Body Wisdom and Why Bad Food Tastes Good

Don’t let yourself eat junk food just because your body craves something in it. Try to figure out what it is your body craves. Could it be fat? Could it be salt? Could it be starch?

Salt

If it’s salt, you might also love popcorn and other salty food. This implicates the adrenal glands. Maybe they’re letting too much salt (sodium chloride) leave the body through the kidneys. Maybe they’re letting too much potassium chloride through, too. A diuretic pill could certainly have a similar effect.

Help the adrenal glands do their job of regulating sodium and potassium chloride by cleaning them up. Let salt-hunger be your signal to do a kidney cleanse (page 549). This will clean adrenals too. Even a slight drop in sodium and potassium chlo­ride in the blood (body fluids) can make you too fatigued to tie your own shoelaces.

Remember, when your body craves potato chips, it craves something in the potato chips. If you let yourself eat highly salted food while you’re giving the adrenals a clean up, at least add potassium chloride to your diet. Make yourself a mixture of equal parts of sodium chloride and potassium chloride. Part of salt hunger is actually potassium hunger. Let your body (your taste) decide on the amount of potassium chloride to add. Maybe one part potassium chloride to two or three parts sodium chloride is a better mixture for you. After mixing, store it in the original containers (re-label them) to prevent caking. If you put it in an ordinary salt shaker, it will cake soon. Use a shaker with a lid that closes.

Fats

Maybe you like French fries because of the fat. If you deprive yourself of the “good” normal greases that come from plant or animal sources which would ordinarily make up 25% of your calories, of course you’ll crave grease. But what a bad trade it is. Now you are getting lab-made (hydrogenated) grease with a non — biological structure, and loaded with the carcinogen nickel.

So if you’re body tells you that you need grease, go back to olive oil, butter, cheese (baked only), lard, avocados, nuts and nut butters (homemade only) and seeds. Humankind has been eating these natural fats long before cholesterol was vilified. The key to cholesterol control is not fat avoidance, but a liver cleanse!

Starch

If switching to natural greases doesn’t satisfy your “fat-tooth”, maybe its the potato in the French fries that your body craves. Plain, pure starch. Do you also love bread and pasta (more pure starch though very inferior to potatoes)? Pure starch is very easy to digest and has a large adsorptive capability for toxins. In fact, if any family member should accidentally eat something poisonous, drinking cornstarch will quickly mop it up and keep it stuck so it can’t enter your tissues. (This doesn’t work for all poisons.) By craving pure starches, your body could be telling you about a need to improve your digestion (liver disorders) or to eat and breathe less toxic things.

Maybe a stomach-full of baby Ascaris is telling you to eat only food that doesn’t need a lot of acid: "just potatoes, bread and pasta, please, and skip the sauce.” Ascaris inhibits acid pro­duction by the stomach. This can result in an aversion to meat.

It doesn’t take much acid to digest pure starch and get it on its way out of the stomach. And out of the stomach means relief: relief of the pressure on the diaphragm and liver, heartburn, that too-full feeling, and other digestive disturbances.

Sugar

Your body runs on sugar. If you are short on sugar it will turn fat into sugar. If you are short on both, it will turn your muscles into sugar. However eating more sugar doesn’t cure the craving. You have to find out why you are so short, in spite of eating it.

The first thing to try is 1 mg chromium (five 200 mcg tablets, see Sources) per day. If you still crave sugar after a week the problem is something else. Perhaps you have pancreatic flukes upsetting your sugar regulation. Kill them and go off commercial beverages that may contain wood alcohol. Sugar regulation is very complex, but these two approaches help most of the time.

Dislikes

Respect your body’s opinion when it says, “No, I don’t want to eat that.” Our education about nutritive value of food may be sound but there are other facts to consider. We should take a lesson from nursing babies: when they refuse to nurse, there is something unpalatable in the mother’s milk. usually the mother has eaten onions or members of the cabbage family. The baby tries it once, and learns to reject it immediately. The baby’s liver, in its wisdom, does not want the baby to eat what it can’t properly digest. The mother may feel: “Now, this breast milk is good for you and drink it you must, or you shall go hungry.” Unfortunately, this works for 2-year-olds and up. They are forced to eat carrots, peas, and other vegetables; vegetables that taste terrible, (modern agriculture has ruined the flavor). They alone taste the bitterness of PIT, a cyanide-related chemical, and very difficult for the liver to metabolize. Broccoli and onions may burn the tongue with its sulfur-containing acids. Green beans, onions, garlic, eggplant, all have unique chemicals in them. If you or your child are not ready to eat them, avoid them carefully, so you don’t get a surprise dose of the toxic chemical.

The more mold a child eats, inadvertently, in peanut butter, bread, potato chips, syrups, the less capable the liver is of de­toxifying foods. This will certainly increase the “pickiness” of a child’s appetite. If your child has too many foods on her or his personal “off list”, let this signal you to improve liver function. Stop the barrage of chemicals that comes with cold cereals, canned soup, grocery bread, instant cheese dishes, artificially flavored gelatin, canned whipped cream, fancy yogurts and cookies or chips. Move to a simpler diet, cooked cereal with honey, cinnamon and whipping cream (only 4 ingredients), milk (boiled), bakery bread, canned tuna or salmon, plain cooked or fried potatoes with butter, and slices of raw vegetables and fruit without any sauces, except honey or homemade tomato sauce, to dip into.

It is frustrating to cook “a fine meal” for the family and find everybody likes it except Ms. Picky. The good news is that she can usually think of something she would rather eat. If it’s nu­tritious, be thankful. If it’s not say No.

Adults should hide their junk food, including everything off limits to children. Don’t “hide” your junk food in the refrigerator and lower level cupboards! Treat yourself as well as your child. If a food tastes bad, don’t eat it. If you crave it, try to un­derstand the message.