Mike Adams Shares Secrets on Shopping for Food

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 by: Kevin Gianni
Tags: grocery shopping, health news, Natural News

(NewsTarget) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's The Healthiest Year of Your Life Program which can be found at (http://www.thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) . In this excerpt, Mike Adams shares his personal health transformation and an important look at shopping for foods.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life Excerpt with Mike Adams, founder of the Consumer Wellness Center and on-line retailer, Better Life Goods. An author and speaker, Mike's mission is to spread the message of natural nutrition and healing.

Kevin: Why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are now.

Mike: Well, like a lot of people, Kevin, I used to be in a really unhealthy place. I grew up on the standard American diet, ate processed foods and by the age of 30 I was borderline obese, diabetic, depressed, suffering from chronic pain. I was messed up and I got there by following the advice of my doctors and my peers. I was doing what mainstream America is being told to do and I was getting the results that came from that.

So at one point, I finally decided to do something to turn that health around and I started educating myself and reading and listening to programs like this one and applying that information, because remember, it's not about what you know in your head. It's about what you can translate into action and then that starts to have a really healing effect on your body and I lost 50 pounds of body fat over about six months. I started training. I started eating well. I started taking in super foods and everything turned around. The chronic pain went away. The depression went away. I started to get strong and my brain started working better.

I've read over 600 books on nutrition, now and I apply that information in my work. So now, I've just become an educator and an example of how you can turn your life around from being unhealthy, obese, nearly diabetic to very healthy, high performance and also having a positive outlook on life. That's the short history, Kevin.

Kevin: I've met you in person and it's hard for me to believe that at one point you were unhealthy.

Mike: Yeah. I get that a lot from people, because they look at me now and say, "Oh, you must have been this way your whole life." And sometimes people get discouraged, too. But I'm here to tell you that no matter where you are with your health, you can do it too.

I've met people who have overcome diabetes, people who have beat cancer, people who have reversed dementia and the beginning of Alzheimer's disease, people who have rebuilt bone mineral density, people who became athletes who weren't even athletic in their younger years. You would call them miraculous, except it really is not a miracle. It's what your body wants to do. Every person has the ability to heal themselves. It's built into your body. All you have to do is nourish it correctly, give it the resources that it needs and then it will start to heal itself automatically.

Kevin: Absolutely. I think one of the biggest challenges is that people like us see this all the time, but when scientific studies come out they may counterbalance what we're seeing as truth. How can somebody navigate through that and decide what's going to work for them best?

Mike: It's true. They're stuck in the Western medical mindset and they believe in Western science, which is a very limited viewpoint. For example, a plant may have 500 different phytochemicals or phytonutrients. That just means plant-based nutrients. Each one of those 500 can have a medicinal effect on the body by itself. In combination, these 500 can have huge numbers of beneficial effects on the body that are not all understood by Western scientists. Now, in Western science, what they do is they take one chemical out of that 500 and they test that and they try to see if they can understand it or synthesize it and patent it and turn it into a drug. They never look at the other 499 and they never look at the combination of effects. So you can see there's a huge
lack of understanding in the way nature really works.

For example, with tomatoes there's a lot of focus on lycopene. That's the thing that prevents prostate cancer, but there are many other phytonutrients nutrients in tomatoes. When you eat a tomato you're consuming all of those phytonutrients together. Your body has the wisdom to know how to use those nutrients all by itself.

Kevin: Yeah. I want to get real basic here, but it's something that I encounter, even from
holistic practitioners from time to time, is the question of organics. Let's start with just
why organics are best and then let's talk a little bit about industrial organic and local organic.

Mike: Okay, sure. The number one reason it's interesting to most consumers is that organic produce contains more vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients than conventionally raised produce. So if you take an organic tomato, side-by-side with a conventional tomato, that organic tomato has more nutrition. There have now been, I think, three significant studies that talked about that. That's just one reason.

I think there's another reason it's very important to those people whose consciousness involves what's happening on this planet and what's happening downstream. In other words, you have a farm and if it's a conventional farm, they're spraying chemicals and pesticides on that farm. So when you choose organics, you are preventing that and what you choose determines what happens downstream.

Kevin: What are some of the things, when you go into the grocery store, that you think of as "code red"; that you really have to watch out for these things that are going on?

Mike: Let's answer that question by giving you a little bit of a different structure on that if
that's okay, Kevin. There are basically three types of shoppers who go to the grocery store and it is characteristic of how they shop. One type are the people who buy anything without reading the label. So they're just buying what they think is going to taste good and usually whatever's been advertised and marketed to them or their children.

