Between $147 billion to $210 billion.

These numbers represent the yearly average cost of obesity for American Healthcare.

$327 billion is the average diabetes-related medical costs per year according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Good day and welcome back to the second release of Panacea, the newsletter about food and health that is so good that you wish it was edible (gluten free option available soon).

Today I want to talk to you about the elephant in the room, the confusion we live on a day to day basis that is making us sick.

The reason why people are not getting any healthier is there is a lot of confusion regarding food and health. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, unless you have a clear understanding of those two factors, you walk through life as a customer of many complacent industries that, while you get sicker and more and more fat, they shake hands and pat each other on the shoulder.

The numbers listed above, raising every year at an unprecedented speed like the cakes of your auntie Denise that in the last years keeps messing with the amount of yeast in her recipes, are very daunting because unless an effective long lasting action is taken, like educating the masses, this won’t stop or revert.

The first imprint should be given in school teaching kids through playtime and books, through government ads or a bigger investments in tv shows focused on educating.

Instead, this is what the average breakfast for kids look like around the world (you can check this new york times HERE ): most of them are fed with bread and spreads and cereals.

I grew up with coco pops and nutella on white milk bread, but either me or my mum did not know any better in the ‘90s. Now we have the internet, podcasts and plenty of other resources though, and thanks to them you can easily find out the the nutrients within food, or the chemicals hiding in it.

Starting your day with cereals, this is what you get:

In 2010, Kellog’s had to come forward: ‘A substance that leached out of cereal packaging and sickened consumers, spurring Kellogg's recall of 28 million boxes of Froot Loops, Apple Jacks and other popular children's cereals, has been identified as a petroleum-based compound that appears to be a breakdown product of chemicals used in the cereal box liners. The compound, methylnaphthalene.’

Just to give you some perspective, there is NOT a world standardised view of what is harmful and what is accepted in food. The following food ingredients are banned or restricted in Europe and allowed in the U.S.A:
Artificial Food Colors:

• Allura Red (Red 40)

• Tartrazine (Yellow 5)

• Sunset Yellow (Yellow 6)

• Quinoline Yellow (Yellow 10)

• Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO)

• Potassium Bromate

• rBGH (Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone)

• Chlorinated Chicken

• Synthetic Growth Hormones in Beef

• Synthetic Pesticides

• Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

Given the busy lifestyle we have, adding all the distractions that take us away from our priorities few minutes at the time (damn those cats videos) it seems very hard to learn how to defend yourself from harmful food, understand how your body works in relation to what you eat and act accordingly.

I remember reading that years ago a guy in London sued the council because of too many billboards in the city centre: I’m sure you know but constantly being exposed to advertising (spotify interrupting ads, visual billboards on your way to work) programs your subconscious brain:

The #1 Habit you should develop is to create a routine that does not expose you to any manipulation of this kind (netflix does the opposite in a great way, but it’s for another time):

Spotify, like any tv channel out there, knows this and having done their studies they know that when there is a cathartic moment, a spike in emotions, that’s the time to run an ad. So the show, song, match you are watching gets interrupted abruptly so that you start associating that dopamine flood with what they are now showing you.

#2: Wake up early(er) and take your time to start your day:

After 7 years working as a chef, I developed the bad habit of going to bed late, mostly because after a shift I was hyper caffeinated and adrenaline pumped. I used to love the silence you get at night and make the most out of it by writing, but I also liked to wake up early which, after a while, takes its toll.

Right now, my routine is to wake up between 5 and 7am, hot/cold shower, brush teeth and tongue scraping (more on that later), drink some (warm) lemon water followed by exercising, journaling and then a detox smoothie.

Some days I have a ‘normal’ breakfast, and to me it looks like a (seasonal) fruit salad (sometimes cooked) with anything in between chia seeds, vegan coconut yogurt, spirulina, some nuts and honey/pollen (although you should not eat fats in the morning to not overwork your liver which works at night, when you sleep).

I promise you, it’s way tastier than bread and spread or cereals, it does not leave you with sugar swings and it’s way. more. nutritious.

