Welcome back!!! Click ‘Read Online’ above to see past topics! Feel free to forward this info to friends or family you feel it may help! Todays message is one designed to help you have less pain and inflammation. And oddly enough it involves pointing a finger at some veggies we all grew up eating while assuming they were good for us.

Monsters in Some of Our Vegetables

Nightshades We Eat

Nightshades are a particular class of vegetables (most of which are actually ‘non-sweet’ fruits). They include:

• tomatoes

• peppers (all kinds)

• eggplant

• white potatoes

This class of veggies contain chemicals that can damage your gut and contribute to the dreaded Chronic Inflammation epidemic I’ve been writing to you about.

It seems like telling the truth about many of the foods we love is always such a damn downer! But somebody has to do it! Nightshades have chemical substances that can damage the lining of your small intestine causing ‘leaky gut’. This allows substances to enter your bloodstream that your digestive system would normally not allow in. And once they are in your bloodstream, they can trigger your immune system to produce Chronic Inflammation - which as I have told you before is at the heart of most all chronic disease processes.

For the Birds

Understanding why tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant are loaded with harmful chemicals was perplexing to me for a long time. These are, strictly speaking, actually fruits, and generally, fruits are designed in nature to be eaten so the consumer can spread the seeds around! A blueberry, for example, ‘wants’ to be eaten by a bear, or a human, because the tiny indigestible seeds will get dropped somewhere in a pile of fertilizer (poop). We are actually helping out such a plant by eating its fruit (provided we poop outdoors!!!). However, the wild version of nightshades have very strong repellant chemicals in them. The original peppers were all face-melting hot. Wild tomatoes have a very strong, repellant chemical flavor. This keeps most animals away from nightshades in the wild—and this seemed counterproductive to the plant if it wants to use animals to spread its seeds—until I learned that birds are apparently immune to these substances. And what better than a bird to spread your seeds? A bird can pluck a pepper and fly miles away before it poops out the seeds. Birds are the world champion seed disperses, and nature, in its wisdom, designed the nightshades to selectively take this advantage.

Who Do We Blame?

About 8,000 years B.C. our ancestors began farming and invented what we call the selective breeding of plants to over time produce a host of fruits, veggies, and seeds that were never meant to be a part of the human diet. This is how today we have sweet peppers that don’t burn your face off, and big, fat, tangy tomatoes. But these fruits still contain damaging chemicals. Much of the produce of early agriculture that exist through to today involved domesticating plants that were never meant to be eaten by us, and are the very foods driving our epidemic of obesity and chronic inflammation induced disease.

The caption on the picture above may seem a bit melodramatic. But hey - I got your attention, and this is important, and honestly - on the level. The wild version of the white potato was actually blue inside - because it contains a compound similar to the poison cyanide!!!

Yep.

White potatoes are tubers that are attached to the roots of the plant. They contain the plant’s food supply, and unlike fruits, the plant does not want you to eat them, so good old mother nature put a poison in them that keeps animals in the wild from digging them up. Early farming communities thousands of years ago in the Peruvian highlands learned how to selectively breed out most all of the cyanide-like substance - resulting in low toxicity levels.

Not only does the white potato have chemicals in it still to this day that can damage the gut, it also has the ability to wreak havoc on your blood sugar and insulin balance—even worse than white table sugar! It is a major culprit in today’s epidemic of pre-diabetes, diabetes, and obesity.

Is there no end to bad news on foods we love to eat? In this case yes and no:

• tomatoes & peppers - most of the bad stuff is in the skins and seeds. If you remove them they are okay-ish. (Example - roasting the peppers to remove skin. Blanching tomatoes to peel skin - remove seeds).

• No way to make white potatoes good for you. Substitute for sweet potatoes (much healthier choice).

• we can all live without eggplant

Could not resist showing this.

While standing in the checkout line at Publix I saw this magazine cover and had to take a picture. The Plant Based diet it promotes ignores the chronic inflammatory nature of certain foods. While there are no nightshades on this plate, we do see pasta (wheat) and soybeans—two of the potentially most gut damaging inflammatory foods we know of. They call this ‘healthy, whole food.’

A ‘pre-agricultural’ Paleo diet is the way to go to avoid chronic inflammation and create the healthiest version of yourself. Click ‘Read Online’ at the top if you haven’t already done so and scroll down to browse previous newsletters that expand on what a Paleo diet is and can do for you! Ask me questions about this in the office!

Until next time - Blessings to you!