Poisons in Our Diet V2
Hello, and welcome to my second video exploring the impact of our diet on our health. I am Dr. William Emmett Walsh, a medical doctor and board-certified allergist and author of How I Recovered from Dementia. It is my 7th book covering our diet and the diseases it causes or worsens.
My patients suffering migraine headaches taught me the foods and beverages that caused their headaches. I found that these foods and drinks, in addition to causing throbbing pain, injured nerves. Following patient suggestions, I developed a diet and used it to recover from another condition of damaged nerves, dementia. As this diet is not like other diets and has no name, I called it the Walsh diet. If you follow it, you have a great chance that it will help you. Before pursuing my treatment path, please consult your medical caregiver for diagnosis and treatment. If you suffer from one of the dementias, then try my diet.
In my book, How I Recovered from Dementia, I discussed this diet in more detail than I can present in this and other videos. The book also serves as a memory device, much more comfortable to consult by just pulling it from your shelves and flipping through it. I use these videos to supplement my book’s information. They should help you better understand our diet-caused diseases and give you the chance to consider my story as I speak to you.
Surprisingly, it is not the foods and beverages themselves that harm us. The excessive amount of certain food chemicals that they contain harm us. Nature or food manufacturers placed them there. I call these dangerous chemicals the aging chemicals because they age us. They age us as they damage us and then kill us. But death is not inevitable. We can recover and live.
The troubling chemicals include two refined sugars, one amino acid, and citric acid. Fructose is the refined sugar found in many fruits. Made of only six carbon atoms, it is a tiny sugar. It combines with glucose, also a 6-carbon sugar, to make the more complicated sugar, sucrose. Sucrose’s glucose component is not threatening; all cells need it and use it for energy production. Sucrose sweetens treats like cookies, donuts, pies, cakes, and is the table sugar spooned into coffee.
Like glucose, we all need fructose but only in small amounts. In large quantities, like in sweet foods or beverages, fructose is a poison. It encourages disease. A simple definition of poison is that it is a substance that causes illness or death.
What does excess fructose poison? A lot. It poisons our fat control system. I named this helpful system because it works so quietly that I do not believe that other diet specialists have noticed it. Our bodies use the fat control system to shed excess weight by burning off our fat. Excess fructose stops this system. Instead, overeating fructose stimulates fat production, makes people obese and susceptible to strokes and heart attacks. That’s because fat plugged their heart and brain arteries.
Excess fructose encourages insulin overproduction, fluctuating the blood sugar level, exhausting the pancreas, leading to diabetes.
Excess fructose also promotes dementia. Avoiding this excess delays the onset of dementia, a worthwhile endeavor that no drug can match.
Heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, dementia; indeed, excess fructose breeds disease.
The second sugar I mentioned is galactose. Again, it is a tiny sugar found as a component of the more complex sugar, the milk sugar called lactose. Researchers use galactose to age their laboratory animals when they study aging. I imagine that many older people believe milk is right for them. There is some evidence that galactose is useful in treating Alzheimer’s disease.
However, many people avoid eating galactose, making dairy-free products popular. I have the highest respect for the wisdom of ordinary people; they taught me the dementia-reversing diet that I use. As long as so many avoid galactose, I will include it among the aging chemicals.
I am in my 80’s, and as long as I want to continue feeling young and do not want to speed up my aging, I will continue to avoid galactose in my diet. It is found mainly in milk and milk products like cheese and yogurt, although some vegetables and fruits have measurable though small amounts of galactose.
The troubling amino acid I mentioned above is really two amino acids, glutamic acid and its sister amino acid, aspartic acid. As aspartic acid does not taste sweet, food manufacturers do not use it in food production, and nature does not load it into foods. In fact, it doesn’t taste nice. We are unlikely to consume it in excess.
That leaves us with glutamic acid as our last truly troubling aging chemical. (Actually, these chemicals are the known aging chemicals. Other chemicals that have poisonous qualities are as yet unknown, and we will discuss them in the future.) Now to return to the study of glutamic acid.
Amino acids are the building blocks of protein, and they do not threaten us as long as the protein locks them in. Free of protein, they roam in the bloodstream throughout the body and at natural levels, they help us.
Free-circulating glutamic acid is called monosodium glutamate (MSG). It tastes excellent, bringing a robust flavor to many foods, especially meat. At excessive levels, it causes harm. I will discuss MSG further and tell you about the danger of citric acid in the next video. For now, thanks for listening to me. I hope you will return to drwewalsh.com for the following video.