Hidden Causes of Obesity

The Big Money comes from feeding people processed foods. Some of the hidden causes of obesity come from the global processed foods industry using new replacement ingredients that save them money, such as high fructose corn syrup or Aspartame to replace the more-costly cane sugar.

Another area where the food industry can increase their profits is by their use of a class of flavor-enhancers known as excitotoxins. These cause food to taste much better, so we eat more(which the food industry likes), but they also have been proven in many laboratory studies to cause obesity -- even with no increase in calories consumed.

As Dr. Russell Blaylock, a neurosurgon who is an expert on both these additives, says, weight gain caused by excitotoxins "... is very difficult to exercise ... off and almost impossible to diet it off." (1)

Some of the propensity to become obese also appears to be passed on to unborn babies when their mother consumes excitotoxins during her pregnancy.

If you are a person who has great difficulty losing weight -- and, as hard as you try, you can't -- perhaps you should try eliminating all these hidden causes of obesity.

This is blockbuster information. As with a lot of things these days, there are very powerful businesses that want to keep the information revealed here a secret. They are making a lot of money by putting these chemicals in our food and water, so they don't want that to change. You will doubtless see their ads on this page, trying to persuade you they are not causes of obesity.)

At the end of this page, you will find a short list of the most important research summaries that support my assertions. Then, you must be the judge whether to believe doctors and scientists or advertisers making money for the processed food industry.

What Are Excitotoxins?

Excitotoxins are naturally-occurring substances that the body uses as neuro-transmitters for the most part. Glutamate is a chemical our body produces as needed to transmit nerve impulses.

The Japanese have been using a broth made of seaweed containing high levels of glutamates to season their foods for many years. The most well-known excitoxin, Monosodium Glutamate(MSG), was created from a combination of salt and glutamate and became a popular flavor-enhancer in Japan, the USA, and eventually worldwide after World War II.

Today there are many flavor-enhancers similar to MSG that are added to almost all processed food, and especially "Fast Foods". These go under a variety of innocent-sounding names such as hydrolyzed vegetable protein, yeast extract, and even "natural flavorings".

Excitotoxins are Everywhere in the U.S. Processed Food Supply -- Even in Baby Formula! Getting babies used to excitotoxic flavors in their foods may be one of the causes of obesity in children. When children become accustomed to processed foods that are flavor-enhanced, healthy foods such as vegetables are likely to be passed over.

Excitotoxins are only one of the unrecognized causes of obesity.

Food manufacturers often argue that since these substances are naturally produced within the body, they cannot be harmful. This is true to a limited extent, but it does not tell the whole truth, which is that only very tiny amounts of these chemicals are produced internally and quickly disposed of for the purposes of transmitting nerve impulses. When relatively huge amounts of MSG or other excitotoxins are introduced through food and drink, the body's cells cannot protect themselves and this onslaught frequently causes cell death by a process called excitotoxicity.

Nerve cells get "excited to death" by excitotoxins

Obviously, not all nerves die when we consume excitotoxins. However, it is a cumulative process. It adds up over time.

Causing the Death of Brain and Nerve Cells Is Not a Good Thing, needless to say!

Food processors use excitotoxins such as msg to improve the flavor of what would otherwise be bland foods. As a side effect, we tend to eat more of these foods, which is a good thing from the food manufacturer's point of view. "Bet you can't eat just one!" is a telling phrase in this context.

Did you ever sit down to eat just a few potato chips and soon find that you had eaten the whole bag? Chances are, there are excitotoxin flavor-enhancers in the chips that caused this loss of control over your appetite. This loss of appetite control is one of the major causes of obesity.

Apart from the effects on your waistline these excitotoxins can pass directly through the blood-brain barrier and damage specific areas of the brain in ways that are believed to cause neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, ALS(Lou Gehrig's Disease), Alzheimer's, and others. Repeated exposures over a lifetime are thought to slowly cause the damages which lead to these diseases.(2)

Short term reactions are frequently noticed by sensitive individuals. Headaches, sweating, sensations of pressure, and occasionally seizures are but a few of these.

