don’t eat pork is my Jewish background. In Leviticus and Deuteronomy, two of the first five books of the Torah (if you’re Jewish) or the Bible’s Old Testament (if you’re Christian), God forbade the Hebrew people to eat swine. (Deuteronomy 14:3–8).

But why would God make this command? It wasn’t because the Israelites didn’t have refrigerated trucks following them from Egypt to the Promised Land to keep ham, bacon, or baby back ribs in a cool environment “safe” for consumption. No, God scratched pork from their meal plan because He knew all about their physiology, and He created them to be nature’s garbage cleaners.

If you decide to strike pork from your diet, I’m predicting that you won’t miss sausage, bologna, salami, bacon, and butchered cuts from the hog at all. I promise you there are great alternatives.

2. Shellfish and crustaceans
If you were blown away by my recommendation to strike pork from your diet, I’m not done yet. Shrimp and lobster, two of the most popular foods in America, are, in my opinion, extremely unhealthy to eat and should also be avoided, even if chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden delectably advertise entrees like breaded shrimp or scampi with pasta.

Invariably, whenever I take out my wife, Nicki, for our anniversary dinner at an expensive seaside restaurant in South Florida, a waiter with a French accent will approach our table and say, “Monsieur et Madame, ze special tonight is pork tenderloin ringed with Alaskan crab and drizzled with a lobster sauce.”

But that’s not what I heard. His description sounded more like this: Monsieur et Madame, ze special tonight is fresh garbage, ringed with raw sewage and drizzled with solid waste.
Stay with me here. Shellfish and crustaceans, as well as fish without fins and scales such as catfish, shark, and eel, were also declared to be “detestable” back in Moses’s day. The reasons are similar to those that make pigs out of bounds: lobsters, crabs, shrimp, and catfish are bottom-feeders. They troll along the seabed or lakebed, sustaining themselves with fish waste. The physiology of crabs, clams, and lobsters means that whatever they consume goes straight into their system, which is why scientists can measure water pollution by checking the flesh of shellfish and crustaceans for toxin levels. While all this “clean up” is great for water quality and one of nature’s ways to scrub the aquatic environment, eating shellfish and crustaceans is not good for your bodies or your health.

3. Processed meats and hydrolyzed soy protein
The quintessential processed meat of all time is Spam, a syllabic abbreviation of “Shoulder of Pork and hAM.” Actually, Spam’s name should be an acronym for “Specially Processed American Meat,” because it deserves Hall of Fame status in the pantheon of faux foods. Spam is one of those mystery meats—along with breakfast links, frankfurters, salisbury steaks, bologna, sausages, and salami—where you have no idea what part of the steer or pig was used. You can figure, though, that you’re eating ground-up stomach, snout, intestines, spleens, edible fat, and even lips.

One thing you can be sure of is that processed meats contain nitrates to convey flavor, give meats their blood-red color, and resist the development of botulism spores. Nitrates can convert to nitrites, which have been studied for decades in public and private settings and found to cause cancer and tumors in test animals. While we’re on this unpleasant topic, I would also steer clear of processed turkey and chicken luncheon meat for the same nitrate reasons.

You may be wondering what hydrolyzed soy protein is all about. Have you ever substituted imitation crab for the real stuff when making a pasta dish for the family? Sprinkled imitation bacon bits on their salad? Ordered inexpensive sushi at a restaurant? All these foods, which are not part of the Perfect Weight America program, are forms of hydrolyzed soy protein.

Hydrolyzed soy protein usually contains a significant amount of genetically modified soy as well as compounds that closely mirror the dangerous monosodium glutamate, or MSG. Hydrolyzed soy protein is also a known excitotoxin, which means it has the potential to cause neurological disturbances. It’s not fish or fowl, and it’s not real food.

