In this video, the speaker discusses the 10 most dangerous foods that people consume. These foods are harmful because they are highly processed and contain additives, preservatives, and excessive amounts of sugar. The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding the long-term effects of these foods on our health and the need to prioritize our well-being over convenience and taste. The dangerous foods include processed grains, kid cereals, fruit juice, low-fat products, plant oils, margarine, diet soda, sugary snacks, sugary drinks, and a combination of these foods. The speaker urges viewers to make healthier choices and avoid foods that negatively impact their health.
Key Insights:
- People often prioritize immediate dangers over long-term health risks when it comes to food choices.
- Processed grains, particularly white bread made from modern wheat, are the most dangerous food as they lack nutrition and contain preservatives, sugar, and chemicals.
- Kid cereals are harmful due to their high sugar content, common allergens, and artificial additives.
- Fruit juice, especially when concentrated, can lead to blood sugar spikes and insulin resistance, and it is often processed, reducing its nutritional value.
- Foods labeled as low fat, such as yogurt and salad dressing, are typically packed with sugar, chemicals, and artificial flavorings.
- Plant oils derived from seeds or legumes, like safflower or soybean oil, have an imbalanced ratio of omega-6 fatty acids, promote inflammation, and undergo extensive processing.
- Margarine, made from seed oils, undergoes hydrogenation, transforming it into a trans fat that is unhealthy and linked to various health issues.
- Diet soda, containing artificial sweeteners like aspartame, can have detrimental effects on the body, including neurological issues.
- Sugary snacks, such as candies and cookies, contribute to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.
- Sugary drinks, including sodas, sweetened juices, and coffee beverages, are high in sugar and lack nutritional value.
- Combining multiple harmful foods, like a doughnut with frosting washed down with soda, intensifies the negative health impacts.
Transcript
Hello Health Champions. Isn’t it interesting how so many people will go to great lengths to protect themselves and their children from harm and danger and accidents, and yet they will fill their pantries and fridges with food that is guaranteed to hurt them. And the reason we do that is that we’re confused between urgent and important, so better said by John Howe, one of my favorite quotes, „What a folly to dread the thought of throwing away life at once and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.“ And that’s the reason the foods in this video are the 10 most dangerous foods because they are the primary way that we throw our lives away by parcels and piecemeal.
Number one on the list is processed grains and in particular white bread made from modern wheat. And why is that so bad? Because that has virtually nothing in common with the grains that develop naturally on the planet. This one has been hybridized and developed not to be good for you but to give high yields and to make big white fluffy loaves, so it’s all about appearance and quantity, not about nutrition. Next, they process it so they throw away most of the nutrition and just keep the starch. Then they add some preservatives, some sugar in some cases, and more chemicals like dough conditioners and texture enhancers. And all these different things. And then when millions of people start feeling bad as a result of eating this, now they have to blame it on something. And as a result, we have gluten being the villain in bread. And I’m not a fan of gluten, but it’s not the only problem with bread or with starch. So as a result, now gluten is the villain. A whole industry has developed of gluten-free products. And therefore, in the marketing, if gluten is the villain, then everything else is a health food. And that’s, of course, not how it works because when they take out the wheat and they put something else in, sometimes that other thing is worse in some ways. So the potato starch and the tapioca starch and the rice flour and the corn starch and all those things they add in, they don’t have gluten, but very often they’re even more processed and will sometimes give you even higher blood sugar spikes and insulin responses. So if you’re gluten-sensitive, of course, you want to stay away from it and you might have an occasional gluten-free product, just realize it doesn’t make it a health food.
