3 Common Ways Nutrients Are Being Destroyed In Your Food...
One of the greatest concerns with the food supply today is the toxicity and lack of nutrients. This begins with the seed, then the soil it is planted in, followed by the treatment it receives during its growth phase. But if that wasn't enough, a further degradation of food takes place between the harvest and the plate. These are the three most prominent ways.
1. Processing
The most commonly eaten and most processed food category is arguably the grains. They often undergo a process that leaves them with a fraction of the nutritional value than when they were initially harvested in order to produce many types of flour products.
To begin this process, the highly nutritious, sprout-able bran and the husk that has the fiber are removed, leaving only the light yellow endosperm, which is virtually all starch with very little nutritional value and a high glycemic index rating.
Following that, in order to bypass the aging process and add shelf life, as well as keep the clean white color, the endosperm is crushed and treated with chlorides to make it instantly white. A byproduct of that process is alloxan, which is used to induce diabetes in lab animals for medical testing.
What is left is a food that has a mere remnant of its original nutrient value.
2. Heating
Another way the nutrients in food are destroyed is through heating. Various phytonutrients, enzymes, probiotics, and vitamins do no survive the heating process, which depletes the food of these life-promoting nutrients.
One heating process that takes place prior to food making it to the store is pasteurization. This is commonly done with dairy products in order to remove any rogue bacteria that may be present during the harvesting process. Unfortunately, once it is pasteurized, it has removed all delicate and beneficial nutrients like enzymes and good bacteria, which are crucial for proper digestion and health.
Another very common practice is cooking foods in ovens and on stovetops at high temperatures for extended periods of time, which results in the destruction of various nutrients.
Finally, microwaving is the worst way to cook food because they excite the water molecules inside whatever you are cooking, causing heat to be formed from the inside out. This results in a cell-by-cell nuking of the food causing near-total molecular decomposition of the vitamins and phytonutrients that promote disease.
This leaves microwaved food almost completely dead, leaving nothing but empty calories, fiber, and minerals. Virtually every vitamin and phytonutrient content has been destroyed.
3. Irradiation
This process exposes food to radioactive materials, such as cesium-137 and cobalt-60, to kill insects, bacteria, molds, and fungi, prevent sprouting, and extend shelf life.
Unfortunately, foods that have been irradiated lose much of their nutritional value. Irradiation can destroy between 5 and 80 percent of vitamins and nutrients found in a variety of foods including essential vitamins A, B complex, C, E, and K. As an example, irradiated eggs lose 80 percent of vitamin A and orange juice loses 48 percent of beta-carotene.
Although the heating and irradiation process are often done by governmental organizations to reduce the number of food borne illnesses, it has indirectly created a policy that increases the number of people killed by infections and chronic disease due to destruction of probiotics, enzymes, and other nutrients that help the body resist and destroy infection in the body.
The bottom line is that the more whole, raw, and fresh the food consumed, the healthier the immune and detoxification systems that destroy such harmful pathogens.
What Have You Done To Cut Out These 3 Nutrient Killers?