4. White flour
One major reason why we have an obesity epidemic is because the standard American diet is weighted way too heavily with sketchy foods containing refined grains where the wheat has been stripped of wheat germ, bran, and half of the healthy fatty acids during the milling process. The end result is something called “enriched white flour,” but the only reason why enriched flour is bright white is because the wheat stalks are rinsed with various chemical bleaches that sound like a vocabulary test from a high school biology class: nitrogen oxide, chlorine, chloride, nitrosyl, and benzoyl peroxide. The “enriched” adjective comes from the millers adding a few isolated and synthetic vitamins and minerals back into the nutritionally stripped flour, but that’s like dressing an American Girl doll in tattered clothes.

Enriched flour, the main ingredient in nearly all the bread and buns on supermarket shelves as well as a zillion other food items baked in commercial bakeries, is easy to spot on the list of ingredients: it’s usually the first item listed. The healthy alternative is purchasing or making your own whole-grain bread from unprocessed whole-grain flour.

5. Hydrogenated oils
Pick up a loaf of white bread at the supermarket, and you will notice that hydrogenated oils or partially hydrogenated oils are usually recorded right after enriched white flour on the ingredient list. If you see any words with the “hydro-” prefix or “partially” on a package or box, don’t buy it. If a friend offers you a packaged doughnut or cupcake, don’t eat it.

During the hydrogenation process, hydrogen gas is injected into the oil under high pressure to make the oil solid at room temperature and prevent the oil from becoming rancid too quickly, but as mentioned earlier, this hydrogenation process produces an ugly stepchild: trans fats. Research shows that trans fats by far are the most dangerous for your heart. They lower the good HDL cholesterol, increase the bad LDL cholesterol, and increase triglycerides as well as another dangerous fat called lipoprotein.

As mentioned earlier, if the ingredient list includes the words “shortening,” “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” or “hydrogenated vegetable oil,” then the food contains trans fat. Even if the ingredients label says “zero trans fat,” that doesn’t mean what you think it does; the FDA allows food manufacturers to have any amount less than 0.5 grams of trans fat in the food (per serving) and still legally say “zero trans fats” on the packaging.
It’s a good idea when you’re eating in a restaurant to ask the server if the kitchen is using partially hydrogenated oil for frying, baking, or cooking their dishes. Ask about salad dressings as well.

6. Pasteurized, homogenized skim milk
When it comes to dairy products, the conventional wisdom in the diet world can be summed up in this way: whole milk, bad; skim milk, good.

Whole milk is loaded with fat and calories, right? But removing the fat to make 2 percent or skim milk makes the milk less nutritious and less digestible as well as cause allergies. Yes, whole milk has more calories, but I’ve seen research suggesting that the mix of nutrients found in milk, such as calcium and protein, may improve the body’s ability to burn fat, particularly around the midsection. Besides, the thought of a cow naturally delivering reduced fat or fat-free milk is “udderly” ridiculous, but I’m going to milk this topic for all it’s worth because milk does a body good. (End of cliché alert.)

The richest food sources of calcium are milk and milk products, but I don’t recommend drinking any commercially homogenized and pasteurized milk. The pasteurization process alters vital amino acids, which reduces your ability to access the proteins, fats, minerals, and great vitamins like vitamin A, vitamin B12, vitamin D, and folic acid found in raw, unpasteurized milk. The homogenization process may be even more dangerous as it alters the fat globules and creates a compound known as XO, or xanthine oxidase, which is believed by some to cause damage to the arterial walls and may lead to an increased risk for cardiovascular disease.

I recommend drinking unpasteurized milk from grass-fed animals instead of homogenized, pasteurized milk. Unfortunately, raw milk can be dangerous if it comes from a farm that lacks sanitary practices, which is why it’s not available in many states. The next best thing is finding cultured or fermented dairy whole-milk products, such as yogurt and kefir, which are produced from pasteurized, non-homogenized milk.
If you can get used to its “goaty” smell and taste, goat’s milk is naturally homogenized, less allergenic, and more rapidly absorbed in the digestive tract. Goat’s cheese, which has become widely available in the last few years, is very healthy, as is cheese made from raw cow’s milk. My favorite dairy products are made from sheep’s milk, which are easy to digest and more nutritious than dairy products made from cow’s or goat’s milk. I find the creamy taste wonderful. Look for sheep’s milk yogurt and cheese at your local natural foods grocery.

