Junk Food is Addicting and Killing PeopleStephanie Relfe The evils of junk food are even worse than most people know. The following is Chapter 27 from my book Youre not Fat, Youre Toxic, which explains how the growing obesity epidemic, along with increasing diseases such as diabetes, is caused by toxins (like those in junk food from supermarkets, as well as from fast food), NOT by calories, which is what the corporations would like us to believe: TOXIC FOOD #14, JUNK FOOD = JUNK BODY Fast food is part of junk food, but its not the only source of it, because supermarkets are full of junk food. Since so many people know that junk food is fattening and unhealthy, one would think that all fast food outlets would have closed down by now. However, since so many people still give their money to junk food companies, and because junk food is a major cause of obesity, I thought I would include information on it, not because its high in calories, but because it is so toxic, in the hope that this will encourage you to never give them another dollar of your money, until they change their ways. Fast food does not have to be so toxic and fattening. Why do people keep eating fast food when obviously everyone wants to be slim, so that they can look and feel great? Why do we have to have organizations like Overeaters Anonymous for people who believe, as they say on the website, Our symptoms may vary, but we share a common bond: we are powerless over food and our lives are unmanageable (1). Its because junk food works like drugs. That is, junk food is addictive. People who cant control their eating are not addicted to food. Its just that the particular foods that they eat are addictive. When these people make the switch to a diet made of vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds and legumes, with a few other foods such as organic eggs and millet bread, they will see their hunger and cravings go down. The junk food companies know this, but they dont care, because it makes them rich. I like to think of them as a part of the Food Mafia. They are little more than drug pushers. To make matters worse, companies such as McDonalds add emotional addiction to the chemical addiction. Why else do they continue to sell so-called Happy meals to children, and advertise on childrens programs, if not to addict people at a young age and keep them customers for life? Other methods used include free toys, selling toys in toy stores that are designed by them, and providing play centers. Every time you think of McDonalds, they want you to have feelings that are based on happy, fun times. Since most people dont think about where their feelings come from, these people will have false urges to eat McDonalds to relive those feelings, until they recognize and refuse those urges. In the brilliant documentary Forks over Knives, Dr. Terry Mason MD, Commissioner of Health for the City of Chicago, tells us that unfortunately, its often poor people who eat fast food. This is particularly sad when you work out that fast food these days is expensive, especially if you work out how much actual nutrition you get dollar for dollar. Five dollars buys one fast food hamburger, or a large amount of nutritious lentils and carrots. Dr. Mason says that unfortunately poor people are poor in everything, not just money, but they are also poor in health and poor in their choices. If you eat any junk food, or smoke cigarettes, realize that you are a slave to the multinational companies. They are living off your work and your body so that they can be rich. And, of course, they are killing you while they do it. I was shocked with what I saw on a TV show run by a doctor, that was meant to be about health. This same doctor had done some good work previously telling people to avoid GMOs, and therefore to not eat any dairy that was not organic. But on this particular show, the doctor asked two other doctors to go and find a healthy fast food meal. (Is that possible?) Strangely, only three fast food outfits were chosen for this task; McDonalds, Dominos Pizza and Subway. Nothing else was considered. I wonder if those companies paid for the privilege, just as most authors have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to appear on all the top talk shows? The overweight heart surgeon picked chicken McNuggets. That was unbelievable! There are few things as toxic as McDonalds chicken McNuggets. First of all, there is little chicken in them. They are 56% corn, mostly GMO corn (3), and the chickens are also fed GMOs and other toxic stuff, including their own manure. Then the McNuggets are super heated in toxic oils, so that they are full of trans fats and AGEs. Worst of all, there are a massive total of 38 ingredients, including tertiary butylhydroquinone, a lighter fluid (4). Are chicken McNuggets really food? Moral of this story: Keep an eye on who is benefiting financially when watching any so-called health show. The other doctor chose pizza with pepperoni. Pepperoni is embalmed meat. And this piece came just after a part where the doctor had restaurant insiders admit that pizzas have sugar added to them. If you ever eat any fast food at all, please watch the fabulous movie Super Size Me. While its mostly about McDonalds, many of the lessons learned in this movie apply to all fast food outlets. Even if you have seen this documentary, you may have missed some of the more important points, as I did on first viewing the movie. So I will outline some of them here. In the documentary Morgan Spurlock, writer and director, begins with a court case where two overweight girls, one 14 years old, 410 and 170 lb and the other 19 years old, 56 and 270 lb, sued McDonalds in 2002, for making them fat. The girls ended up losing the court case. But, just in case something like this happened again, in 2004 congress passed the cheeseburger bill which made it illegal for people to sue food companies for making them obese. You see, Congress currently works to protect corporations, not you. The judge said the lawsuit was frivolous because the dangers of eating its food is universally known. Yet, despite this, McDonalds has 30,000 outlets in over 100 countries. 