Video | Toxic Foods | Why We’re Wired to Eat Them | Boring Diet | Takeaway

We encounter toxins every day. We eat, breathe, and even make them inside our bodies. The good news is that we are designed to detox because of our built-in detox machine, the liver. And while we cannot avoid every toxin, we can choose what we eat to moderate our intake of toxic foods and drinks.

This blog post shares three dietary toxins in our food supply, why we are wired to desire them, and how leaning toward a boring diet can make you happier and healthier.  

Toxic Foods – At-A-Glance

• Toxic ingredients in our food supply include sugar, seed oils, and additives.
• To reduce your intake of harmful foods, avoid foods with a toxic ingredient listed as one of the top three. 
• We are wired to crave toxic ingredients. That desire is driven by variety and a phenomenon known as sensory specific satiety. 
• Limiting variety and opting for “boring” meals reduces hunger and cravings.
• Practical ways to follow a “boring” diet include repeating meals, limiting restaurant foods, and getting fat and protein with each meal.
  

Stop Your Intake of Toxic Foods – Why “Boring” is Better [Video]

In this video, you’ll learn…

• Three toxic foods commonly found in our diets.
• How to reduce the intake of each of those toxic foods.
• The benefits of a “boring diet” and how to implement it in your life.

Toxic Foods

Your liver is your initial filtration system, but the overconsumption of harmful ingredients like sugar, seed oils, and food additives can overload it.

Toxic Food #1: Sugar

No matter what style of eating you prefer, from vegetarian to keto, if your goal is better health and weight loss, sugar is the first thing to go for good reasons. Consuming sugar throughout the day promotes high blood sugar and insulin levels that are inflammatory and encourage fat storage. 

A high intake of fructose, which is a common sugar found in soda and processed foods, causes fat to accumulate in the liver, significantly increasing the risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

How to Reduce Sugar

I have blog posts on how to cut sugar out of your diet and a book, Zero Sugar / One Month, that you can pick up on Amazon. 

But the general rule is this: If a packaged food has sugar listed as one of the first three ingredients, don’t eat it. That does not include natural sugar from fruit and other whole foods because they contain nutrients that slow digestion. 

Toxic Food #2: Seed Oils

Seed oils, also called vegetable oils, are in the news a lot these days. These refined oils promote inflammation within your body. For one thing, they are high in inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids. The oils are also hard to extract. Because of that, they must be pulled out using harmful chemicals or heat. This extraction process creates oxidative products like free radicals that damage cells. 

Unfortunately, seed oils are cheap, so they are the oils restaurants and packaged food companies typically use and the least expensive option at the grocery store. 

How to Reduce Seed Oils

To reduce your intake at a restaurant, avoid fried foods. To reduce your intake at the grocery store, learn their names. Common examples are soybean oil, sunflower oil, canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, peanut oil, and safflower oil. 

There are many seed oils out there, but soybean is the most widely used. If you remember that, you’re in good shape, and you can apply the same rule as you did with sugar, meaning if soybean oil is listed as one of the first three ingredients, don’t eat it.

Toxic Food #3: Food Additives

Another category to avoid is unnecessary food additives. However, this one is tricky because so many things are added to our foods, especially here in the United States. 

This University of Kentucky statement says it best, “Rules about food additives are generally stricter in the European Union (EU) versus the United States (US). The US tends to wait until an ingredient is flagged as dangerous before taking action, while the EU tends to be more proactive in banning such ingredients.”

In other words, in the US, we tend to cross our fingers and hope for the best. Then, when disease happens, we say oops. 

How to Reduce Food Additives

There are two rules you can follow to avoid unnecessary food additives. To keep with our “first-three-ingredient” rule, if one of the first three ingredients sounds like a chemical additive, it probably is, so don’t eat it. 

Another way to avoid harmful food additives is to glance at the ingredient list. When you see a really long ingredient list and scratch your head about what all those words mean, put that item back on the grocery store shelf.

We Are Wired to Eat Toxic Foods

When you remove toxic ingredients from your diet, you make great strides toward better health. The challenging thing is that we are wired to want to eat them, and that desire is driven by two factors: variety and a phenomenon known as sensory specific satiety. 

Variety

It is said that variety is the spice of life, but when it comes to eating, having too many choices stimulates your appetite. There is no better illustration of this than “The Cafeteria Diet Model” used in obesity research (1).

To study obesity, researchers need obese mice. To fatten up animals quickly, they give them a variety of foods, much like humans encounter at a cafeteria. This smorgasbord of different food choices overrides hunger-satisfaction cues and encourages effortless overeating. 