Number two on the list is kid cereals, and if it’s not the first one, it’s usually one of the first ingredients is sugar or high fructose corn syrup or corn syrup solids or one of those things. And then, of course, we find wheat and corn and some of the other offenders which are pure starch and they’re very, very common allergens. Then they add some more coloring, some artificial flavoring, and some more chemicals and, again, preservatives. And I think most people, if they look at this honestly, even without knowing, they’re not going to look at that and think it has any resemblance to actual food. And then, of course, what do we serve it with? We serve it with skim milk, and that is another one of these very common allergens. And we removed the fat, which was probably the only thing in there that didn’t cause much of a reaction. But let’s talk a little bit more about why we pay so much attention to avoiding the urgent dangers but we pay so little attention to the long-term important things. And there are two huge reasons. The first one is that we are wired that way. From your genetics and from your conditioning, your nervous system is wired to pay attention to things that can kill you and hurt you. That’s just part of what we are. So your nervous system will detect change. If you’re looking at something that’s not moving, that there’s not much change, then your brain kind of settles down and you go into a daze and you lose attention. But if there’s some change, if there’s something sudden, if there’s some movement, then your nervous system gets activated. And all the people in media and marketing, they know this. And that’s why they change the pictures every second and they change the angles and they flash things and they make sounds because it’s the only way they can get your attention anymore. And the reason, of course, we’re wired this way is that’s how we detect threats and it’s a great survival mechanism to be wired this way. But we have to understand that that keeps you alive in the moment, but if that’s all you do, it might hurt you in the long run. The second big reason is that we never had to, you never needed to worry about the long term because all the important stuff was short term. The things that hurt us was accidents and tribal warfare, wild animals, infection, and starvation. That’s what people died from. And to the extent that we could find enough food, it was never a problem because all of the food was good quality. It’s like a lion doesn’t have to worry about the quality of the antelope or the zebra he’s about to hunt down. He knows that it’s part of the ecosystem. It’s going to be good food. We never encountered any sugar, any chemicals, anything processed. But today, it’s a completely different story because all the things that killed our ancestors are not really a big problem anymore. 90-95% of what we die from is three different things that wear us down slowly. And number one is structural stress. So sitting doesn’t seem like much of a stress, but it is. It’s a bad posture. And your body is made to move, and that movement stimulates your whole body. Every system in your body, including your brain and nervous system, follows a principle called use it or lose it. So when you’re sitting, you’re not moving the body. You’re not stimulating your body in a positive way. And if you don’t stimulate it to regenerate, then it degenerates. Second is emotional stress. It wears us down slowly, and often people have a sense of overwhelm. And we have this massive sensory overload. Like I said, with our attention span, the only way they can get our attention is to shock us. And that’s because we have this sensory overload, and it’s very, very stressful because your nervous system is designed to respond to big stuff one at a time. A wild animal, you’re being chased, you fight, you survive. And then as soon as things settle down, you can calm down. And that’s the sort of stress we’re designed for, big changes. And today, it’s completely different. It’s small things all the time. It just never slows down, never turns off. Number three, and maybe most important, is chemical stress. And why would that be most important? They’re all important, but chemical stress is where we have gotten the furthest off track. Because there are so many things, like with pollution, there’s hundreds of thousands of chemicals that have been developed since the 1950s. Our ancestors had none. And the food, for many people, most of what they eat, is sugar and fake food. Our ancestors had none of that. And here’s one more reason we fall into this trap, is that our bodies are so good at repairing and regenerating and handling different stressors that we take health for granted. But because of how much the world has changed, it’s changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 50,000, we can no longer afford to take health for granted. We have to start understanding these factors and how they affect the body.
Number three, most dangerous food is fruit juice. And as usual, this is gonna get a lot of people angry because fruits and vegetables are like sacred cow. We’re not allowed to touch them or criticize them in any way. And I’m a fan of fruits and vegetables and plants to some degree. I think we need a balance of everything, but it needs to be whole food and it needs to be within our carbohydrate tolerance. And the fruit juice that most people drink is concentrated sugar. So if you had the whole fruit, you would eat maybe one, maybe two, and it would be absorbed rather slowly, whereas if you make juice out of it, it’s very easy to consume the sugar from six or seven or eight different fruits. And that, of course, is going to raise blood sugar, it’s going to trigger insulin spikes, and predispose us to insulin resistance. Now, if all you ate was whole foods and this was the worst of it, that may not be a huge problem. But if in addition to all of the different foods that people eat, if you eat the bread and the cereal and the sugar and the candy and the donuts and the waffles and the pancakes, and you have created some insulin resistance, then this is going to make it much worse. And often people say that, well, sugar is bad, but this is natural sugar. And sure, but there’s not much difference because sugar is still glucose and fructose. And this natural sugar in fruit is still 50% fructose on average. So, like I said, in addition to all the other factors, this is going to further aggravate fatty liver and prevent the reversal of fatty liver, which probably a majority of the population today have some degree of this fatty liver. It used to be that alcoholics alone got fatty liver. Today, 12-year-olds get fatty liver.
Next problem is that this is fairly processed. They pasteurize it, they concentrate it, they remove the water, they add the water back. And whenever you change it, whenever you alter it, now you’re also changing the nutrition to some degree. So if you eat the whole fruit, then you’re getting the whole package. The more you change it, the more you destroy nutrients. So if you’re healthy, if you’re in maintenance, if you’re metabolically fine, I think you can have some juice once in a while. But I would suggest you have it fresh, meaning you squeeze it yourself, you do it occasionally and seasonally. And most of all, get over the idea of it as part of a healthy breakfast. So most people will get cereal and toast and orange juice all together. So now you’re getting, plus the skim milk, so you’re getting all these different forms of sugar just added on top of each other.
