AH Asks
Hi Dale: I am sending an email with an Excel doc of my usual diet. It is raw unless noted. Approx every 2-4 weeks, I break the diet, by doing one or more of the following: drink 2-3 beers, eat meat (homecooked or barbequed), eat homemade cake, and/or eat ice cream. Approx. once every six months we go out for dinner, and I eat everything. Please advise as to how I can change my diet to be more balanced. Also, how much damage does the diet-breaking do, in your opinion? Thank you.
Here is how I measure what:
- A person can get away with on diet cheating
- The frequency that will be – not too big of a setback
Questions to ask yourself:
Do I feel better when I move forward each day doing the best I currently know how, than when I stray? If not figure out how to feel great every day.
I first consider how I feel after I stray into the known area of consuming foods that do not support me when I have a choice.
When I listened to practitioners I respect, the tidbit I thought Nathan Pritikin mentioned was that of value was, after he had controlled his disease with diet and (after he carefully measured his blood, etc.) he found that he was willing to “cheat” on holidays without too big if a setback.
The specific choices you seem to have made up until know that raises a flag for me are:
In my mind, every 2-4 weeks is way too often.
The choices of beer, meat and desserts could be quite a setback.
Just to review, beer has alcohol, a stress load on your liver to detoxify, damages good gut bacteria and promotes the growth of bad gut bacteria.
Meat requires plenty of enzymes to digest, can stay in your digestive system for two to five times as long as the plant nutrition, potentially putrefying along the way. (More on Meat.) Meat tenderizers contain toxins that should be avoided.
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What Exactly is MSG?
You may remember when the MSG powder called “Accent” first hit the U.S. market. Well, it was many decades prior to this, in 1908, that monosodium glutamate was invented. The inventor was Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese man who identified the natural flavor enhancing substance of seaweed.
Taking a hint from this substance, they were able to create the man-made additive MSG, and he and a partner went on to form Ajinomoto, which is now the world's largest producer of MSG (and interestingly also a drug manufacturer). 2
Chemically speaking, MSG is approximately 78 percent free glutamic acid, 21 percent sodium, and up to 1 percent contaminants.3
It's a misconception that MSG is a flavor or “meat tenderizer.” In reality, MSG has very little taste at all, yet when you eat MSG, you think the food you're eating has more protein and tastes better. It does this by tricking your tongue, using a little-known fifth basic taste: umami.
Umami is the taste of glutamate, which is a savory flavor found in many Japanese foods, bacon and also in the toxic food additive MSG. It is because of umami that foods with MSG taste heartier, more robust and generally better to a lot of people than foods without it.
The ingredient didn't become widespread in the United States until after World War II, when the U.S. military realized Japanese rations were much tastier than the U.S. versions because of MSG.
In 1959, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration labeled MSG as “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS), and it has remained that way ever since. Yet, it was a telling sign when just 10 years later a condition known as “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” entered the medical literature, describing the numerous side effects, from numbness to heart palpitations, that people experienced after eating MSG.
Today that syndrome is more appropriately called “MSG Symptom Complex,” which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identifies as “short-term reactions” to MSG. More on those “reactions” to come.” The entire article by Dr Mercola is here:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/04/21/msg-is-this-silent-killer-lurking-in-your-kitchen-cabinets.aspx
