Understanding food (and food-toxins) affects on the body has been a large focus of my life.

Over the years I have consumed an immense amount of information on digestion, food, and disease. From my university days of doing a quarter-long in-depth dive into organic food production which I presented in a speech every week, to running a raw food kitchen in upstate New York.

One of the most compelling pieces of areas of my learnings is in what happens to our body depending on what we consume.

I have divided into two areas: pure real food verse all the man-made bits we consume.

Man-made includes:

• Preservatives.

• Petrochemicals in the form of pesticides.

• Man-made oils, like vegetable oil.

• Processed salt, aka table salt.

• Hormones and antibiotics, that we consume when we consume animal products that are given these.

Our bodies struggle to digest everything that is man-made. Period.

Can our body deal with them?

Sure. Kinda.

What our body can’t eliminate it stores.

Our bodies have evolved to survive. So it will do what is necessary when it is flooded with toxins.

A toxin, I have come to define, is anything the body is exposed to that ranges from not useful to damaging.

Our body needs water: pure water, without chlorine, without residual pesticides that have leaked into many water sources, and without fluoride. The more chemicals in water, the more work the eliminating organs need to do in order to process.

Our body needs nutrients, vitamins and calories in the form of fats, proteins, carbs, fibers.

All of the perservatives, pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, that come with most foods are all toxins that the body has to filter, process, store or eliminate.

The change in our toxin intake, since the industrial revolution, is huge and impossible to adapt to at the rate our bodies are being asked to.

The heavier the toxic load the more bogged down the body becomes, the more bogged down the body becomes the more storing happens.

Which results in an accumulation of toxins and opens the door for disease.

The blind spot we have is that most people don’t have a direct reaction to a particular intake of a food-toxin, the body CAN deal with it.

But what happens is a slow and accumulated toxin load that most people don’t see the connection to their daily life. It seems to just suddenly happen one day.

The body gets overloaded with toxins and organs start to loose the ability to function. Wherever a person is genetically weaker, then that part of the body will go first.

Man-made oils is one toxin I have studied a lot. Our bodies crave and need oils. Fats and oils are vital to our body’s functioning, especially our brains. Our brains have evolved to crave and love oil, it is how the human brain has been able to evolve so incredibly: a diet high in fats.

But when we eat trans fats, vegetable oils, or any man-made oil then our bodies take them in and try to use them to build and repair cells. But man-made oils are comparable with building with styrofoam, it seems to work but then quickly crumbles.

My conclusion from my two decades of studying food-toxins and its effects on the body is to ingest as few man-made bits as possible. And to consume as much real food as possible, as close to its natural form as possible, with ideally no man-made add ons.

It is impossible to avoid the man-made bits entirely.

Minimizing man-made bits is my goal.

Minimizing the man-made bits lowers the demand on my body of processing, eliminating and dealing with toxins. Minimizing also ensures that I am focusing on providing my body with the actual substances it needs to repair and maintain: real food.