DITCH THE STANDARD AMERICAN DIET AND SAVE YOUR HEALTH:

By Cheryl Meyer

The foundational piece for health is what you eat. My mission is to change the way America eats and to inspire healthier lifestyle habits. You must start with food because eating the standard American diet, and C.R.A.P.

processed) makes us all sick. “The number one cause of death in the United States is the Standard American Diet.”

~ Michael Greger, M.D. How Not to Die

I want you to start eating from the “farmacy,” moving away from the pharmacy and popping pills to feel better. If you start eating real organic food of all the colors of the rainbow, your body has the correct fuel and building blocks to function and heal, your medical scores improve, and you can move away from all the medication and start to feel GREAT. You need real nutrients for your cells to have healthy energy systems, and your cells are constantly dying and replacing themselves, so they need quality building supplies.

• Your intestines cells, which it is very corrosive, are replaced every 3 days.

• Your gut lining replaces itself every 6 days, And the lining is thinner than tissue paper.

• Your tastebuds get replaced every 2 weeks.

• Your skin replaces its cells every 2-3 weeks.

• Your body continuously replaces red blood cells, but the times over your lifetime.

• The surface of your lungs gets replaced every 3 months.

• Your liver replaces all its cells every 5 months.

• And your brain replaces some cells daily.

Processed food consists of sugar and fake chemicals made to taste like real food. They are destroying our bodily systems and our ability to function. The net result is a huge epidemic of Chronic illnesses in this country- autoimmune disease, cancer, heart disease, liver disease, Type II diabetes, arthritis, and many other metabolic disorders.

I started researching all these 10 years ago when I got autoimmune disease. After running multiple tests, my conventional MD did not think anything was wrong with me.

I knew something had gone very wrong with my body. I hurt, and my life was interrupted. I had extreme pain and did not want to get out of bed. I had researched my mother’s rare disease, Multiple System Atrophy, years earlier so that I could converse with her doctors. I had read all the studies available on that condition, so I knew it was

I completely changed my diet over the next 5 years to eating a rainbow of organic, whole foods and simultaneously eliminated dozens of toxins in the products in my home. At the end of this MD, Shilpa Sayana, MD, who ran that I had all the markers for autoimmune disease, and gave medical attention to my entire body to solve my core issues. In addition, she made medical and holistic suggestions and helped me return to relative wellness. (Read Dr. Sayama’s article on Functional medicine in this magazine.)

I no longer eat many processed foods but only food with real ingredients. I learned that food is information. Food is molecular information that tells your body what to do (changing gene expression, being part of cell signaling pathways, triggering hormones, etc.) Casey Means, MD

Your body gets defective code if you are not eating the highest quality foods because Food Quality Matters. If you eat processed foods or much of our conventionally farmed produce and meats, you eat poison with every bite from the pesticides and the herbicides that Big Ag uses on our food supply.

Stop eating the S-A-D. That stands for the Standard American Diet, which is really very sad.

I want to discuss everything I have discovered about the SAD. I am sharing what I have discovered to inspire you to change what you eat for your future health.

What is the SAD diet? It is fake, processed, fast, and processed frozen food; believe it or not, it is restaurant food that is not farmto-table. Restaurant food comes in little baggies, gets zapped, and then gets arranged on your plate in many restaurants. It is also restaurants utilizing conventional crops and factory-ranched animals that come with GMOs and synthetic chemicals. The factory-ranched animals also come with growth hormones, antibiotics, and stress hormones from being raised under appalling conditions.

“The problem with ultra-processed foods/highly processed foods is that during processing, they reduce properties of the food (like vitamins damaging parts of the food (like of compounds in the food making them disease-promoting (like oxidized fats) and add in stabilizers, chemicals to make them more ‘palatable’ and shelf-stable. What this means is that the food is not really serving your health as a good building block for the body and is not good molecular information for your body to know how to function properly.” ~ Casey Means, MD

When you consume processed food, you eat synthetic, industrial chemicals formulated to taste, smell, look, feel, sound, and enjoy as if they were real. Still, they are chemicals, and they are empty calories. They have little nutrition. Many of these chemicals are also harmful to our bodies. The food patenting these processed foods. Roundup is heavily used on most of our crops and in these foods. Roundup is known as glyphosate, which we now know creates some cancers in the human body. Yet to be researched are other harms of Roundup, but most likely exist. You also eat other harmful pesticides and herbicides sprayed on our crops. (“cides” mean kills) Processed foods also come with the pesticide BT toxin, used in GMO plants to kill bugs and chelate all the good essential nutrients out of your body and then replicate in your gut, interrupting your health.

