Of course we all know the old saying… “You are what you eat.” Well, you’re also what your food eats. So, it could be “You are what, what you eat… eats.”

People who know me and patients have heard me say a million times: “Eat only grass fed beef, free-range poultry and wild-caught fish.” In this post, we are going to really examine why that is so important.

Bioaccumulation

This is the concept that if there is toxicity in an environment, animals will absorb the toxicity and as it moves up the food chain, the toxicity becomes more and more potent.

Here’s an example. Say there is a mercury mine near the seaside. It leaks mercury into the ocean where the krill eat it. They absorb mercury toxicity, but it’s not that much because, well, they are very small animals.

The salmon come along and eat the krill, but they eat hundreds or thousands of these krill, absorbing all of the mercury they’ve consumed. A big tuna comes along and eats dozens of salmon throughout a year or so, absorbing all of their mercury toxicity. A shark or halibut or swordfish or the REALLY big albacore tuna comes along and eats salmon and smaller tuna and everything else, absorbing their toxicity.

Humans throw a net out and eat ALL of that. Fish is one of the top sources of heavy metal toxicity for humans. Humans are the real apex predators.

“But wait Dr. Ernst! You are telling us to eat wild-caught fish? But it sounds like even wild fish are picking up heavy metal toxicity?” you understandably ask.

Yes, that’s true. Your best strategy there is to eat smaller fish, i.e., salmon, trout, Pollock and the smaller tuna such as yellowfin (being the most readily-available smaller tuna). Albacore and Bluefin tuna are very large and thus more toxic. Probably best to avoid swordfish and shark altogether.

The main reason I recommend wild-caught fish isn’t the heavy metals. It’s the factory farm-raised “meat industrial complex” that I’m worried about.

Factory farming and its impact on your food – grains and inflammation

Among the many health issues that arise from factory farming, the most poignant is systemic, chronic inflammation.

Most animals kept in factory farms are fed grains – corn, wheat, barley, etc. There are a few reasons for this.

• One, it’s relatively cheap feed.
• Two, it’s considered acceptable feed by the USDA, FDA and various animal rights organizations.
• Three, and most importantly, it makes these animals gain weight. And anyone who’s ever bought meat at the store knows that it is sold by the pound. Make the animals fat, make more money!

The problem is, modern grains are arguably poisonous. The combination of heavy genetic modification over the last 40-50 years, a higher concentration of gluten, pesticides and herbicides all cause enormous amounts of inflammation in the body. And it doesn’t go away. The inflammation is chronic, it lasts for years or even a lifetime and it is damaging to nearly every system in the body.

This sort of inflammation is at the root of a slew of diseases, including (but not limited to) asthma, arthritis, Crohn’s diseases, Alzheimer’s, several types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, Parkinson’s and lupus.

Factory farming and its impact on your food – hormones

Cows in the dairy industry can be given growth hormones in order to increase their milk production. Once their productivity declines, these cows are slaughtered for beef. The six growth hormones commonly used by the U.S. dairy industry have been shown to significantly increase the risk of breast, prostate, and colon cancer in beef consumers. It also reduces fertility, causes weight gain, contributes to sleep problems, and here’s a relatively new phenomenon – estrogen dominance.

Hormones in our food, as well as environmental and industrial toxins, are acting like estrogen in the human body, causing many men to become more… womanly. It causes breast enlargement, lower testosterone, lowered muscle mass, low sperm count, etc…

They can cause severe hormonal imbalance, particularly in pre-pubescent teens, causing them to reach puberty at much earlier ages.

Factory farming and its impact on your food – antibiotics

Since the 1950s, antibiotics have been used on factory farms to increase the rate of growth in animals. Today, an estimated 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to farm animals for non-therapeutic purposes. Using antibiotics in this way can lead to drug-resistant bacteria; as a result, certain bacterial infections have already become or are on their way to becoming untreatable in humans. Antibiotic resistant infections kill 90,000 Americans every year.

In the U.S. every year, about 3 million pounds of antibiotics are prescribed… to humans. But almost 25 million pounds is given to animals in factory farms, non-therapeutically, which means even when they are not sick. They are essentially just fed a steady stream of antibiotics.

It’s gotten so bad that even organizations like the American Medical Association; the Centers for Disease Control; the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences; and the World Health Organization have linked non-therapeutic antibiotic use on factory farms with increased antibacterial resistance and called for a ban.

But antibiotic resistance isn’t even half the problem. When these animals are fed antibiotics, then we eat the animals, we absorb the antibiotics.

Antibiotics are major contributors to leaky gut, the condition wherein the cells that make up the inner wall of the small intestine spread apart, allowing unwanted molecules and particles to directly enter the bloodstream.

When these foreign particles enter the bloodstream, there is naturally an immune response, which includes… INFLAMMATION. And it’s just like we talked about earlier.

The bottom line

To recap, we eat grains. We eat animals that eat grains. Grains turn into sugar in our bodies, which then causes inflammation. Antibiotics cause leaky gut, which causes inflammation. And high levels of gluten present in today’s highly genetically modified grains (including animal feed) causes leaky gut as well. All in all, we keep coming back to inflammation.

Furthermore, we have trillions of healthy bacteria in our gut (called the microbiome) that contributes to our immune health, our digestive health and even our mental health. Antibiotics kill the microbiome.

Poor sanitation and waste management on factory farms and the poor management of animal waste can lead to the contamination of the food supply by bacteria like E.coli and salmonella. Each year 76 million Americans become ill from food borne illness, and thousands die.

I hope I’ve done a good job of outlining the problem. The solutions are quite simple.

First of all, eat grass fed beef, free-range and organic chicken and eggs, and wild-caught fish (the smaller the fish, the better).

Avoid excess carbs. Avoid grains.