Dietary Toxins and Eating Well

While I normally focus on toxins in personal care products and the environment, I've decided to take a look at toxins and harmful chemicals in the food we eat. This is a collaborative post with a wonderful blogger, Jessica David of Conveying Awareness with Jessica David.

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwind3/2343142046/">Bradley Wind</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">cc</a>

To begin with, let's short list of some chemicals that we need to avoid in the food we eat.

• Mercury in fish: The dangers of mercury exposure include fatigue, memory problems, mercury poisoning, and dangers to the developing fetus.
• Artificial dyes: These are a color followed by a number, for example, Red 3. These dyes have been linked to behavioral problems in children and cancer.
• Sodium nitrate: Found in processed foods like hot dogs, bacon and sausage, sodium nitrate gives these foods their red tint. Sodium nitrates leads to an increase of nitrosamines in your body, which can lead to cancer. 
• Bisphenol A ( BPA): Often found in the lining of canned foods and beverages. It is estrogenic and can also leach from plastic. BPA has been linked to diabetes and heart disease. 
• Polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs): These are industrial coolants that can be found in farm-raised fish and are known endocrine disruptors and carcinogens. 
• Dioxins: Dioxins are contaminants formed during combustion and industrial processes. For example, trash burning, forest fires, incineration, herbicide manufacturing, and paper pulp bleaching. Dioxins can also be found in farm-raised fish and in the fatty tissues of animals that have been exposed to dioxins. The risks of dioxin exposure include, reproductive & developmental problems, an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease, and cancer. 
• Hydrogenated oils: Oils are long, often branched chains of carbon and hydrogen that are liquid are room temperature. The branches are caused when there are carbon to carbon double bonds. Scientists can go into the lab and add hydrogen atoms to these double bonds to break them and make the molecule more stable. This is a hydrogenated oil. They are used to increase the shelf life of food products, but have been linked to diabetes and heart disease.
• Artificial sweeteners: Aspartame is probably the most famous artificial sweetener. It has been linked to headaches, dizziness and neuronal damage. Recently, another artificial sweetener, Splenda (sucralose) was linked to the release of cancer-causing chemicals when cooked & baked.
• GMOs: GMOs are genetically modified organisms. They are created when scientists take the genes from organism/species A and put them into unrelated organism/species B. We were told that GMOs would help alleviate the problem of world hunger, but instead, GMOs have largely been used to increase the consumption of pesticides (The Link Between GMOs and Pesticides). Studies on the safety of GMOs have largely come from the companies that produce GMOs, who have a vested interest in the outcome of those studies. While more independent scientific studies are needed on the safety of GMOs on humans, experiments from farmers show that animals prefer non-GMO food. One scientific study on rats, showed lifetime exposure to Roundup Ready GM corn lead to tumors, multiple organ damage and death. 
• Pesticides: Conventional farming relies heavily on pesticides. Pesticides have been linked to endocrine disruption, infertility, neurological damage and cancer. The most widely used pesticide, atrazine, has been extensively studied by Dr. Tyrone Hayes of UC Berkeley. He used to work for the company that made the pesticide, Syngenta, but when he tried to publish a paper on the negative effects of the product, they stopped him. Syngenta has been trying to stop him ever since. His website can be found here. Unfortunately, even organic foods are exposed to some pesticides through rain, runoff and the water table, though to a lesser extent than conventional produce.

Sources
Alternet
Care2
NIEHS

Now let's transition into how you can improve your diet to become your best you.

One of my passions is to share the benefits of eating the [real] rainbow daily and it's found in fruits and vegetables. I wasn't always like this though. It only occurred to me about 5 years ago the importance of eating more of nature's best so that I could heal some conditions that had plagued me for years. Though I have always been thin, I wasn't always healthy and I didn't know any better and guess what? I didn't care much about longevity in my 20s. It wasn't until I became a mom at age 31 that I decided to make some changes! It took another new mom to pull me aside and share with me how I could eat more fruits and vegetables and that it could be the first step in the right direction for reversing some damage done through nutrient poor food choices that I had made for many years. 

Fast forward a few years, I became a certified health coach. The seed to link arms with others in their wellness journeys was planted months after that talk with my friend. Learn more about my story here. So here I am encouraging you to strive for 5. Eat five different fruits and 5 different vegetables daily. Here are some tools to help you meet that goal. 
  
1) Download my free eGuide.  
2) Learn more about Traffic Light Eating from a L.E.A.N. perspective. 
3) Follow me on Pinterest. These boards are helpful: + Eating the Real Rainbow + Recipes Using Veggies + My recipes  
4) Join a CSA (farm-share co-op). For a listing in your area, visit Local Harvest. 
5) If it's right for you, take one of my L.E.A.N. Start online classes. 

In session three, we talk about ways to eat more of nature's best - fruits and vegetables! Info. 

In tip 2, it mentions the L.E.A.N. perspective. This is the 4 pillars of health: Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitude, and Nutrition and no matter the way you slice it (different words to describe the same concepts), we need all 4 components for our journey to wellness. World-renown pediatrician and author of nearly 40 books, Dr. Bill Sears (of the Sears Wellness Institute) teaches us that the most basic foundation of understanding nutrition is through the colors of a stoplight. Today's lesson is on the green light. The other two colors are summarized in tip two.

Green light foods are fruits and vegetables found closest to nature. If you're concerned about pesticides, other contaminants, and GMOs, purchase them organic or know your supplier. I teach that eating a variety of fruits and vegetables is key to wellness and the benefits outweigh the risks. Over time, as your pockets adjust, you will find that eating produce without *most contamination may serve you better and it will support small local farmers and their families. Knowing your supplier is key because you can support local farmers and their families that cannot afford the organic label. This also applies to getting whole food nutrients in a capsule. If the product doesn't carry the USDA Organic seal, you may also look for NSF International's seal - this means that what the product claims to have or not have in their product is the truth via NSFs third-party non-affiliated testing and certification. * Even USDA Organic foods have some contaminants. See this link for more info. 

I live in a food desert. The options for fresh, sustainable produce free of contaminants are low. There are no farmers' markets in my area so it is difficult for me to find a good variety of produce locally. I shop about twice a week to two or three stores to find the best quality of produce. It's important for me to eat a variety of produce and for specific crops, I almost always buy organic when I can (see EWG Dirty Dozen for more info, link is below). I'm thankful that there is a farm-share co-op drop off in my city. I am a subscriber to Abundant Harvest Organics and eventually, I hope to grow my own soon with a Tower Garden. 

If you want more information on which fruits and vegetables have the highest levels of contaminants, visit EWGs: The Dirty Dozen. If you'd like to know how many and what kinds of contaminants are on your produce, check out What's On My Food.  Choose, eat, and live well! =)

 

Jessica David is a Certified L.E.A.N. Health Coach and the owner and founder of Conveying Awareness providing nutrition tips via a plethora of resources. Jessica feels that through encouragement we can impart education with lasting results. She advocates for families to eat more fruits and vegetables. She lives in Ridgecrest, California with her husband and their son. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and her blog.