Eating real foods and animal products from factory farming also comes with harmful poisons utilized in farming and raising our animals. The chemicals are also robbing our soil of many of the essential nutrients we get from our plant foods.

And all those foods are interrupting your health and eventually making you ill. They are committing homicide to your cells. The SAD diet contains a lot of sugar, salt, chemicals, poisons, and synthetic ingredients that you cannot recognize and do not know what they are. If you do not know what they are, your body does not know what they are either. Therefore, your body cannot utilize them for nutrition. They do not promote a healthy body. You need real food sans the chemicals (organic). You need all the colors of the rainbow of organic, whole foods in diversity because together, the phytonutrients in these foods create a synergy that fosters health. You need the essential nutrients that you get from real food.

“Processed foods are making us sick. Is it time for the government to step in?

“That’s the argument made by the authors of an editorial in the Harvard Public Health journal. They point out that there are to ultra-processed foods each year—’more deaths each year from our food than all the combat deaths from the Revolutionary War through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.’ Processed foods also

‘For instance, two-thirds of severe COVID cases resulting in hospitalization have been attributed to four diet-caused diseases: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure.’ The authors suggest that current regulatory guidelines require the FDA to take action when food additives or methods of preparation threaten the health of Americans—which ultra-processed foods clearly do. What do you think?” ~ Chris Kresser, Functional doctor. overweight or obese. Americans are overweight because our bodies are out of balance. I believe that health IS balance, so this is at the root of our ill health. sick with an autoimmune disease that if I was overweight, the reality was I was starving my body. I was confused. How could I be starving my body if I was overweight? Well, I was not feeding my body adequate nutrition. It was holding onto every morsel of nutrition it WAS getting because it went into starvation mode that it might never get another morsel of nutrition again.

When I started eating real whole organic foods, real phytonutrients, minerals, and vitamins, I discovered how incredibly smart my body was. It communicates in symptoms. I gradually began to feel much decreased. Unfortunately, our overweight status is closely associated with the numbers of heart disease, stroke, autoimmune diseases, liver disease, Type II diabetes, certain types of cancer, and premature death. I learned that if you eat the standard American diet, you will likely get a standard American disease, as I did. It could have been cancer, heart disease, or other chronic illnesses. Or it could have even become multiple system chronic diseases. And if you keep eating this empty SAD food, you will go on to die the standard American death, most likely after a prolonged illness. So, you need to eat real whole organic foods from the farmacy to feed your body health and heal from the inside out.

By design, food that is impossible to resist lures Americans, even those with this knowledge. It is convenient, and it tastes good.

Two recent studies, one at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and the other at Brigham Young University, showed

Berkman, a Ph.D. in Utah, attributes it directly to the standard American processed food diet. “What does metabolically unhealthy mean? It means that you have poor metabolic health and a higher chance of developing diabetes, heart disease, or stroke.” If you are healthy today and eating the standard American diet, you are on your way to getting one of the chronic diseases listed are-metabolically-unhealthy-saysutah-scientist-heres-what-to-dopercent-of-american-adults-aremetabolically-healthy-carolina-

Berkman states, “We are eating the wrong kinds of food in all the wrong quantities, and it is making us not only fatter but sicker.”

Corporations have weaponized your food. “Environmental factors, like advertising, lack of menu labeling, and more, and the addictive properties built into industrial food, all add up to override our normal biological and psychological control mechanisms. Being fat and obese has become BIG business.” Big Food, Big Pharm, and Big Agriculture do not want you to win at health. They do not want you to lose weight. That would be bad for business.

I have discovered that we must break the addiction to these foods, the SAD foods we eat, and return to balance to regain a more normal weight by eating real, organic, whole foods. Eating from the “pharmacy” returns our bodies to balance and can restore health. when I began to eat the diverse rainbow of organic fruits and vegetables, my body began to heal, many of my symptoms of poor health began to dissipate. My pain lessened. My husband eating with me became non-diabetic, my fatty liver healed, and I have gone from being a full diabetic to being prediabetic. All my joint and muscle pain from my autoimmune pain is gone; my fatigue and mood swings are gone. My erratic digestive disruptions are gone. I no longer feel lousy. I feel great. My husband and I joke that we feel better than in our 50s. My Functional MD recently joked I am aging backward.

I lost 65 pounds by concentrating on eating the rainbow of organic, whole foods and pastured meats.

