There has been a lot of talk in the media lately about chemicals in our food. Regardless of how you feel about the messenger and/or the motivation around the discussion, bringing the issue to public attention is long overdue. If you have been our patient, you know we focus heavily on the nutrition pillar of obesity treatment – and that we really push people to consume a diet made up primarily of whole, unprocessed foods. Foods that contain one ingredient – apple, carrot, chicken. Not the shiny, packaged, nothing-to-do-with-nature products found in most isles of the grocery store, gas station, and every checkout counter in America.
Surely by now (if you’ve listened to me at all), you know that weight regulation is about so much more than calories – or macronutrients. Energy storage – fat storage – is driven by hormones. And many of the chemicals that enter our bodies alter these hormones. Some enter our bodies through our skin or our breath, but most enter our bodies through our mouths. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are chemicals that enter our body and – you guessed it – disrupt the endocrine system. The endocrine system is the hormone system of the body.
Some of these are referred to as obesogens.
Like carcinogens increase the risk of developing cancer, obesogens increase the risk of developing obesity.
We aren’t sure how they all work yet, and they may all work a bit differently, but some of the ways they do this is by increasing the number of fat cells, increasing the storage of fat in existing fat cells, changing our metabolic rate, altering our gut flora, and directly affecting the hormones in our bodies that regulate hunger and fullness. This is only one of the reasons we focus so much on whole, unprocessed foods when we focus on the nutrition pillar.
Many of these obesogens are found in ultra-processed foods.
Roundup/Glyphosate:
We don’t think about eating roundup (gross), but when it is sprayed all over the soil and the crops while they are growing, the plants incorporate it into their very structure. And the two foods sprayed most heavily in the US with glyphosate are corn and soybeans – which are used to make most ultra-processed foods. These two crops are the raw materials the food industry transforms into the dizzying array of products that make up nearly half the calories the average American consumes each day.
We may not think we are eating much of these foods, but most of us are.
Derivatives made from these two crops provide a huge proportion of the fat, sweeteners, and other additives that make processed foods so hard to resist. They are used to make chemicals. Chemicals that we ingest.
Plastics/BPA:
BPA is a synthetic compound used to make plastic. We are largely exposed to BPA when eating food stored or reheated in BPA-lined containers. Because the compound is not fully attached to plastic, it can leach into the food – especially when we heat the food up.
And a lot of ultraprocessed foods are packaged in plastic bags.
Plastic bottles.
Plastic wraps.
They are literally surrounded by plastic from the time they leave the processing plant until they go into our mouths. It’s frightening, actually.
Food Preparation:
Another way these obesogens enter the body is by cooking.
When we heat oil up past its boiling point (to deep fry food) we create some of these chemicals.
When we use pans covered with nonstick coatings, some of those coatings get into the food itself. When we use plastic utensils to stir our food, they can leach out of the utensils and into the food.
This is why you are seeing more and more people drinking out of stainless steel or glass. Why we are seeing more and more glass storage containers, and ceramic and stainless steel pans.
It’s also one of the many reasons we recommend eating mostly whole, unprocessed foods!
Even if they were sprayed with glyphosate, most haven’t been sitting inside plastic for months on end – in and out of hot warehouses and hot trucks.
They aren’t loaded with chemicals that are put there to stimulate your taste buds (at the expense of your health). They are full of nutrients and substances that your body knows what to do with.
I encourage you to do some research. Go beyond the 30-second snippets that are all over social media either villanizing these chemicals or denouncing them as anything to worry about. They are a trendy subject and everyone seems to have an opinion – although very few are actually grounded in data. There are some links above and some below in case you want to learn more.
