Food Additives and Preservatives

Drive-thru Burgers Never Die
What they’ll do to keep it “fresh”

Part 4: Poisoning Ourselves with Food Additives and Preservatives
By Dr. John Thomas, D.C., The Running Doctor

Food additives and preservatives do more than keep the food "fresh" for years to come. Let’s talk about Linda. Linda showed me a Mickey D’s Happy Meal that she had bought at the drive-thru. One year earlier she had ordered a plain burger--no mayo, mustard, ketchup or pickles--and a small fries. She asked for a receipt and kept it with the meal.

A year later, I was looking at dried up meat and a bun. The meat didn’t stink at all. It was just a little darker in color and a little bit harder. It was almost the same size as the original--just a little smaller. There was no mold on it. It seemed a bit rubbery, like beef jerky. You might think that the bun would be moldy, but it didn’t have any. It was still that toasted color, just stale. The burger looked like a fake replica of the real thing. You could probably fool anybody who had a couple of drinks and get them to eat it.

You have probably dropped a few fries in your life in your car, only to find them a few months later under the seat looking the same as they did when you bought them. Linda’s fries looked exactly the same. One year later they were just hard, no mold. When Linda showed me her experiment, I couldn’t believe that the stuff was more than a year old. I asked her if she had kept it in the fridge. She had never once put it in the fridge or freezer. Bugs didn’t get it, because bugs didn’t want it.

Fast Food Additives and Preservatives

It makes sense. A lot of fast food fries have formaldehyde or formaldehyde forming agents as food additives and preservatives along with many other chemicals. These are toxic.

As I wrote the last month, toxins are the quiet killer, found in seemingly innocuous food and hygiene products you might find in your neighborhood grocery store. Toxins are filtered through the lymphatic system. The lymph nodes in your neck or armpits get tender and enlarged when your body fights a cold.

You have these nodes and lymphatic vessels all over your body. Your lymphatic system and your immune system work with your liver, the major organ of detoxification, to keep you safe from toxins.

Today’s diet and hygiene practices take their toll on the system. Toxins overflow from the lymph system to your fat, where they are stored as fat-soluble toxins. When you go to the gym with your new year’s resolution to lose weight, part of the reason exercise will leave you feeling sick, is the release of years of toxic buildup. Lactic acid buildup in your muscles will also cause you pain. This is why so many people quit a workout regimen.

Toxins in muscles cause them to tighten up. This chronic tightness causes joint pain, headaches, burning between your shoulder blades, cramping, tightness in your neck and back, a lack of energy, insomnia, crankiness, muscle spasms and more.

Toxins and Free Radicals

A build up of toxins in the body also causes oxidative breakdown. In nature, oxidation causes wood to rot and metal to rust. In our bodies, toxins act as free radicals. Free radicals rob the body of electrons causing instability at the microscopic level to huge numbers of atoms and molecules. Toxins enter through our food and the outdoor or indoor environment.

Toxins cause oxidative damage to the DNA in that tissue. As the DNA replicates, it replicates with damaged copies. These bad cells continue to duplicate, until there is a large mass of them. By the time a doctor finds it, it’s called a tumor.

You are exposed to many harmful toxins in what you eat and drink, the polluted air you breathe and the stuff that you rub into your skin. These toxins accumulate in your body over the years and are documented to cause all kinds of health problems and conditions including cancer.

Cancer cells float around in our bodies. Bad cancer cells in your body can out number good fighter cells at any given moment if the recipe for death is right. All you need is a dangerous mix of bad habits, bad health, bad genetics, bad diet, bad environment and a bad lifestyle.

Plastic Food Storage Containers

Suppose you never eat fast food and avoid food additives or preservatives, and therefore think you don’t have an issue with these kind of toxins. If you cook at home, you might store your leftovers in plastic food containers. Plastic is very unstable. If you reheat your food in those, chemicals like dioxin are leeched into your water or food. It’s better to use glass.

Polycarbonate plastic containers are a good choice to use, because this is a stable form that is unlikely to leech chemicals. This is a harder plastic that looks a bit like glass and is often clear.

If you made your favorite meal from scratch, would you store it in your freezer in a flimsy cardboard box? Would you leave it in there for a week? How about a month? Or a year? So many of us have the habit of throwing in a frozen pizza, fish sticks, frozen onion rings, fries or nuking a ready-made meal. These are stored in boxes that are useless for keeping things air tight or even fresh. When you take the food out, you see water crystals, right? Have these products thawed before they got to you? How many times?

The only way they can get away with shabby packaging is by using massive amounts of colors, food additives and preservatives. Even the packaging itself can have a very TOXIC preservative agents added to it to help preserve the perceived freshness of the product.

There are many other unhealthy things found in prepared foods. Besides preservatives, additives and colors, there are fillers, expanders, modifiers, anti- caking agents, stabilizers and more.

Cleanse the body of Food Additives and Preservatives

We don’t have to be poisoned. I have developed an effective, affordable way to detoxify from preservatives, dioxin and other cancer-causing free radicals. Dr. Thomas' Full Body Detoxification Program combines a personalized program with holistic nutritional testing and one on one consultations, along with diet modification and included weekly visits. A month’s supply of herbal detoxification products are also included.

Detox kits or tea from the store won’t analyze your personal health and lifestyle. They won’t sit down with you and ask you about your exercise and eating. They won’t give you the personalized approach that you need for success like Dr. Thomas’ Full Body Detoxification Program.

Call Allied Healthcare for your free consultation with Dr. John Thomas at 770-460-1911. Next month, we’ll be looking at Diet soda.

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