Our brain evolved to immediately sense hidden dangers in our environment like crouching tigers. Our ancient ancestors who failed this simple test ended up on Darwin’s short list, failing to pass on their genes to the next generation. Items in our environment that don’t try to eat or harm us, or those we cannot eat, eventually fade into the background. We no longer see, hear or smell them. Our brain pays attention to what it needs to in order for us to survive and thrive in a sometimes hostile world. The rest is just background static on the radio.
Beware of the Hidden Tigers
In our modern world most of the tigers have been eliminated, so most of what surrounds us in our daily lives becomes a safe “normal”. Most of the risks in our modern environment involve chronic toxins, substances that will harm our health or kill us over decades rather than in minutes or hours. Because we don’t sense these chronic toxins as an immediate threat, we tend to ignore them because our brains didn’t evolve to sense and react to chronic toxins. We only began to deal with chronic toxins with the introduction of the scientific method. This way of viewing the world slowly evolved over the past two thousand years and only really began to play a central role in our lives over the past century or two. The scientific method allows us to pick out the chronic toxins in our environment, even if we don’t inherently sense or see them.
Cigarette smoking is a good example of this phenomenon. Smoking tubes of tobacco first entered the scene with cigar smoking in the early 1800s. Cigarettes really didn’t catch on until after the civil war and they really took off with the invention of the first cigarette machine in the late 1880s. Over the next century cigarettes became a natural part of our landscape. Initially many thought that tobacco had medicinal properties. This was probably picked up from Native American’s and other groups that used tobacco during religious ceremonies. It wasn’t until the middle part of the last century that people began to suspect that smoking was bad for your health. The tobacco industry responded by coming out with filtered and low tar cigarettes. In the early 1960s the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health was formed and since then an endless parade of scientific studies has shown that smoking is dangerous to your health.
Despite the mounting evidence, it took decades for this information to sink into the public’s perception of smoking. Smoking was a normal part of our environment and it wasn’t perceived as a tiger until the past few decades. When I started practicing medicine in the late 1970s, physicians still smoked in the hospital. Now you can’t smoke anywhere near a hospital. It takes a great deal of effort to get humans to perceive that a chronic toxin is dangerous because of the way the human brain evolved.
Is This Stuff Really Food?
Over the past century we have almost completely changed our food supply. We started to deconstruct food and then put it back together in strange new forms loaded with long lists of unpronounceable chemicals. The moon shot of the food industry was the introduction of the Twinkie with 37 ingredients. Sugary sodas gradually replaced water and milk. Breakfast cereals were invented and they now form the core of many people’s morning meal. The three main components of modern processed foods are added sugars like sucrose and HFCS, high glycemic carbohydrates often from grains and omega 6 fatty acids from vegetable oils. Humans didn’t evolve eating this combination of dietary items and over the past few decades it has become apparent that they are chronic toxins. Eating processed food won’t kill you today or tomorrow but it can destroy your health over decades.
In recent years it has become clear that this type of processed food can also adversely affect your brain leading to a form of food-induced brain dysfunction called Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome. People with CARB syndrome can develop up to 22 brain dysfunction symptoms that interfere with their ability to function. They also tend to store excessive body fat at virtually any caloric intake, helping to drive deadly diseases like diabetes and heart disease. The worst of the worst is sugary soda, a beverage loaded with toxic amounts of fructose and glucose. If you consume more than 25 grams of fructose daily, much of it is converted to triglycerides and uric acid, two problematic substances. This eventually leads to insulin resistance and when you have insulin resistance and consume high glycemic carbohydrates, your brain is exposed to dangerous glucose spikes, eventually triggering CARB syndrome.
For decades soda has been considered an integral part of our environment to the point where nobody really thinks about it. This is similar to where we were with cigarettes in the 1950s. Over the past few years pioneers like fructose researcher Richard Johnson and Pediatric Endocrinologist Robert Lustig have been sounding the alarm that sugar is indeed a chronic toxin that is playing a key role in our epidemic of obesity and metabolic disorders. In other words soda, like other chronic toxins is a tiger in disguise.
The Push Back From Big Soda
It didn’t take long for the soda companies to respond. Coke has recently launched an aggressive counterattack by becoming involved in the Latino community, one that has been hit hard by the soda-induced obesity epidemic. They have also pushed back by suggesting that Coke doesn’t play a major role in causing obesity. This is similar to the response of the tobacco industry when they were first confronted with the dangers of smoking and as is the case with tobacco, the scientific evidence will some day roll over Coke’s ridiculous efforts.
Once a chronic toxin like cigarette smoking, soda or processed food has been identified, you don’t want to wait decades for the news to sink into your brain because doing so could lead to serious health consequences. You need to use accurate information to recognize the tigers in disguise—the chronic toxins in our environment hiding in plain sight.
When you walk into a grocery store, modern pharmacy or gas station, just about every food or beverage item you lay eyes on is a chronic toxin. You need to train your brain to see through the disguise of the tiger because if your fail to do so, you will fall victim to the wrath of the crouching tiger even if you don’t plainly see it. I suspect that years from now they will look back and say “What were they thinking when they were filling themselves with toxic fake food?” That’s because over time, science will show us the true toxic nature of our modern diet of processed foods.
A New Era in Nutritional Research
In the past much of our research on food and nutrition was sponsored by food companies and others with a vested interest in our modern diet. That’s why I think that it’s important to support Gary Taubes and Peter Attia and their NuSi project that is dedicated to doing nutritional research free from the yoke of vested interests. Let’s push back against all the hidden crouching tigers in our diet by making a contribution to NuSi today.
A recent article that hit the headlines gives us a good reason to push for the type of independent research proposed by NuSi. Recently Ferris Jabr published an article in Scientific American titled “Is Sugar Really Toxic? Sifting Through the Evidence”. Unfortunately Mr. Jabr didn’t do quite enough sifting. Several of the authors of the studies he listed in his article apparently have strong ties to the sugar and food industries, yet he failed to disclose this fact in his article. In journalism this is like plagiarism in college—a big no-no. Perhaps Ferris is right—it’s OK to indulge in your sugar cravings. In the world of science he is obligated to disclose conflicts of interest and he failed to do so. Thus Ferris and his defense of sugar must be taken with a grain of salt.
The Diet Disease Connection
As a practicing physician I would estimate that over 80% of the problems I see every day are directly related to eating a poor diet. I don’t see many people suffering from lack of food, but rather from eating the wrong type of food. The medical profession tends to be drug-centric. They wait until you get diabetes or hypertension and then they throw a bunch of drugs at you to “manage” your condition. I don’t want to manage diseases—I want to prevent or reverse them. If we took the funds used to develop and market just one drug and used it to do unbiased nutritional research, we likely could figure out how to prevent or reverse many of our most common chronic diseases. That’s the reason we need to support Gary and Peter in their efforts. We need them to help us find the hidden crouching tigers in our modern diet.
Although there are still a few true crouching tigers left in our environment, the tigers that represent chronic toxins are often hidden from view. With the help of NuSi we should be able to unmask these tigers to review their true nature as serious dangers to our health and wellbeing.