Slow Kill: Every Meal Matters

Just imagine your favourite meal with the aroma of this wonderful food choice wafting upwards to your olfactory consciousness and the sublime sensations of taste and texture in your mouth as you savour every mouthful. This degustation delight savoury or dessert is no doubt occurring in the presence of enjoyable company with either friends or family, making this meal even more delightful. This lovely sensory experience is however very short-lived. It is enjoyed fleetingly and essentially over minutes, but the effects of this one meal on your blood glucose and blood fat levels will linger in your bloodstream for 6 hours or more. In fact, there are many changes in your blood after eating that goes beyond just elevated glucose or fat levels, and collectively these changes are termed postprandial dysmetabolism. These are the destructive postprandial (after-eating) effects that persist in your blood and body long after that oh so brief, and yet enjoyable eating experience is forgotten. But this is an ongoing process as you need to eat to live and so the next meal is not too far away on the horizon when the process continues, meal-after-meal over your lifetime. It is highly unlikely that anyone apart from the boffins of nutrition will acknowledge that food can be so damaging and ultimately deadly over a lifetime of consumption, but this is an undeniable fact of life! We eat to live but the very thing that keeps us alive, food, damages us! Food is nothing more than an amalgam of dietary chemicals that will need to be broken down into energy or where the nutrient components are used to build cell architecture, functionality, receptors, neurotransmitters and cell signalling molecules. In the process of creating energy from food or using food components to build cellular structures, free radicals (atoms, molecules or ions with unpaired electrons) and reactive oxygen species (ROS) are released causing damaging effects on cell components and proteins and subsequent inflammation throughout your body. However, this is not the only way that food harms you as you will soon find out. This cellular and organ damage is not noticeable or even felt after just one meal although some meals in the wrong individual can kill during or soon after eating and I will show you how and this has nothing to do with an allergy. This food-related damage is cumulative over your lifetime. It ages you incrementally and increases your risk of obesity, heart disease, vascular damage, diabetes, dementia and a range of cancers. Unhealthy diets can lead to telomere shortening. Telomeres are the ‘shoelaces’ at the ends of chromosomes that will ultimately shorten and limit cell division. Telomeres are an excellent marker of health and reflect the damaging effects of bad diets or destructive environmental factors through telomere shortening. Telomeres will be discussed further in this book. There needs to be a change not only in mindset but knowledge as well about the dangers of food no matter how healthy you perceive that food to be. ALL food ultimately damages you. Your meal composition is a critical factor in determining the extent of food-related damage caused by every meal you consume! This book provides you with that detailed understanding of the damaging effects of food and how to avoid this ongoing and cumulative damage over your lifespan. This insidious process is the ‘Slow-Kill’ that I am talking about in this book. Control how rapidly you age by controlling your meal composition. Decades of medical and nutritional knowledge enables me to see clearly how these food-related effects lead to chronic illness and premature death which, to a large extent, are eminently preventable. Truth is emerging through all that dietary ‘noise’ out there. The key to a long healthspan and looking far younger than your years is to understand how food damages your body meal-by-meal. Read more