Number four is anything low-fat. And you can fill in the blanks, things like yogurt, sour cream, ice cream, salad dressing, peanut butter. And I’m not saying that it’s bad because it’s low-fat, because there are plenty of low-fat things like lettuce and broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, all sorts of things that are naturally low-fat. There are still whole foods. But if something used to have high fat or more significant fat, and now they market it as low-fat, now you have to start really worrying because what did they do to this food? And if it has less fat, that means it has more sugar, more chemicals, more artificial flavorings, more texturizers, etc., etc. It’s becoming a chemical cocktail full of non-foods. And a perfect example would be this thing, which cheese is supposed to have two or three ingredients, like milk, cream, and bacteria. And this is no longer food. And you should be very scared of lists that look like this. So when they promote it as low-fat, that means you’re just getting a chemical concoction.
Number five is plant oils. And usually, we’re told that fruits and vegetables are so good, so if they can market oils from vegetables, that has to be a good thing. Well, these are not vegetables. They’re made from seeds like safflower. They’re made from beans legumes like soy, and from grain like corn. And the first problem is that they’re very high in omega-6s, so that’s a type of fatty acid. And we need both omega-3s and omega-6s. But we need them in a certain ratio. And if we eat whole food, then we’re going to get them close to a one-to-one ratio or maybe a one-to-two ratio. But when we add a bunch of processed seed oils and plant oils, we can get as much as a 20-to-one ratio. And now these omega-6s become very, very inflammatory. They promote inflammation and even insulin resistance, not as much as sugar, but they’re a very significant factor. Next problem is that they’re extremely highly processed because if you squeeze an olive, it’s going to release that oil pretty readily. That’s not true for these things. They don’t give up their oil very easily. So you have to add things like pressure and high heat and even chemical solvents. And as a result, now you have chemical residues. The fats are damaged and rancid as a result. And when they’re rancid, now they taste terrible. So nobody would consume this stuff unless they cleaned it up. So they de-gum it and deodorize it and make sure they remove any trace of flavor or nutrient from it.
Number six on the list is margarine. And this, of course, is made from seed oils. So all the things we said on the previous slide still apply. But now, in addition to that, they’re taking it, they’re turning it from a liquid to a solid. So now they have to change it even more. And that’s a process called hydrogenation. So now they bombard it with a hydrogen cannon under high heat, high pressure, and they literally change the shape of the molecule and turn it into a frankenfood that your body has never ever seen before. And that new product is called a trans fat. And this is so bad that this is universally agreed that we need to avoid this. So they require food labeling now, but it doesn’t mean that they’ve actually done away with this because the labeling people are tricky. So they call it zero grams of trans fat, which simply means that it’s 0.49 grams or less per serving, which is rounded down to zero. So you could actually have 10% trans fats in a teaspoon of this oil. Would you like your margarine to have 10% lead in it? Well, I don’t think so. Right? So don’t fall for this trick. You want to use things that are not hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated at all. So read the labels. If it says that, get something else or just go with what nature made, which is butter, olive oil, coconut oil, natural fats.
So which foods are the most dangerous? Are they the ones that kill you the fastest or are they the ones that kill the most people? Oftentimes, we hear that something is bad for you, and it doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. We don’t really care. And if it’s harmful, then maybe we pay a little more attention. A little stronger is dangerous or lethal or can kill you. And on the lower end of the spectrum here, now we think of poisons. We think of something that will kill you in a matter of seconds or minutes. And that’s sort of what we worry about. That’s exciting. That’s interesting. But this stuff, not so much. But when we think like that, we really get it backwards. And if we instead look at what kills the most people, then the stuff that kills you instantly kills the least people because we have the good sense to avoid it. Whereas stuff that most people eat every day and they say, „Oh yeah, I know it’s bad for you, but it’s on every corner and it’s cheap and whatever,“ but that’s what kills the most people.
So a quick comparison between the fast and slow things that hurt you. Fast would be things like poisonous fish, poisonous mushroom, or food poisoning, food that is contaminated with something that eventually kills you. The slow stuff would be, again, the things most people think of as food, and the slow then would cause cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, hypertension. So all of these foods that are just bad for you, they are related to this metabolic syndrome that causes slow-grade inflammation and chronic degenerative disease. The top category here gets about 3,000 lives per year, whereas the slow method kills 30 million people every year. Now think about that. Which one is the more dangerous?