You’ve probably noticed that major supermarkets as well as warehouse clubs sell organic milk. I don’t believe commercial organic milk is the answer, however. Some companies with organic brand names you would recognize produce pasteurized and homogenized milk.

7. White sugar
I’ll bet you that any food with enriched flour also contains sugar or one of its sweet relatives—high-fructose corn syrup, fructose, and sucrose. You’ll find these sugars among the first ingredients listed in candy bars, pastries, snack cakes, cookies, and ice cream. You will also find plenty of sugar in foods you might think are healthy, like “natural” breakfast cereals, energy bars, raisin bagels, certain whole-wheat breads, hot dog buns, salad dressing, steak sauce, ketchup—the list is endless.

Sugar is so omnipresent that most people don’t realize they eat sugar with every meal: their breakfast cereal is frosted with sugar; break time is soda or coffee mixed with sugar and a Danish; lunch has its cookies and treats; and dinner could be sweet-and-sour ribs, sweet potatoes covered with marshmallows, a garden salad doused with artificially sweetened dressing, and a sugary parfait for dessert. Talk about adding a sweet exclamation point to the day! A United States Department of Agriculture study revealed that we eat an average of 31 teaspoons of sugar daily—with 17 teaspoons coming from high-fructose corn syrup, and 14 teaspoons coming from cane or beet sugar (sucrose).32 This adds up to more than 500 calories daily.

If you’re looking for a guilty party to blame for the bellies hanging over beltlines, then look no further than King Sugar, which takes sugarcane or sugar beets from the fields and processes it 99.9 percent before it’s dumped into 5-pound bags of bleached white sugar. (I’m sure research scientists are working overtime to remove the last one-tenth of 1 percent in sugarcane that’s healthy.)

According to Ann Louise Gittleman, author of How to Stay Young and Healthy in a Toxic World, “Sugar is not an innocent substance that gives us pleasure and causes no harm. Quite the contrary; there is perhaps nothing else in the diet that promotes disease and aging more over the long term than excess sugar.” She says that more than sixty ailments, ranging from allergies to vaginal yeast infections, have been associated with this dietary demon.

“Without a doubt the biggest change in our diets has been our sugar consumption...refined white sugar known as sucrose, brown sugar, corn sweeteners, high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, glucose, lactose and maltose,” said Ann Louise Gittleman. “Over the past two centuries, we have literally shocked our bodily systems with outrageous and ever-growing amounts of nutrient-robbing sugar. At the end of the 1700s, sugar consumption was less than 20 pounds per person per year. By the end of the 1800s, sugar consumption had risen to 63 pounds annually. Now, 100 years later, the average American eats over 170 pounds of sugar each year.”

8. Soft drinks
A 12-ounce, sugar- or high-fructose corn syrup–sweetened beverage contains nearly 9 teaspoons of sugar and 150 calories—empty calories that provide little or no nutritional value. If you drink one can of soda per day and don’t change anything else about your diet or exercise regimen, you will consume 55,000 extra calories in one year, which adds up to fifteen pounds of weight gain.

Soft drink manufacturers know that once teenagers leave the adolescent years, they become more health conscious, or at least more aware of how bad sweetened soft drinks are for them, so that’s why they try to hook ’em young. Nicki swore off soft drinks during her senior year of high school, but not because she wanted a better fit in her prom dress. Her epiphany came after conducting an experiment in her science class. One day her teacher informed the class that they were going learn about acidic reaction. He dramatically dropped a galvanized construction nail into a glass of Coke to see what would happen overnight. The nail didn’t dissolve—that was an old wives’ tale—but the red rust encrusting the galvanized nail blew Nicki away. She hasn’t had another soft drink since then.

9. High-fructose corn syrup
High-fructose corn syrup, or corn sweetener, is more than plain bad for you—it’s horrible for your health and the worst form of sugar. Americans receive some 200 calories daily, mainly from soft drinks. High-fructose corn syrup is a major contributor to weight gain because foods with fructose may not turn off your hunger signals. You get hungry after eating a snack containing high-fructose corn syrup because you’re not satiated. Your appetite is saying, “Nice try, but I’m still famished!”

