Beware The Dangers of Enriched Foods

Beware The Danger of Enriched Foods - Naturopathic Medicine Springfield MO

Beware The Dangers of Enriched Foods

When your family goes grocery shopping, you’ll often find many packaged foods that are marked as “enriched”. The term “enriched” is deceptive when looking at the final food product, because it gives the impression that any food that is purposely enriched should be even more healthy to eat. Unfortunately, the opposite is true.

So many nutrients are removed from grain products in the first place that the consequent addition of a few vitamins and minerals back into those items scarcely makes a difference compared to the loss. It’s the equivalent of taking out all the money from your wallet and then adding a dollar back in and calling it enriched. With grains and modern food production, “enrichment” only means slightly less massively depleted.

Modern food production has made a huge contribution to the wide circulation of food to populations that would otherwise have a great deal of difficulty in feeding themselves. But one downside of mass food production is that “enriched” foods are not only extremely drained and depleted of healthy nutrients, they may also make significant toxic contributions to many people who eat them on a regular basis.

The nutrient content in today’s food is contingent upon how it was produced. Modern food processing, which can include canning, freezing, and/or the addition of various synthetic substances that prevent rotting, consistently produces a final product that is severely lacking in vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients.

This is the unfortunate consequence of delivering our food supply to an ever-growing population. Even if it were possible to produce enough fresh foods to meet the world’s demand, there is no reasonable delivery framework to get that food delivered before it would ruin, spoil or end up plainly unappetizing.

What makes this process even worse is adding supplements that are non-nutrient and toxic. The iron that is added to our food today is, actually a metallic form of iron. Click here to watch a video and see metallic iron fillings pulled out of a prominent breakfast cereal with a strong magnet.

Such iron filings have also been pulled out of various other “enhanced” or “iron-fortified” food. Iron, like any other nutrient, must be in a food-form, bioavailable state to be helpful to the body. When it isn’t, it not only does little to no good, it can have its own particular, direct toxicity. It goes against the basic tenets of naturopathic medicine to believe that crushing shavings off of a bar of iron into your food, like you would grate cheese onto your Italian food would be healthy. Yet that is the exact form of iron that is routinely added to many of the “enriched” food products that we eat today.

Enriched white flour is used in many different packaged foods. Almost all prepared pastas, flours, saltines, breads, food with crusts, cereals, and far more subtle white flour-containing foods have iron fortification. The definitive way to stay away from this metallic iron infliction is to grind your own flour from natural grains, or purchase organically produced foods.

The only way to truly avoid such corrupted food is to buy organic foods grown straight from the ground. Organic foods are seldom subjected to the addition of more vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. A few are, however, and you do need to become a diligent label reader. Buying organic also has the added benefit of avoiding the high fluoride content found in so many grain products fertilized with the traditional NPK, or nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer.

The most common fluoridation agent, hydrofluosilicic corrosive, is a result of the fertilizer industry. It’s likely that most manure adds fluoride to the products being prepared. Carefully investigate fluoride to decide if this is something you want for your family.

Enriched white flour, as well as refined sugar, has been linked to a wide variety of medical diseases. Furthermore, the appearance of birth defects are almost directly linked to mothers who started eating white flour and refined sugar.

Consuming a healthy variety of foods is not easy. Even eating nothing but fresh fruits and vegetables does not assure optimal nutrition, as many farm soils have become depleted of many of the minerals and other nutrients that are normally present in soils. Food grown on land that has been repeatedly farmed over and over without attention to proper techniques of soil nutrient regeneration will lack the proper nutrients.

Eating a healthy diet becomes an almost impossible task to achieve if there is a regular intake of processed, “enriched” foods. Essential nutrient levels in your body will progressively decline over time, and the appearance of multiple degenerative medical diseases will be facilitated.

“Enriched” foods may have additives that are toxic rather than beneficial, even when they are advertised as nutritive. Using metallic iron filings as supplemental iron is only one glaring example. This is the leading cause of leaky guts and food allergies. To correct the iron toxicity that we’ve all been exposed to, visit Kare for some IV Vitamin C therapy with our nurse.

Keri Sutton - RN, MSN, ANP-C, AGPCNP-BC

Keri is a Nurse Practitioner and founder at Kare Health & Wellness. Keri's pursuit of personal answers to her own health issues landed her in the top of Functional Medicine. As she utilized functional Medicine to get her own health and life back, she made it her life's work to bring this empowering form of healthcare to as many people as she can.

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