#3 Remove processed sugars from your diet and eat food that contains 3 ingredients or less:

It took me 30 years to get here. Growing up in the ‘90s there was no understanding of the relationship between food and health, so my mum was buying me a lot of sweets to cease the tantrums (I have been genetically blessed with my constitution for all my life regardless of my childhood) and my grandma was often treating me with zabaione (raw scrambled egg with sugar). Terrible, I know, yet so delicious I’m drooling at writing this.

As you know, long term effects of processed sugar consumptions for humans (especially young developing humans) leads to the following:

1. Impaired cognitive function

2. Reduced attention span

3. Memory problems

4. Learning difficulties

5. Mood swings

6. Behavioral issues

7. Neuroinflammation

8. Disruption of neuronal communication

9. Increased risk of addiction to sugar

10. Altered reward system

Also, having a nutritious meal and drinking water in between influences digestion. But what really stops the digestion and prevents the absorption of nutrients is drinking coffee, sugary drinks or any form of sugar (that dessert thought) right after a meal.

What we need to change is our definition of food: we all fall prey to cravings, for me they look like a dark chocolate bar (with a life span of 10 minutes) or a bag of chips/popcorn during movie night. You can feel that warm feeling wrapping you like a hug, I know.
Regardless of the times we fail though, I would like to start forming the association of food with anything containing 3 or less ingredients.

Tofu (water, coagulant, soybeans): acceptable.

Grass fed Steak: great.

McDonalds 19ingredients chips: meh.

#4: Learn to question everything.

The above statement includes this article and his author too.
But what I’m referring to is anything you hear from your social circle, your youtube content creator, your governor, president and doctor.

According to the Physicians' Health Study 44% of doctors are overweight and 6% obese (REFERENCE) and according to a study of 500 primary care physicians around the country, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that a doctor’s own size influenced how he or she cared for patients with weight problems (HERE)

If you want to simplify things, consider these two guidelines:
Learn to listen to your body, this means removing the distractions that prevent you to listen to what’s happening when you do anything (no phones or music when you are eating, so you can focus better on how your stomach reacts to it and when you are getting full).
Start looking into what you consume: this comes down to something as simple as getting a product into your hands, see where it comes from and what ingredients it contains. With the average medium-sized grocery store being organised as a mouse trap to turn you into an irrational buyer and carrying anywhere from a few thousand to around 20,000 products, 20-30% of which being fresh products, most of the rest is not as healthy as you think for your body.
When you shop for food anything, check the labels and anything you don’t understand, duckduckgo it (and I specifically chose not to write google it because google can hide information, like when you asked to your ex ‘did you see anyone else last week’ and he/she said no because they met two weeks ago instead. Search for long term effect and studies of that specific thing on health. You will be surprised. Then angry. Then sad.

At the end of reading this you might think that your grocery shopping cart is determined by how much you can spend and fresh clean food is unaffordable, that’s why you buy x and y.

Although I agree with you (I read last week that the price of fresh food increased between 20 and 25% since 2021) what you should focus on is a healthy nutrition.

You can buy a lot of veggies, a sirloin/porterhouse/t-bone steak twice a week (~30-60 $ a kilo/2.2 pound) or feast at McDonald’s all week.

But consider this scenario: you chose a mix of the first two options for few decades, everything you eat gets inside of you and resurfaces through your organs and skin, you look as pretty and shining as a royal, and healthy.
Sure you spent those extra 20/30% in food but there is no medical bill waiting for you at the end of this contingency of choices.

OR

You follow Morgan Spurlock’s diet and anything in between (if you don’t know this guy, he filmed a documentary called SuperSize Me and he tried 30 days straight of McDonald’s and documented the experience and all the negative effects coming from his new culinary habit, from getting weight to troubles in sleeping, cardiovascular problems including erection, shortness of breath and so on) and you experience chronic inflammation through your body and brain (which impact your thinking and behaviors too) but you save money.

The first option is somehow healthy, the second one is very far from that.

The third option (yes there was a third option) is to become literate in the practical knowledge that works for you, because we are bio individually unique and what works for you might need some adjustments for me: from the connection between food and health and everything around these two topics, including skills, habits, biohacks, supplements and cooking proficiency.

Any email from here onward will be specifically targeting one topic and I need your help to understand what kind of content you want me to cover more.

Also, I’m planning already pdfs and videos covering the food/recipe side of it, so any feedback will help to stir the boat in the right direction.

Thank you and see you next week,

Prometheus aka Luca