With such a high-falutin’ name, you’d think that a sweetener with the word corn in it wouldn’t be as bad for you as regular white sugar, but it is. With high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), research scientists invented an enzymatic processing method that begins with milling corn to produce cornstarch, which is then made sweeter by chemically converting some of the glucose to fructose. The more fructose in the end product, the sweeter it is. A widely used variety of HFCS, known as 55-HFCS, consists of 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. Thanks to a system of price supports and sugar quotas that have been in place for twenty-five years, importing sugar into the United States has become cost-prohibitive, which has opened up a huge market for American companies manufacturing high-fructose corn syrup.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi dumped the sugar from their carbonated soft drinks back in 1984, substituting cheaper HFCS in its place. These days you’d be hard-pressed to walk into a 7-Eleven and find a soda pop sweetened with sugar. The only holdout I could find was Goose Island sodas, although Jolt Cola did use sugar one time with the following marketing slogan: “All the sugar and twice the caffeine.” But the makers of Jolt Cola reformulated their product with high-fructose corn syrup, no doubt to make the product less expensive in the stores. I’m sure the opportunity to lower costs is the reason why high-fructose corn syrup has become the principal sweetener in fruit juices, baked goods, canned fruits, dairy products, cookies, gum, and jams and jellies.

So what makes high-fructose corn syrup such an unhealthy, fat-promoting form of sugar? The body handles fructose differently than it does other sugars. For starters, the body metabolizes fructose into triglycerides more than other sugars, which raises blood triglycerides significantly and increases the risk of heart disease. (Triglycerides are the body’s storage form for fat and are found in fat tissues.) Unlike glucose, fructose does not stimulate leptin, the hormone that tells you “I’m full,” but reduces ghrelin hormone levels, which tell you “I’m still hungry.” Consumption of fructose from corn sweeteners comes with no enzymes, vitamins, or minerals, so it cheats the body of micronutrients. HFCS is different from the natural fructose found in whole fruit because with fruit, the body gets the enzymes, vitamins, and minerals to help with digestion and utilization of the fructose.

The liver cannot handle fructose very well. When fructose reaches the liver, says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist the University of Miami School of Medicine, “the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose.” The fructose propels the liver into a fat-promoting mode by activating the formation of enzymes that lead to elevated levels of “bad” cholesterol and triglycerides.

The consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages—about two-thirds of all HFCS consumed in the United States is in beverage form—has certainly left its fingerprints vis-à-vis our nation’s obesity epidemic. The consumption of high-fructose corn syrup increased 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990, far exceeding the changes in intake of any other foods or food group.37 Juice drinks like Minute Maid’s Hi-C are among the worst offenders: despite flavors like Blazin’ Blueberry and Orange Lavaburst, Hi-C lists pure filtered water and high-fructose corn syrup as its first and second ingredients. At least they’re filtering the water!

I like to pick up a freshly cooked ear of fresh, organic corn and dig in at a summer picnic, but I’m having some trouble digging up some sympathy for this simple vegetable—or grain. (Corn should be considered a vegetable when consumed raw and a grain when cooked.) Economists say that we can blame corn for the sharp spike in grocery prices in the last year, and that’s likely to continue as the American food economy—especially ethanol production for gasoline—becomes more and more dependent on corn. The price of corn rose 46 percent during 2007,38 which carries all sorts of implications since corn is the main building block for much of the American food supply.

What’s happening is that an ever-increasing amount of corn is being diverted to make ethanol to mix with gasoline. Ethanol now gobbles up 18 percent of the domestic corn supply, up from 10 percent in 2002.39 This is set to escalate further. As corn prices move up to meet the demand for ethanol, this raises production costs for all sorts of foods: dairy cows eat corn to make milk, hens consume corn to lay eggs, and cattle, hogs, and chickens are fattened on corn before slaughter. I’ve already detailed how corn syrup is the main sweetener of soda pop and thousands of other food items.
Future outlook: look for King Corn to tighten its grip over its subjects.

