It doesn’t take much to realize that the culture we live in is crazy, unhealthy, and impersonal. Nobody cares about you, but, maybe, yourself. If you’re lucky, someone else might care about you. But to virtually everyone else, you either don’t exist, or you’re something to exploit.
Nobody cares if you’re sick or well, either, except for those who make money trying to sell you treatments, and they want you sick so you need them. Then there are those who are making you sick in the first place with their products.
They have you coming and going. You buy their crap which makes you sick, and then you buy their crap that’s supposed to make you better, while you work at a crappy job to pay for both. In the end, you’re energy is spent, your money is spent, and your life is spent. You’re born, you live, you die…next victim.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Our culture should not make us sick. We should not be fodder for the economy.
We are responsible for our own health, safety and happiness, because nobody can give you that besides yourself, despite the ads to the contrary.
Let’s say you have some nerve problems. Maybe you have numb or tingly feet or hands. Maybe you have an irregular heartbeat. It could be you feel tired and foggy-brained. So you decide you’re tired of feeling tired, and you’re fed up with the weakness and nerve pains you’ve been having. So what can you do about it?
Lots of health problems are caused by our culture and way of life. We are trained from birth to do certain things that can harm us. Smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol are two examples. Both products are known health hazards, and even carry warning labels. But people still use them, mostly because they are addicted to these substances. This makes the producers of these products very happy, along with the medical profession that is waiting to treat the resulting problems. Try avoiding tobacco and booze, and even the government will get upset, since, despite their warnings, the government gets a piece of the pie with taxes.
Then there’s tight clothing. For centuries, women and men and children wore corsets to alter their body shape to make it more appealing and socially acceptable. The constriction and tightness of these garments caused disease, but it was socially essential to wear these torture-like garments, so people put up with the discomfort for the sake of compliance and conformity. These days, the same problem is happening with bras, which are known to cause breast pain, cysts, and cancer. Standards of beauty can be fatal.
And cultures have been screwing up peoples’ health for a long time. In Ancient Roman times, for example, water engineering was well developed, and it was transported through pipes for drinking and cooking. It was a very clever engineering achievement, and a sign of an advanced civilization to have plumbing. However, these pipes were made of lead, which is called plumbum in Latin, hence the term plumbing and plumber. They didn’t realize that lead, among other things, is a neurotoxin, or nerve poison. It ultimately spelled doom for the Romans.
It’s sometimes difficult to know when a culture’s ways are causing harm. When everyone is exposed to a hazardous substance, all of society gets used to the illnesses it can cause, and it seems “normal” to be ill. You need people who are not doing the same thing for a comparison. Nobody knows who started it all and made the harmful customs we follow. But you can bet they made money on it.
For the Ancient Romans, what killed them was poisoning by lead. For us, and get ready for this, we are being poisoned by bread. We are also poisoned by potatoes and beans and whole grains and other starchy products. More accurately, it’s the way they are prepared that is the problem. And it’s a bigger problem than you can imagine.
You may not realize this, but when you cook food you are causing a chemical reaction. The heat from cooking helps breakdown the food, but it also forms some new chemicals that were not in the food, and which are poisonous. The same cooking temperatures that make delicious bread, cookies, crackers, chips, cakes, fries, and other favorite foods is also making toxic chemical by-products.
“Wait a minute!”, you shout. “For thousands of years people have been heating foods in ovens. Have they been creating poisons all that time?”
Yes, they have. But our bodies know how to eliminate it if there is not too much of it. Our bodies know how to detoxify from many things if we’re not getting overdosed.
But today, with all the products that are fried, baked, roasted, toasted, broiled, or in any other way heated to over 248 degrees F, we are exposed to too much of this poison. And it’s name is acrylamide.
This chemical is an important one in our culture. It is the building block for polyacrylamide, which is used in tons of things. Acrylamide is a powerful nerve poison, or neurotoxin, and is also highly suspected to cause cancer. It also causes smaller babies to be born, reduced fertility in men, and lots more. You really don’t want acrylamide in your body.
What happens when you are eating this nerve poison at every meal, your entire life?
One thing that can happen is numb or tingly hands and feet, low energy and fatigue, and mental fogginess. This poison actually destroys nerve cells in the brain and nerve endings in the hands and feet. It causes muscle weakness, clumsiness, trouble walking, and even an irregular heartbeat, among other things.
“Wait!”, you exclaim. “Aren’t these also symptoms of Long-COVID?”
That’s right, they are. More than half of the public that has had COVID experiences nerve problems that last beyond the initial infection, with many still suffering. It comes and goes, as though there was something they are eating that is making it better or worse, depending on the amount consumed.
And that’s what’s happening. The virus that causes COVID-19 is known to enter the entire nervous system, including the brain and all the nerves, causing what doctors call “COVID neuropathy”. They don’t know what causes it, or how to treat it. But they do know that nerves are damaged by COVID-19, and that nerve poisons make it worse.
