Firstly to kick things off, What is good health?
Good health is not merely the absence of disease!
To me some very general and broad questions/Indicators that can be used for spotting potentially poor health and thus not optimal can be determined by asking some of the following questions, this is a super short list! And may shock some of you.
- Do you require coffee upon waking in the morning to get going for the day?
- Indicating you are waking up tired/flat, and not refreshed and clear-headed YES/NO
- Do you feel like napping during the day/do take nap’s or rely on additional coffee to get through? YES/NO
- Do you take/use any forms of medication? YES/NO
- Do you have constipation or diarrhoea on a weekly basis? YES/NO
- You are very underweight or very overweight and or you just cannot drop body-fat no matter what you do. YES/NO
- You have cravings for man-made and or processed foods or you have cravings in general? YES/NO
- Elevated blood pressure/HR or blood sugar on a regular basis YES/NO
- Depression or feeling low often YES/NO
- You have the occasional severe Anxiety or panic attacks
- Mood swings
- Sore joints any were on the body
- Excessive gas or bloating
- Lack of apatite
- Can you eat some “bad food” and not have digestive distress and brain fog for days afterwards? YES/NO
- You have any of the following Asthma, Eczema, Allergies (hay fever)/histamine responses etc
- Ongoing broken sleep (waking up once during the night is not acceptable)
- Poor memory and concentration, brain fog, poor attention to detail etc
- No drive/motivation to just get shit done
- You find no enjoyment in life/satisfaction
- IBS/IBD/Yeast overgrown such as thrush, need to take antibiotics every few months
- Get sick often
- Never ever ever ever get sick EVER, not for years can also be an issue!
As you can see there are a ton of poor health indicators!, and answering yes to any of them may indicate less than optimal state of health, most of what manifests above are signs and symptoms of potentially something bigger that may need to be addressed.
The following 5 listed common dietary mistakes (my belief) may be largely contributing to the above symptoms/discomfort you may be experiencing and keeping your best you out of reach
We are forever chasing optimal health so let’s get started!
These are highly common but I believe them to go largely unrecognized, in no particular order:
- The excessive Use and Consumption of refined polyunsaturated fats/vegetable oil’s in the western diet especially when used and heated for cooking purposes.
This includes liquid oil’s such as
- Conola oil
- Vegetable oil (soybean oil)
- Corn oil
- Sufflower
- Safflower
- Margarine spread’s
- Grape-seed oil
These oil’s are defiantly not essential to life, in fact you could almost consider these oils to be the harbinger of illness or the anti-life and for the majority not to be consumed by anyone, especially when heated and cooked with (there are some exceptions to this but these would still be consumed raw-fresh and unheated such as flaxseed oil and EPA/DHA rich fish oil’s in SMALL AMOUNT’S)
Why the issue with these oils?
Well on a molecular level these oils are dominant in poly-unsaturated fats, and polyunsaturated fats in nature are highly “unstable” to both heat/temperature (cooking) and oxygen and thus are very reactive to both which can and will cause a rapid change to the structure of these lipid’s (oil in this case) affecting both their functional role in the human body and at the same time the way the body “recognizes” and perceives these lipids as either safe (usable/functional) or as an antigen and now a threat, promoting immune activation and inflammation in most.
(In most cases before you even open the bottle these oil’s are “rancid and not fit for human consumption” the reason is that to extract the usable oil’s from there seed’s and get them into the lovely looking plastic bottles sold in every supermarket over the world the seed’s must first be crushed with many ton’s of pressure, heated many times throughout the extraction process and “extracted further” with the use of highly toxic solvents’, degummed, deodorized….and so on….leaving us with a compound that is not fit for human consumption and has no benefit to the human being, not a good scenario)
As warm-blooded mammal’s we NEED and do much better on “stable” saturated fats including monounsaturated fats over highly refined poly-unsaturated rich vegetable oil.
As warm-blooded mammals with cells that are very metabolically active including those cells mitochondrion (think brain, kidney and liver cells as an example which have huge energy demands and thus produce lot’s of oxygen radical’s (could be visualized as dirty exhaust fumes that can accumulate and cause many issues) with potential to do damage in the wrong circumstances) we need cells that are a little more rigid and have good structural integrity to their cell membranes to whether this high level of cellular activity and the high temperatures/metabolic by-products associated with this activity.
Saturated fats along with cholesterol provide this “optimal” cell rigidity and structural integrity! And as such provide the cell membranes stability against possible “damage” from such things as those free radicals and inflammatory activity taking place with general every day to day cell activity (cellular respiration, cell apoptosis, bacterial/viral infections etc) before stacking on any additional nutritional insults.
Cells that are too fluid on a cell membrane level generally due to an abundance of the above mentioned polyunsaturated rich seed oil’s can displace saturated fatty acids in cell membranes.
Seed oils such as sunflower, safflower, canola, soybean, cottonseed etc and especially combined with a lack of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat are highly susceptible to general every day oxidative stress via the damage and structural changes of “unstable” polyunsaturated fatty acids in these cell membranes as they are so highly unstable making them a highly inflammatory reactive compound which is great at damaging additional cells and initiating further immune/inflammatory activity.
As an example of the above here is a highly simplified view of immune activity gone wrong:
Immune cell’s (white blood cells) when activated due to an antigen presentation/trigger such as a pathogenic bacterium will make and use highly reactive compounds such as H202 (hydrogen peroxide) to “kill” that bacterium, the same compound’s that the immune system makes to protect us can and will damage its own cell membrane when it is abundant in unstable poly-unsaturates from the so-called healthy oil’s leading to cell stress and thus a cascade effect of immune activity from there as cytokine activity goes up.
The lungs are another great example of where things can go wrong, the basic physiology of the lungs shows us that the lung surfactant is dependent on saturated fat, in particular, the saturated fatty acid palmitic acid (16 carbon saturated fatty acid) for optimal formation and function.
A well-formed surfactant allows for optimal oxygen/co2 exchange between the
lung’s and our blood supply, if saturated fatty acids are replaced by polyunsaturated fats through lack of saturated fat and an abundance of seed oils it can be a disaster as lung function is compromised. Currently lung cancer is the second most common type of cancer in the world killing 150,000 American’s or more every year, it is interesting to note that a lot of these people have never smoked a day in their lives, could the use of polyunsaturated fats in cooking and other food item’s be a contributor here?
PART 2 COMING SOON…
Article Written by
Anthony Kerr
Master Coach
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