Dr. Russell Blaylock, the neurosurgeon who wrote the book Excitotoxins -- The Taste that Kills, believes that excitotoxins are a likely cause of sudden cardiac failure, in which otherwise healthy people die suddenly for no apparent reason.

Oddly enough, aspartame or Nutrasweet, which is an artificial sweetener and also an excitotoxin, has been found to cause both weight gain as well as tumors in laboratory animals of many kinds. Aspartame is a particularly virulent excitotoxin because of the breakdown into wood alcohol, formaldehyde, and aspartic acid as it is digested -- a "Triple Threat" to the body, with all three being poisonous.

The story of how Washington insider, Donald Rumsfeld, got Aspartame approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration is a very interesting demonstration of how political power is used by lobbyists to help the food industry, to the detriment of public health and safety. How Aspartame Got Approved by the FDA

Fluoride in our Water

What Is Fluoride?

Fluoride is a toxic waste produced by the aluminum, the fertilizer, and other industries. This, by itself should be reason enough not to drink it in our water.

Most of the fluoride put in U.S. drinking water comes from China. Dr. Joseph Mercola makes clear a few things about the fluoride used in our water:

"China, in contrast, does NOT allow water fluoridation because it's too toxic and causes damage, according to their studies. Instead, the waste product from their phosphate fertilizer industry is shipped to the United States, where we add it to our water supply!

This is a very important point: the fluoride added to your water is NOT pharmaceutical grade. It's a toxic industrial waste product, which is also contaminated with lead, arsenic, radionucleotides, aluminum and other industrial contaminants."(4)

Beyond the fact that it is toxic and diminishes human thyroid function, which is definitely linked to weight gain(3,4) -- Fluoride only works marginally well for reducing dental cavities!

According to Dr. Bill Osmunson, a dentist with a Master's degree in Public Health, when one combines all the sources of fluoride the public typically consumes, "we're ingesting far too much fluoride."

It should be noted that in no less than 23 studies done in four different countries, moderate fluoride exposure lowered IQ in children. Remember that diminished thinking ability and IQ are symptoms of hypothyroidism, also. Reported ranges of lowered IQ go from 5-8 points. This is significant.

Fluoride-containing drugs have a long proven history of use in counteracting hyperthyroid conditions.

There are major ethical questions created by dosing an entire population with what is essentially a drug, without their permission, without the oversight of a doctor, and without limitations on how much fluoride they may consume daily. These ethical considerations are being ignored by public health authorities -- Why?

One way or the other, Flouride is another of the hidden causes of obesity because of its disruptive effects on our thyroid functions. It is shocking that, for reasons of profit perhaps, the public authorities are so insistent on maintaining the status quo.

The only defense, if we live in the majority of urban U.S. cities where drinking water is fluoridated, is to filter out fluoride from our tap water or drink nothing but spring water.

This is crazy, but that's the way it is. Many U.S. communities are now being urged by citizens to stop polluting their drinking water with this thyroid-inhibiting substance.

With the combination of excitotoxins used to enhance the flavor of the vast majority of processed foods and diet beverages chemically encouraging us to eat beyond the limits of natural hunger -- and the thyroid gland's diminished ability to keep our metabolism up to speed, it should be no surprise that there is an obesity epidemic on a global scale.

Those who are determined to maintain a normal weight and healthy metabolism should avoid processed foods for these reasons, drink only fluoride-free water and prepare their own foods from "scratch".

We cannot deal with these hidden causes of obesity unless we become aware of them and remove them from our diet.

(1) http://www.naturalnews.com/SpecialReports/Aspartame_Truth.pdf

(2) http://aspartame.mercola.com/

(3) http://www.fluoridealert.org/fluoride-dangers/health/index.aspx

(4) Fluoride Can Impair Thyroid Function -- http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/08/13/fluoride-and-thyroid-dysfunction.aspx

To learn more about the Hidden Causes of Obesity, See This