I have had clients get better thyroid test results, lower A1C results, lowered pain, improved sleep, reversed IBS, and eating this way even helped put one client’s cancer into remission; most have had a reduction in other gnarly symptoms dissipating. In addition, most have lost some weight without dieting. One is no longer hypoglycemic. Another is no longer diabetic. addictions of sugar and chemical addictions built right into processed food. Sugar, chemicals, MSG, and more are all addictive. Avoiding them for a short time breaks the addiction.

I learned in the book “Hooked” that Big Food does not like the term addiction. They claim that food lacks some of the technical narcotics have. So instead, they prefer words you will love, like alluring, crave-able, and smackable, but the aim is the same.

In “Hooked”, a book by Michael Moss, he states that Big Food their foods not bland but well- blended. This way, people do not get full too fast or stop eating too soon. If your taste buds are overstimulated, you will stop eating, and Big Food wants their snacks consumed continuously until the entire package is gone. And then your body is begging for more. Fullness or satiety is a serious enemy of Big Food. They always want to leave you wanting more. (Dampening our hormones, Ghrelin and Leptin accomplished never being full. See comments below)

“If you get the perfect formula, the right amounts of salt, sugar, and fats, it sends you over the moon and makes their products totally irresistible, so you get hooked,” states Moss. (Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions Hardcover by Michael (March 2, 2021))

Remember the billboards, “I bet you can’t eat just one.” They purposely build that craving into their food so that you buy it repeatedly, and the net result is you are overeating whatever that food is.

Cheetos are an excellent example. There are so many taste sensations in that cracker. You cannot stop the entire box. Food scientists know that an intense taste at the front drives you to retaste whatever that wonderful taste was that you have lost. The food industry is even researching the connection between the taste receptors on your tongue and the corresponding chemical reaction that occurs in your brain. They can now replicate the chemical reaction on your tongue and the aroma. They stimulate the taste of something without it ever being real. crackers are loud when you chew something. This is because your jaw and ear bones connect. So, you hear the crunch very loudly when you bite into it. It distracts you, and that is all good. around with the formulas until they hit that perfect spot of just enough and not too much sugar, just enough and not too much salt.

The crunch it makes is also crucial. There is an auditory element to eating food. They have discovered that if chips do not have the right crunch, you eat less because you do not register that it is that good.

It helps if the food dissolves quickly in your mouth, causing the brain to believe there have been no calories consumed, so it is now called vanishing caloric density. The goal is to reach your bliss point.

And they know that their products will be irresistible if you add GMO fat, a cheap, unhealthy Omega-6 oil, to get this perfect mouth feel and you to eat more. So, food from Big Food needs to have that melt-inthe-mouth appeal. Food scientists have even studied the architecture of your mouth. So, they want to increase the bliss point from every angle.

Salt, sugar, and fat are the three pillars of the processed food industry. They are the three pillars of the SAD diet. And now you will understand why I say it is SAD if that is what you eat. They trick the brain into tasting something that is not there and not tasting something that IS there.

Moss notes that the brain gets so deceived that when they hit the perfect amounts of each ingredient, we, consumers, buy more and eat more. So, we need it, crave it and cannot wait to get it, and we store it in our kitchens and go from bag to bag to bag and overeat, and as a

MSG is not good for us, right? But names, so you do not know that is what you are eating. And MSG taste includes sweet, sour, bitter, and salty; it means the essence of deliciousness, and MSG does all that for us. But MSG is a neurotoxin that is addictive.

Pandora’s Lunchbox, by Melanie Warner, a New York Times food editor, was curious about why processed foods and fast foods do not rot. Weird, huh?

There is also something in processed and fast food called is usually MSG. We all know that

Her book takes a close investigative look at research labs, university food science departments, and the factories that are developing our food. The book opens at a convention of cheap fake food products available for Big Food to use instead of real food ingredients. These fake food products taste consistently fabulous. Why use consequences like obesity or diabetes, the devastating harm to our environment, and the inhumane treatment of animals raised within the industrialized food system.

Because they are in business to whether it is making you unhealthy. The cheaper the fake ingredients they use in their food, the more money they make.

Warner looks at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive, and most nutritionally inferior food in the world. As a result, she uncovers startling evidence about the profound health implications of packaged and fast foods we eat daily.

Bill Bradley, a former high-level marketing executive for Big Food companies, left Big Food because he got disgusted that this food was synthetic, completely contrived, and created. He states, “Because of that, there are so many problems. Our bodies are tricked, and when our bodies are tricked repeatedly, dramatic things begin to happen, like weight gain or endocrine disruption or diabetes or hypertension or chronic illnesses.” Bradley says in his blog, “There is no free lunch. Over the long term, you always get what you pay for. Cheap food is very expensive once you add up the true costs — like the taxes you pay to subsidize Big Food companies, health consequences like obesity or diabetes, the devastating harm to our environment, and the inhumane treatment of animals raised within the industrialized food system.” So, he left Big Food and became a real organic, whole-food Bradley has three observations from his years as a processed food marketeer.

