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Why is your diet increasing your pain?
Isn’t it strange that when we were younger, we could eat anything we wanted without much consequence? While yes, there are some age factors at play with shifts in hormones that occur naturally; there is another culprit behind your pain. Processed foods!
Processed foods are more ubiquitous nowadays than ever before. The obvious ones are cookies, cakes, and candies; but it’s not just the dessert part of our diet that processed foods sneak in.
As a Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Chef, I became proficient in the art and science of processing food to make your tastebuds sing! After many years in the restaurant business, I realized that there had to be another way to help people.
As I studied more about nutrition and finally through medical school, I realized that my gut instinct to leave the culinary world was spot on. Our foods are causing inflammation and chronic diseases throughout our population across all ages at an alarming rate.
Meat & Dairy
Beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs and dairy products have all been processed, packaged and delivered to you, the consumer, in a way that makes you think they are good for you. Let me explain. This is not a “vegan-only diet” fad that I am making a strive for, even though the best studies have shown that a plant-based diet is the best long-term way to eat for humans around the world. Our meats are processed from the time these animals are born.
Food is made up of the basic protein, fat, and carbohydrates plus all of the other micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. What has happened to our food in the past few decades is horrifying. Most of the producers are trying to increase their profit margins to make more money. The way they do this is to minimize waste, disease amongst the livestock, and maximize their yield per animal. Food science has made incredible discoveries just like all other fields in science have.
But the consumer is the one who loses. The healthy fats have been replaced by inflammatory fats; the animals are living in extremely close quarters to each other which causes high levels of stress hormone (cortisol) to surge throughout their body; and the micronutrients, vitamins, and mineral content are depleted from the livestock. This all trickles down into what you are getting, and not getting in your diet.
Ingredients not on your food labels
Hormones, pesticide, herbicides, antibiotics, and hormone-disrupting chemicals are everywhere in our food and drinks. The goal of processing for increased yield makes a farmer or manufacturer add these to their crops, livestock or batches of processed foods in order to boost their yield again.
This is a huge topic so to be brief, these are causing inflammation, hormonal imbalances and disrupting the crucial microbiome of good bacteria that keep us healthy and prevent the bad bugs from causing us harm. In short, another cause of inflammation that is extremely modifiable based on your decision-making skills at the grocery store.
Sugar
I can’t leave this little treasure out of the conversation! Sugar consumption is at an all-time high in the country and the disease rates keep on growing. We never, in all of human history, have had the number of chronic diseases than we do now. Auto-immune, cancers and other strange diseases keep popping up. The average sugar consumption has risen 10 fold in the past century. Sugar causes inflammation (IL-6 and TNF-alpha). The addictive quality of sugar is in line with that of cocaine. It is a big dopamine releaser which reinforces you to make the same behavior over and over again…an addict!
In summary, “food can be the greatest of medicines or the slowest form of poison.” I truly believe that by getting educated throughout my life I have been given a huge gift to give back to the community. Teaching others about diet and lifestyle is always going to be beneficial.
Our reach for drugs and bandaids only prolongs the underlying problem. Getting rid of the underlying causes of the inflammation can certainly help decrease your pain. I have had countless clinical experiences in making simple changes to a person and having significant reductions in pain, inflammation and removing patients off of their medication. YOU can do this and I can help. Living a better life is possible, free of unnecessary inflammation!
About the author:
Dr. Steven Sorr is the founder and chief medical officer at Source of Health in Scottsdale, AZ and has been in clinical practice using regenerative medicine since 2013. He received his doctorate in naturopathic medicine from SCNM and is a licensed healthcare provider in Arizona.
Dr. Sorr brings a huge passion for life and a diverse educational background of food, yoga, and medicine to Source of Health. His goal is to revolutionize the standard of care mindset by making significant strides in evidence-based therapies that are drug and surgery-free to restore high-level health for all.