Sensory Specific Satiety

But why does having a variety of foods in front of us make us want to keep eating? This can be explained by understanding sensory specific satiety. It refers to the declining satisfaction we get from eating a particular type of food and the subsequent increase in appetite that we get when we switch to a new taste or texture. 

When you eat, you feed your body and your senses. Foods vary in many ways, from taste to texture to aroma. 

The trap of sensory specific satiety is that it keeps renewing your appetite even though your body has no need for more food.

This explains “The Dessert Effect,” where, despite feeling full, we find room for dessert. The anticipation of the cake’s taste and texture overrides your brain’s satiety cues.

As we can see, the issues with our food supply are complex, and it’s challenging to pinpoint a single solution. However, limiting variety and opting for “boring” meals might be an answer to overconsumption.

Boring Diet

“Boring” doesn’t mean eating a diet void of flavor. Instead, it means repeating meals and enjoying what you eat but limiting variety within a meal. By doing this, you defeat decision fatigue and promote palate fatigue.

Boring Benefit #1: Defeats Decision Fatigue

Having a variety of appealing food choices readily available encourages overeating. Keeping these foods out of sight and out of reach not only helps prevent overeating but also reduces reliance on willpower, which can be easily depleted by daily stressors like low blood sugar, fatigue, and stress. 

Decision-making is one of the most exhausting and stressful activities we engage in, and this constant burden leads to decision fatigue (2).

Willpower is no match for decision fatigue, and when it sets in, it becomes difficult to control behaviors like eating.

Boring Benefit #2: Promotes Palate Fatigue

Keeping things boring also directly counters sensory specific satiety by promoting palate fatigue. Palate fatigue is sometimes referred to as taste bud exhaustion because it occurs when your taste buds become so accustomed to a particular taste or texture that the food is no longer appealing.

An episode of “Man vs. Food” perfectly illustrates this.

In the episode, the host was challenged to eat an enormous sundae in under an hour. Halfway through, he started to struggle, so what did he do? He asked for an order of crunchy, salty french fries. Why would he do that? 

He understood palate fatigue and knew that the sameness of the ice cream’s taste and texture was shutting down his appetite. He purposely shut down palate fatigue by temporarily switching to a food that had a different taste, texture, and temperature. This restimulated his appetite, and he was able to finish the ice cream challenge.

Boring Diet Solutions

With so many traps laid for us in the food environment, following a boring diet will not only help you reach your health goals, but you’ll also find it to be quite freeing, saving you time, helping you feel better about what you and your family are eating, and bringing cravings under control. Here are some practical ways to bring boredom into your diet. 

Repeat Meals

A great first step is repeating meals. Here are two things you can do this week. First, eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch each day. A simple, repetitive menu is easy to follow, saves you time and food prep, and keeps you in control of your eating. For example, eat an omelet for breakfast, eat a salad for lunch, and repeat.

Second, make it a goal this week to find two dinner recipes that are easy to make, enjoyable, and made from whole food ingredients. A ten-minute Google search will give you plenty of recipes. For example, Google “show me low-carb chicken recipe using a crockpot.”

If you do this for a few weeks, you will have five to ten favorite recipes that you can rotate, reducing decision fatigue and keeping you out of restaurants. 

Eat at Home

Restaurants are designed to encourage continuous eating. They provide a range of flavors and textures that keep stimulating your appetite.  

Going out to eat is an enjoyable activity, so you don’t need to write it off completely. However, you’ll be happiest with your results if you make going to a restaurant a special occasion rather than a daily indulgence. 

Eat Protein and Fat with Each Meal

Protein and fat take time to digest, keeping hunger away for hours and cravings under control. There are many foods to build a meal around, including meat, fish, eggs, cheese, nuts, and seeds.

Takeaway

Unfortunately, ingredients that harm us are weaved into thousands of common foods. Sugar, seed oils, and food additives top the list, and the irony is that these items stimulate our senses, making us crave them. 

When you switch to a boring diet, you still enjoy what you eat. But by repeating meals, limiting restaurant foods, and getting fat and protein with each meal, you defeat decision fatigue and promote palate fatigue, bringing your eating under control.

References: 

(1) Lalanza, Jaume F., and Eelke MS Snoeren. “The cafeteria diet: A standardized protocol and its effects on behavior.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 122 (2021): 92-119.

(2) Pignatiello, Grant A., Richard J. Martin, and Ronald L. Hickman Jr. “Decision fatigue: A conceptual analysis.” Journal of health psychology 25.1 (2020): 123-135.

About the Author

Becky Gillaspy, DC, is the author of The Intermittent Fasting Guide and Cookbook and Zero Sugar / One Month. She graduated Summa Cum Laude with research honors from Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1991.