2. Advertisers design most Big Food companies’ claims in advertising on television or in magazines to manipulate you. He used to do the manipulation. So, read your labels and do your research. And my rule, as a health coach, is if there is an ingredient on the box and you cannot pronounce it or know what it is, you put it back on the shelf. You do not put it in your body because your body cannot use it. This includes synthetic vitamins.

3. There is no free lunch, not in anything, but especially not in the food you eat from the Big Food industry. So, you always get what you pay for over the long term.

Big food is cheap but only cheap on the front end. It is not cheap on the back end because of what happens when you eat Big Food’s processed food. Cheap food becomes very expensive when you add up all the true costs, like the taxes you pay to subsidize the Big Food and Big Ag industry. So, they are not only paying conventional farming to poison us, but we are subsidizing all these Big Food companies that make us sick.

Check out Bruce Bradley’s Pinterest advertising is.

It would be best if you control your own life and your health. You also need to control that the food you put into your body only has quality ingredients.

1. Bradley shares that Big Food

However, he wants you to think critically.

By the way, I advocate that you become an “army of one” (coined by Howard Lyman- an American farmer and animal rights activist known for promoting vegan nutrition and organic farming coined the phrase to promote change from the bottom up) and control what you eat and cook so you do not hand your health over to these corporate giants. Over the long term, you always get what you pay for. There are also the health

Our healthcare system requires repair. Why is our healthcare system broken? As a result of the incentives paid to every level of our society, to the food companies, to the pharmaceutical companies, to the agriculture companies, to the medical schools both for programming and to skew studies, to our media gets more than mentioned businesses; to our laws that subsidize the poor quality depend upon them all creating confusion to gaslight us into maintaining the status quo. Even our Health Insurance companies do not want this to change. Big bucks politicians get enormous funding from Big Corporations to legislate food policy. Even the healthcare system is involved. This is a HUGE business, and trillions of dollars are protected. They do not want us healed. They want us to continue to need their services and products. to eat the SAD diet, which is only making more of us get sick and putting a bigger and bigger burden on our healthcare system.

One of the things the SAD diet does is mucks around with all your hormones, starting with all your feel-good hormones. It mucks around with the dopamine in your brain; it lights your brain up like a pinball machine, and you get high and then crash, causing you to eat more to repeat the high, so you release more dopamine because you love that feeling. The sugar and chemicals directly impact your dopamine, a chemical released in the brain that makes you feel good. Having the right amount of dopamine is important for your body and brain. Dopamine helps nerve cells to send messages to each other.

It is also mucking with all your other hormones. It mucks around with your serotonin, which is your feelgood hormone. Your gut makes it, but a vagus nerve connects to your brain. This can lead to depression. Eating all this C.R.A.P. dampens your serotonin, making you feel bad. Serotonin plays a key role in

The synthetic ingredients and

sugar muck around with your GABA. If you do not have adequate GABA, you get anxiety, and it also mucks around your mood. These chemicals and sugar also muck around with your insulin. Because you have eaten more sugar than your system can handle, your body makes excess insulin to encourage your overloaded cells to take more in. This impacts your moods, which are now all over the place, and you get diabetes which has many long-term harmful impacts on your body.

because you begin to feel great and do not want to go back to feeling lousy again.

The bottom line - “Processed foods are factory-made science projects that resemble food but are not. The convenience is killing us.” ~ Dr. Mark Hyman

Restoring balance in the body is crucial for health. For example, eliminating all the chemicals and sugar in processed food from your diet stops the assault on our cells that is causing us to get chronic diseases.

Change how you eat. Only eat and love food that loves you back. And understand how rigged the system is. Food quality is foundational for health and the key to a happy

The biggest discovery I made; we have two hormones I had never heard of, which is why I was never successful with weight loss programs. Processed chemicals make these two hormones inactive. They are ghrelin and leptin. These are your hunger hormones. If you can harness your hunger hormones and stop processed food from dampening them, you can break the addiction to sugar and chemicals. You can walk away. Your taste buds come back. You start feeling fantastic. You are not hungry all the time. Your brain registers when you are full, so you stop eating. Real fruits and vegetables taste yummy, and it gets easier to eat real food and cook

If you want to discover my howto Ditch the SAD and Stop Eating C.R.A.P Class, I teach this class quarterly and have phenomenal endorsements. I now have proof of concept and multiple success stories.