The second type is someone who reads the front of the boxes. So they're looking at the health claims that have been made by the manufacturers of those food products, or that have been approved by the FDA. The type of people who read the back of the boxes, they read the ingredients. They are actually looking at what's in the food and not what claims are being made on the front.

Then there's one additional type that's outside of this whole system and that's the type that doesn't buy anything in a box. It's all fresh produce. So here's the deal. If you're a type one person, I guarantee you that you're going to be diagnosed with cancer someday. You're going to have diabetes. You're going to have heart disease. You're going to have depression and mood disorders. Marriage problems probably will result from that. Life is not going to be very good if you're a type one shopper. Even if you're a type two shopper it's not going to be very good either, but you're going to be confused. You're going to think, "Oh. I'm buying healthy foods. Look, this says made with whole grains." But you didn't read the back. You didn't realize it was also made with high fructose corn syrup and refined white flour and it's only 5% whole grains. Do you see what I mean?

So that's going to produce some really negative health effects. If you're a type 3 shopper, then you're starting to get into health. You're reading the ingredients. So that's my number one tip is to start reading the ingredients of products before you buy them and then finally, some day you can get into being a type four shopper, where you're just buying non-processed foods, fresh produce by the way.

Kevin: Yeah. What are some of the things that even a savvy type three shopper needs to be aware of when they're looking at the ingredient list?

Mike: Well, they need to be aware of the tricks that some companies play to hide these undesirable ingredients on these food labels. These companies go to great lengths to hide the ingredients. For example, they know that consumers are watching out for MSG. So they don't put the name MSG on the label anymore. Instead, they use another ingredient that contains about 14% MSG, so it's not called MSG. It's called yeast extract. So if you go around the store and you read the ingredients, you're going to find yeast extract on about 20% of everything in the grocery store.

Kevin: Wow. That's pretty awful. One of the things I've seen recently and I've written fairly extensively about is how some labels, even margarine, can say fat-free on them.

Mike: Yeah. Well, my favorite is when they can say trans fat-free, even though it's loaded with trans fatty acids. Let me explain how they do that. This is the .5 g rule.
The FDA says if you have .5 g of trans fatty acid per surveying or less then you can claim zero. This is some really fuzzy math and only at the FDA does.5 round down to zero. Everywhere else in the world it would be one, but no, at the FDA it rounds down to zero. So let's say they have a bag of cookies and it's made with partially hydrogenated soybean oil and it's loaded with trans fatty acids, all they have to do is change the serving size. They can say one serving is one cookie and then the bag has 32 servings, but if you eat the whole bag you might be getting 16 g of partially hydrogenated oil or trans fatty acids.

Kevin: It's insane.

Mike: That is a lot. That's like a heart attack, but according to the FDA they can claim zero. So you've got to watch out for the little tricks that the companies play. It's easier and cheaper for them to just change the label, just redefine the serving size, or make new claims on the front, rather than actually using helpful ingredients, because healthful ingredients cost money, but changing your label costs nothing.

Kevin: What do you think it's going to take to bring more awareness to the companies that actually create change with this sort of system as it is?

Mike: Well, two things. The more education we get out there the more consumers are going to search out healthier products. Then that's going to change the way food companies make their lineup.

The second thing is that we have a health crisis in this country now that no one can ignore. We have a real health problem and it's become so obvious now that even legislators are starting to wake up and propose things like banning all high fructose corn syrup from foods sold in public schools. This is being debated right now in the U.S. Senate. So something's got to change, because if it doesn't this country is headed towards a health system collapse, where it becomes so expensive to treat our diseases that the country goes bankrupt.

You can change your future right now. You can make empowering decisions and change the future of your own health and the health of your entire household.

To read the rest of this transcript as well as access more information on creating and living a healthy lifestyle and hear from other health experts just like Mike Adams, please visit (http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) .

About the author

Kevin Gianni is a health advocate, author and speaker. He has helped thousands of people in over 85 countries learn how to take control of their health--and keep it. To view his popular internet TV Show "The Renegade Health Show" (and get a free gift!) with commentary on natural health issues, vegan and raw food diets, holistic nutrition and more click here.


His book, "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution," is a step-by-step guide to optimum health for the time and energy-strapped. To find out more about abundance, optimum health and self motivation click here... or you're interested in the vegan and raw food diet and cutting edge holistic nutrition click here. For access to free interviews, downloads and a complete bodyweight exercise archive visit www.LiveAwesome.com.