I see the light going off in your head. That’s right. If you eat lots of acrylamide in your cooked food, then you are taking in nerve poison, which makes an already sick nervous system even sicker.
The government knows this, of course. There are governments all over the world that are scrambling to try getting acrylamide out of food. This has been going on since 2002, when scientists first discovered acrylamide in food. But it’s hard to challenge the cooking methods of baking, frying, and roasting. Harder yet is challenging the industries which make these foods, along with the ovens and other appliances used to cook the food to the high temperatures that cause acrylamide formation. So there has been resistance to the message that acrylamide in food is unsafe at any level.
FYI, the worst foods for acrylamide content are chips, coffee and roasted-grain coffee substitutes, crackers, and potato chips, fries, and crisps. Tobacco smoke also has this poison, and it’s also in cosmetics and gets absorbed through the skin.
Here is a list of food products and their acrylamide content, as determined by the FDA. The longer and hotter a food is cooked, the higher the acrylamide content goes.
The good news is that you can boil and steam any food and not form this poison. You need to get things hotter than boiling to cause the chemical reaction that creates acrylamide. So this means you can still eat a balanced diet. Just don’t cook it over boiling temperature. This means no baked goods, including breakfast cereals, which are very high in acrylamide. The drier and the crunchier, the more toxic it is.
Unfortunately, the US government is still resisting the call to warn the public about acrylamide causing nerve damage. For some reason, probably industry resistance, the Feds are saying that the levels of acrylamide in foods is bad, but probably not bad enough to cause nerve problems, although they then say to try to reduce your acrylamide in food, anyway.
The problem is that the FDA and CDC, which are both concerned about acrylamide, have not considered that a huge chunk of the US population now has Long-COVID and associated nerve problems. This means that the public is now more sensitive to nerve poisons than before COVID-19.
When people are healthy, they can tolerate some nerve poison in their food. But when they’re sick with a nerve disease, they become more sensitive to a nerve poison. This means the Feds need to reevaluate their claim that levels of acrylamide are too low in foods to cause nerve damage. The population has changed. People now have nerve damage from COVID. The last thing they need is more nerve poison.
But don’t expect the Feds to issue the warnings they should about this crisis. California is currently being sued by the Chamber of Commerce to prevent warning labels on foods and drinks that contain acrylamide. Warning people that the food they are eating is contaminated with acrylamide is not good for business.
Actually, the issue the Feds are more concerned about regarding acrylamide is that it causes cancer. But the studies on that are mixed, so no action is being taken warning about acrylamide in foods, yet. Meanwhile, the fight over whether or not acrylamide causes cancer is overshadowing the fact that it does cause nerve damage.
But you shouldn’t wait for the government to overcome industry and cultural resistance to this information before you decide to improve your health. If you are suffering from any nervous condition, be it a mental health issue or heart palpitations or digestive problems or numb/tingling feet and hands, then you need to stop eating nerve poison with your meal.
It’s simple. Eat foods raw, boiled, or steamed. That’s it. Avoid roasted beverages like coffee or, especially, coffee-substitutes that have roasted grains. The darker the roast the higher the poison level. (Try a tea instead). Even chocolate is roasted, unfortunately. Potatoes, which are major sources of acrylamide when fried or roasted, are fine if only boiled. A Keto Diet would be fine, since the major offenders in creating acrylamide when cooked at high temperatures are grain products, and Keto diets avoid starchy foods. A Paleo diet also avoids grains. But, again, you can still enjoy grains, but boiled and not fried or baked.
It may sound severe to give up your donuts, bread, pastries, coffee, and fries. But if you are suffering from nerve problems, you need to try eliminating this poison. Acrylamide is everywhere, so total elimination is difficult. But you can reduce the amount, and possibly stop the progressive loss of nerve function.
The good news is that, from research on people who have been exposed to acrylamide in industrial settings and have suffered nerve damage, this damage can heal to some degree. However, as the brain also gets involved, it becomes more difficult to heal, since it’s hard to regenerate brain cells.
Keep in mind that the effects of acrylamide on the nerves are cumulative. This means you may not feel the effect at first, but the impacts add up. By the time you have been poisoning yourself for 60 years, your body will have signs of chronic nerve poisoning. Maybe this causes other problems associated with aging and a progressively failing nervous system?
In any event, you now know that your food is tainted by poison if cooked too long at too high a temperature. It could be killing you slowly, waiting until you are weak from something else, like a viral infection that causes nerve problems, such as COVID-19. At that point, what you once tolerated in a healthy body may be no longer tolerated in a sick body. This means that the crispy bread you enjoyed yesterday may be killing you tomorrow.
For more, with lots of science and quotes from the experts on this issue, see my article, COOKED TO DEATH: How the acrylamide in food causes nerve damage and Long-COVID.
Bon appetit!