Number seven is diet soda. So now you’re getting chemicals like sucralose, sulfame potassium, and aspartame. And what these have in common is that they are chemically related to pesticides. They were developed from pesticides, which are designed to kill things. The aspartame breaks down into formaldehyde, which is embalming fluid. It breaks down into methanol, which is wood alcohol that will get you blind if you consume a large quantity. But if a large quantity can do that, you have to wonder if a small quantity over a long period of time is that actually doing nothing or is it creating slow harm? It also contains aspartate, aspartic acid, which is a neurotransmitter in the body. It’s an excitatory neurotransmitter. It stimulates things. And that sounds like a good thing, right? Well, in balance, it is because in the body naturally, it’s very delicately balanced. But when you’re throwing it in from the outside, it’s usually in bursts that the body doesn’t anticipate. And now it becomes an excitotoxin. And that is probably part of the reason why this is so addictive. And every time I bring up artificial sweeteners, there’s a lot of people who say that, „Well, there’s no conclusive proof. There is no evidence. So I’m just going to keep drinking it.“ Of course, that’s their choice. But my opinion is that if you instead understand nature, if you understand that the human body is an organism, that we’re part of an ecosystem, and that these are poisons, they’re man-made very strange chemicals that play no natural role in the body, then I don’t think that you have to wait. You have the choice to wait for conclusive proof or you can save some time and just use some common sense.
Number eight, most dangerous food is sugary snacks because snacks have a positive connotation. They’re that little treat. It’s that little energy boost that gets us through the day. But realize that all you’re doing is you’re fueling an addiction. And with the candies and cookies and cakes, you’re just pushing yourself further and further toward insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome with all of those problems. And don’t be fooled when they call it a protein bar. Now they’re better ones and worse ones, but for the most part, they have almost as much sugar as the candy. And instead, they’ve just added some protein powder that many times it’s not a whole lot better. It’s very highly processed. It’s soy protein isolates and things like that because it’s cheap. They can fill it up. And they market it as if it’s a health food. But it’s slightly better, probably, but it’s almost the same. And then, of course, it’s things like Pop-Tarts and donuts and cinnamon buns that some people actually believe it’s food. And they will give their kids this stuff for breakfast. I know this is hard to believe, but I’ve heard stories like that. So just realize it’s empty calories and you’re just feeding an addiction.
Number nine is sugary drinks. And this is a little bit worse because oftentimes people don’t even realize they’re eating something. They just think they’re thirsty. And of course, they’re getting a little bit of water, but mostly they’re getting sugar. So sodas and soft drinks, energy drinks, sweetened juice, coffee drinks, sweet tea, sports drinks. They’re all sort of becoming the same thing. An energy drink is just a soda with caffeine or another stimulant in it. Sweetened juice has a little bit of juice, but it’s really just sugar and water. On top of that, coffee drinks was becoming popular because some chains, some popular coffee places brought decent coffee. But it didn’t really take off and people didn’t really become hooked until they added a bunch of sugar. So today, you can get 50, 60, 70 grams of sugar from a coffee drink. And in the American South, of course, we have the traditional sweet tea, which is again, it’s just sugar and water with some tea. And sports drinks is another example of something that’s marketed as being healthy, as something positive, that if you’re an athlete, if you’re exercising and you sweat, now you’re going to lose electrolytes. So they have artificial colorings and they have sugar and high fructose corn syrup and water. And then they add a little sprinkle of salt, and they call it an electrolyte drink. So don’t fall for it. If you need some electrolytes, have a sprinkle of salt and then drink water.
So if you eat a diet where these foods are a staple, then you can be sure to reduce the quality of life and to take decades off your life. But if you don’t feel like that’s fast enough, then if you want to speed up your demise a little bit more, then the ultimate insult is to combine as many of these as possible. So one example would then be to have a donut with frosting or glazing on it and wash it down with a soda. Because now you’re combining the worst of all these. You’re getting white flour, you’re getting seed oils, you’re getting the trans fats. And these oils are not just the worst, but they’re heated repeatedly. And every time they reuse it and reheat it, they destroy it and make it a little bit more toxic. And of course, you’re getting plenty of sugar, artificial color. If you make the soda diet, then you’re also getting the aspartame and you’re getting a whole concoction of chemicals. I mean, you can’t look at this and really think food.
So I hope you have a little bit more urgency to avoid these foods and to not throw your life away by parcels and piecemeal. If you enjoyed this video, you’re going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.