46 million people are served daily, even in hospitals! No wonder obesity is global. The judge further said that if the plaintiffs could show that McDonalds intend for people to eat McDonalds every meal of every day, and that doing so would be reasonably dangerous, they may be able to state a claim. So Morgan decided to go on a diet of nothing but McDonalds food and drink, three times a day, for one month. During the month, he ate everything on the menu. In addition, since most Americans dont get any exercise, he got very little exercise as well. This was ground breaking research because it was being done on a real human in a real-life situation, not just a few rats in a lab. And the research was independent of any large organization that might interfere with the conclusions. Morgan definitely showed that, for him, it was very dangerous. First he visited three medical professionals, including a cardiologist and General Practitioner, as well as an exercise physiologist. His blood pressure was normal and his blood tests were excellent. His general health was determined to be outstanding. The doctors thought that the McDonalds diet would be no big deal. The cardiologist thought that his triglycerides would go up but nothing else would change. The MD thought his cholesterol and weight would probably go up. They were all in for a massive shock, because it did not occur to any of them how bad this diet would be for him, or that it would prove to be incredibly toxic. In fact, it became so toxic that it became life-threatening! Here are some of the results for Morgan after only 30 days: At day 14, two different liver enzymes skyrocketed. One enzyme went from 21 to 130, the other went from 20 to 290. The massive increase in liver enzyme activity showed that the diet was highly toxic. The MD said after just day 14, If someone was doing this with alcohol, they could theoretically wipe out their liver. (Note: If you dont have a functioning liver, you are not going to get rid of fat, assuming you stay alive). At day 21 the MD said after a blood test, For the first time were seeing uric acid elevated. The danger of this is gout and kidney stones. (Note: Gout, a very painful disease of the past is now on the rise). The results for your liver are obscene beyond anything I would have thought.My advice to you, as a physician, is that youve got to stop. Youre pickling your liver. And youre kicking it while its downIf you were an alcoholic, Id say, You are going to die. I guess the doctor did not want to say the obvious on video: That means that McDonalds can kill you. Despite this warning, and feeling chest pains and depressed and moody most of the time, which was unusual for him, Morgan completed the 30-day McDonalds diet. Perhaps most importantly of all for anyone who wants to get thin, he noticed that he got hungry soon after eating. Whereas, when you go on a wheat-free, soy-free, whole-foods plant-based diet, with lots of raw plant food, you will notice that you seldom get hungry. The more totally raw meals you have, the less hungry you will get. In just 30 days, Morgan ate 30 lb of sugar from the food alone, not counting drinks. Thats one pound a day, because nearly everything on the menu has sugar added to it, even the salads. You see, sugar is addictive, and cheap, so that makes good financial sense. During the month, Morgan craved the food more and more, and got massive headaches when he did not eat it. Those are signs of addiction. After the McDonalds diet, Morgan went on a vegan diet to detox (5). It took 8 weeks for his cholesterol and liver to go back to normal. Then he gave up being vegan. It took him 5 months to lose 20 pounds, and another 8 months to lose the last 5 pounds. It was truly amazing and sad that after this fantastic documentary came out, it barely made a difference to any fast food outlets, except that they made a little effort to appear as though they were offering healthier food, by adding a few salads with toxic dressing, but they did little if anything to alter the basic toxic menu items. We have to break the addiction to junk food. Addictive food is high in calories and toxins. Unfortunately, there are two kinds of addiction that we get from fast food. TWO KINDS OF ADDICTION FROM JUNK FOOD Dr. Neal Barnard MD, of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, has this to say (6), Dr. Barnard further explains This chemical addiction is so bad, that scientists found that rats fed nothing but junk food from the supermarket (bacon, sausage, cheese cake etc.) for long enough, not only got obese they voluntarily starved themselves when later offered nothing but healthy food (7). We need to make new laws where addictive food is concerned. As Pediatric Endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig says, free speech does not work with addictive substances, especially where children are concerned (8). 2. Emotional addiction You can bet that the junk food companies have something similar. Thats why junk food companies spend so much on advertising to children. They want you to have commands in your brain to eat their food, combined with good feelings from childhood, buried in your mind. For example, the average American child sees a whopping 10,000 ads per year for things to eat and drink. 