We eat more and more rubbish
Interview for the ekologia.pl

We eat more and more rubbish. Interview with biologist and nutritionist Grazyna Pajak PhD

In shops there’s plenty of food filled with chemical substances, some of which are even hard to pronounce. Do we know what we eat ? Do we realize which ingredients can be harmful ? About the influence of proper diet on our health and why we should avoid processed food we talk to a biologist and dietician dr Grażyna Pająk.

Joanna Szubierajska: Apparently we eat about 2 kg of chemical substances a year. In which products there is the most of it ?

Dr Grażyna Pająk: 2 kg of chemical substances was eaten in the 90s, at the moment the food available on market supplies us with around 7 to 9 kg of those substances yearly. The highest amount of chemical additives is in all the products that are maximally processed, highly efficient, coloured and with a long expiration date. Only 100 years ago we had a selection of about 500 food products, currently we have around 50 thousand, but the modern food rarely meets the needs of our bodies. We eat more and more rubbish, less and less nourishment.

 

9 kilograms is a lot. So how does our body react to those processed nutrients ?

It rebels. At first we don’t feel well, we don’t have energy, we are irritated, we have sleeping problems and we are chronically tired. Our immunity decreases. With time we have more symptoms – allergies, intolerance and different kinds of health problems, it is a call for help. Mostly we ignore the signals sent by our organism or we try to suppress it with pills for every disease until we are seriously ill.

 

The institutions that introduce food on market try to convince us that processed food is safe and healthy, meets specific norms, so it isn’t harmful ?

In mass food production the controls are necessity. There is a number of norms and provisions thanks to which the processed food can go to shops. However it does not mean that our body can always accept them. For centuries a man used to acquire, cultivate and grow natural food. Then we supplied our bodies with all the essential nutrients that built our cells. Currently we eat products and their names, not the nutrients. A lot of them contain substances that are foreign to our organism. In the products we eat the TRANS fatty acids, massive amounts of sugar and the omnipresent GLUTEN. Those products are destructive to us; only 100 years ago they were not present in our diet, today they are common and compliant to norms, so often treated as a normal food.

 

So that’s why it is said that the obese people are undernourished ?

Currently obesity is mostly a result of a body malnutrition, but also of overworking, tiredness, excess of empty calories, pesticides, GMO and electromagnetic smog. Paradoxically more people die from civilization diseases than hunger. We try to lose weight, we limit the number of calories or use fashionable diets and we maintain the weight for a short time, then we are trapped by the yo-yo effect. As a result we weaken the muscle tissue and the fatty tissue becomes thicker. The proper weight-losing program should remove toxins from the body, complement the deficiencies, improve the metabolic processes eliminating the excess of fatty tissue and strengthening the healthy tissues. Such system lets maintain a beautiful silhouette, good condition and immunity without the yo-yo effect. 

 

What about the storage of food and preparing meals – does it even matter ?

Yes. The base of healthy meals is the presence of enzymes that are sensitive to processing and improper storage. For example, in fridge we shouldn’t store food in plastic bags, it is better to put it into a glass or ceramic bowl and cover it with a sling film. We need to remember that we shouldn’t cook fruit and vegetables for a long time and put them into metal pots. A better option are the enameled and glass vessels. Let’s remember that for a thermal treatment the best are fire, food steamer, devices using the halogen light, convection and electric ovens.

 

What about the food prepared in the microwave oven ?

For years it is known that a microwave oven is harmful. Already in the 60s the Russian conducted a detailed research showing that food from a microwave oven in simply dead. Within seconds in the heated food we destroy all enzymes and biologically active compounds. Instead, we create a lot of free radicals and processed chemical compounds. In order to digest the dead food, the body needs to use its own enzymes and energy. As a result, instead of getting energy from food, we take it away of the organism in order to digest what we ate.

 

„Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” convinced Hippocrates. Can we really regain health and well-being by diet ?

 

Of course. Hippocrates also said that: „we will never understand what is a disease until we don’t know what is food”. From the biological point of view nutrition is supplying the body in all essential nutrients, from plants and animals, that each our body cell needs in order to live, work, regenerate and breed. Our body is built of 80 to 100 trillion of such living bricks. During one day we change around 2,5 billion cells in a body. With a proper nutrition we are able to clean the body, regenerate it and nourish. Then we function completely differently using the potential of a human body. A proper lifestyle and a properly adjusted diet can work “miracles” in case of diseases.

 

Can the cleansing therapies work “miracles” as well ?

Purifying the body of toxins and deposits is essential, especially in the 21st century when we are bombed with harmful chemical substances from all angles. Unfortunately there is no one wonderful diet for everyone. The way of cleansing should be adjusted individually depending on the problems we have. A safe way to relieve the body is a one-day starvation diet or mono diet consisted of seasonal fruit and vegetables. For many years I have been adjusting diets for my patients. The positive effects of a well conducted cleansing therapy still surprises me and my patients.

 

What diet should we use if we don’t want to go to the dietician, but we still care about our health ?

A proper diet should supply us with all the essential nutrients in the most natural form. Additionally, we should select the proportions of ingredients according to our metabolism type that we can determine indicatively by a test. Let’s eat 5-6 meals a day. By limiting gluten, sugar and trans fatty acids, soya, corn and all the maximally processed products, we can create a way of nutrition that will be safe for our body. The diet should include groats and their derivatives (flour, flakes), vegetables, legumes, fruit, ecological fish and meat, free range eggs, organic fermented dairy, real butter without plant additives, clarified butter, olive oil, flaxseed oil and rice oil. Let’s eat a lot of almonds, walnuts, sunflower, pumpkin, flaxseed, nigella, herbs. We should remember about supplying ourselves with a big amount of water – clean and revived.

Thank you for the interview !