10. Artificial sweeteners
Dieting and artificial sweeteners go together like...ham and eggs? Mea culpa for the jarring simile, but the huge demand for low-calorie and sugar-free foods and beverages by those seeking to consume fewer calories has created a $6 billion market for artificial sweeteners. Aspartame, saccharin, and sucralose are found in umpteen thousands of foods as well as in blue, pink, and yellow packets of Equal, Sweet’N Low, and Splenda found on restaurant tables.

If you have always thought that artificial sweeteners will help you lose weight, you might want to rethink your position. Researchers at Purdue University say these sugar substitutes could interfere with the body’s natural ability to count calories based on a food’s sweetness. In other words, drinking a diet soft drink instead of the full-octane sugar version will reduce your caloric intake, but it could also trick the body into thinking that other sweet items don’t have as many calories either. This sort of thinking gives weight-conscious people another mental alibi for overindulging in sweet foods and beverages.

I understand the rationale behind drinking low-cal or no-cal drinks—lower total caloric intake—but sipping artificially sweetened drinks is not the solution

11. Artificial flavors and artificial colors
The dictionary definition of artificial refers to something not made by human beings or a copy of something natural. Since the goal of Perfect Weight America is to eat natural foods, anything containing artificial flavors or artificial colors will be naturally unhealthy as well as increase the toxic load on the body.

Take the recipe for Waldorf-Astoria Red Velvet Cake—please! The cooking instructions for this ooh-la-la confection, which originated at the iconic Manhattan hotel, calls for squeezing two bottles of FD&C Red No. 40 into a mixing bowl filled with the requisite shortening, flour, eggs, and sugar. Pastry chefs say they have to wear gloves to keep the shameful dye off their skin or rub nail polish remover if any red spots appear on their double-breasted white jackets.

“Why should a dose of Red No. 40 turn Betty Crocker into Hester Prynne?” asked Slate.com writer Daniel Engber, referring to the fictional colonial woman forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” for committing adultery. “Ask a gourmand, and you’re likely to hear three specious answers. First, Epicurean: Artificial color tastes bad. Second, Hippocratic: It’s bad for your health. And third, Platonic: It makes food unnatural.”

Don’t purchase foods that list artificial flavors and colors on the packaging. These additives have been linked to behavioral problems in children and increase the body’s toxic load. They have also been associated with allergies and skin rashes.

12. Beer, wine, and alcoholic drinks
If you like to watch a football game with a beer in hand or dine with a glass of fine wine, I have some troublesome news for you: during the first three phases of the Perfect Weight Eating Plan in chapter 7, I’m asking you not to drink any alcohol.

Although I’m a teetotaler who may enjoy a glass of organic wine a couple of times a year, I recognize that there have been studies pointing out the benefits of drinking modest amounts of red wine for cardiovascular health. The “French Paradox,” so called for the observation that the French typically suffer low rates of heart disease despite having a diet rich in saturated fats, was attributed to alcohol and olive oil intake. The “French Paradox” is only a paradox if you assume that saturated fat is the cause of obesity and heart disease—something I point out in the next section. No wonder the French—eating all kinds of real food to their hearts’ content and toasting family and friends with a glass of vin rouge—have that certain joie de vivre. (I’ve now officially used up all the French I know.)

So you’re welcome to open a bottle of nice wine in Phase IV of the Perfect Weight Eating Plan, but I balance alcohol’s benefits against the downside of excessive drinking, which damages family relationships as well as every organ in the body (especially the liver), promotes depression, causes digestive ailments (ulcers, gastritis, and pancreatitis), and impacts fertility. Alcohol adds weight, a full 7 calories per gram, almost twice that of protein or carbs. That’s a significant reason why we see beer bellies in this world.

If you are a regular drinker, see how you feel after you’ve jumped on the Perfect Weight America bandwagon. I’m not saying that you should never have another adult beverage or savor a fine glass of wine with an exquisite meal again, but you may realize that drinking has become a weight-inducting habit that needs to be trimmed back.