95% of these ads are for fast food, candy, soft drinks and cereals, none of which are nutritious. Dont go thinking its just McDonalds, either. All junk food and pre-packaged food is contributing to fat gain, because of the toxins and excess calories which they contain. Any food outlet which does not give you a list of all their ingredients is suspect. I am not talking about a chart that says how many calories or grams of fat are in the food, but what is in the food. In fact, even with the list of ingredients, you still dont get to know the quantity of each ingredient. Listen to a quote from the lawsuit against McDonalds: DONT LISTEN TO THE MOUTHPIECES FOR THE CORPORATIONS It broke my heart to watch a young, very overweight 14-year-old girl say about Subway, in Super Size Me, after listening to a speech by Jared; The only solution? Telling people that eating a whole lot of baked wheat and meat will work for them? This is terrible. So many people have big guts from the many toxins in wheat, and whatever else they add to the bread that makes it so fluffy. However, pictures of Jared in 2009 show the weight coming back on (11). That was no surprise to me, since he said he had caffeine and diet drinks, and anyone who lives off a diet of food that is not prepared at home will end up getting toxic, and therefore putting on weight, in the long run. (See my chapter Health is like a bank account). Please, anytime you hear anyone saying that they lost weight from eating a particular brand of food, ask yourself how much money that person makes from telling you that. MOST SCHOOL FOOD IS JUNK FOOD Who profits from junk food? Super Size Me shows an example of one such company, Sodexho, which serves 400 school districts, as well as prisoners. There is one public school in the USA where this is not the case. The Appleton Central High School, Wisconsin, used to have children who were out of control. Children even brought weapons to school. But in 1997. a private group called Natural Ovens installed a healthy lunch program. Fast-food burgers, fries, candy and sodas were replaced with fresh fruit and salads, baked rather than fried meat and whole grain bread and good drinking water arrived. The teachers saw a major change in the children. As reported in a newsletter called Pure Facts, Grades are up, truancy is no longer a problem, arguments are rare, and teachers are able to spend their time teaching. And while they did not mention it, you can bet that these children are not going to have weight problems as serious as those where junk food is the norm. Surprisingly, the cost is about the same. So why arent all schools doing this? Paul Stitt MS, Founder of Natural Ovens Bakery, explains: What a great scam! Get taxpayers to pay for their companies to addict children to their cheap, toxic and fattening junk food, for the rest of the childrens lives! It sure beats advertising. If only accurate muscle testing was taught in all schools. I have found that when I show children, especially small children, how junk food is weakening, rather than just bad for them, they become very committed to not consuming that product any more. Some children like being bad, but no child wants to be weak. (Please see Chapter 12 on kinesiology and muscle testing, for more information). The food industry is an enormous business in the United States. It therefore employs very well-paid lobbyists, who work with the government to make you eat more of their product. I strongly believe that one of the best ways to counteract the effects of the wrong messages we are being sent from big corporations and government, as well as from the addictive toxins in our food, is for each and every person to learn how to do accurate muscle testing of food. Even children as young as 12 years old or less can learn how to do this. Children as young as six years old can be muscle tested. When a person has experienced for themselves how just thinking of a toxic food makes their arms and legs go weak, their brain often finds the extra willpower that is needed to take personal responsibility, and to eat and drink only healthy food instead. Remember, wild animals keep slim by eating the food that nature designed them to eat. Thats what you need to do. You are a herbivore. Eat plants. That is, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds and legumes, as unprocessed as possible. And also have as much raw food as possible. People need to learn new ways of shopping and preparing food. Please see my shopping list in this book. Learn how to prepare food by going to the Internet and searching for a vegan and/or raw recipe for the food you bought. The recipes in this book will give you a good place to start. And boycott the Food Mafia whenever you can. REFERENCES: Permission is granted to use this article in whole or part if you acknowledge the author and quote and link to http://www.YoureNotFatYoureToxic.com Stephanie Relfe was born in Sydney, Australia in 1960. She has a Bachelor of Science degree from Sydney University where she majored in Histology (the study of cells) and Zoology. Stephanie has had over 200 hours in training in Specialized Kinesiology and over 100 hours training in Clearing, a technology which helps a person to improve their thoughts and actions using a biofeedback meter. She has worked as a professional Specialized Kinesiologist since 1993, both in Australia and the USA. Stephanie has developed her own method of Specialized Kinesiology called Synergistic Kinesiology. She is married to Michael Relfe from the USA and has a son. Her websites include: 