Avoid These Brain-Harming Foods!

Raena Morgan: Dr. Kohls, will eliminating certain foods from the diet improve mental health? Which foods would you recommend staying away from?

Dr. Gary Kohls: That’s a good question. Absolutely.

RM: It seems simplistic, just don’t eat these foods and you’ll be fine.

GK: I think we have to read the labels on the foods and try to figure out what their origins are. If they are manufactured in some factory and they have ingredients there that you can’t pronounce, for instance, you probably should stay away from them. Unfortunately the labels aren’t complete. There can be artificial flavor enhancers that are just covered by the notation, “artificial and natural flavors included.” They may be very toxic substances but the Food and Drug Administration has allowed food manufacturers to cover up what’s actually in the foods we eat.

Certainly if there’s any indication that the fat or the oils that are in a food are synthetic and if they have a long shelf life, they’re probably synthetic, we should avoid them because artificial fats are not good for our brain. Our brains are 60% fat, of the dry weight, 60% of the brain is fat and it needs to be natural fat. It needs to be not margarine, which is synthetic fat, kind of plasticky stuff, not French fry oil, that’s artificial oil when it’s been heated up. So we need to know what we’re putting in our mouth, if it isn’t going to be good for our brain.

Now there are some foods that have an immediate effect. MSG for instance. Monosodium glutamate is in everything that has a salty taste.

RM: Right, you just go through the soups in the soup isle and they’ll have MSG in them.

GK: That’s right. And that’s often hidden too because hydrolyte soy, etc. has glutamic acid.

RM: Now MSG has an effect on your intestines, but what about your brain?

GK: Yes, it can cause headaches, high blood pressure. It’s actually a toxic substance. In the book Excitotoxins, that book talks about MSG and the dangers of that. It causes excitation of the brain, so much that it can actually kill brain cells and other cells too. So MSG, it’s a very flavorful thing. It makes your mouth water. Chinese food syndrome. MSG toxicity. It’s not that you’re allergic to it. It’s a poisonous substance, especially in overdose. Children are much more sensitive to it too. They’ve done studies on infant mice and rats and cause blindness with MSG in young animals.

So if it’s highly toxic at high doses, should we be eating any of it because it might be lesser toxic, less toxic? It’s still toxic. But that’s in so many things that are salty. It’s in all the fast foods and I’m sure the secret formula of the Colonel’s Kentucky Fried Chicken has a lot of MSG in it. That’s why it tastes so good.

But there’s a lot of other flavor enhancers too. Chewing gum now, it’s allaspartame. It’s NutraSweet, which is a synthetic substance that’s not common, not present in nature and it’s synthesized and when it breaks down in our body it has a very sweet flavor, you know 200 or 300 times the flavor of salt with no calories. It has no nutritional value. But when it breaks down in the body it forms formaldehyde, which is embalming fluid, kills everything. It forms into methanol, which is a very toxic…ethanol is a whole lot safer, which is drinking alcohol, but methanol is very toxic. That’s been known to cause blindness and kidney failure in alcoholics. They think they’re drinking alcohol when they’re actually drinking wood alcohol. These are toxic products that are break-down products of NutraSweet, which is in chewing gum. You can’t get, hardly, not that I can find anyway, a chewing gum that just has dextrose or sugar.

And Splenda. Splenda is sort of now that everyone is starting to or many people are realizing that NutraSweet is poisonous, now they’re switching to Splenda, which is also a synthetic flavor enhancer. It’s very sweet, has no calories. It’s worthless as far as nutrition. But it’s actually sucrose, which is cane sugar, beet sugar. They take that ordinarily healthy, it’s not toxic anyway. It might not be so good for a lot of things. All sweets aren’t necessarily healthy. But they’ve actually added three chloride ions to the sugar molecule so it’s actually tri-chlorinated sucrose, but the industry calls it sucralose or Splenda. So it’s a nice-sounding name, but it’s actually chlorinated carbon atoms there and any time chlorine is combined with carbon, it’s a toxic substance. A lot of carcinogens. DDT is a chlorocarbon atom. CFCs are chlorodioxin, chlorocarbon atoms. And a lot of the pesticides and herbicides. You add chlorine to a carbon atom and you’ve got a carcinogen or an immune toxic substance. And that’s what Splenda has. I accessed the website of a pesticide company in Japan and they sell sucralose as a pesticide. That’s what we’re eating as the flavor-enhancer Splenda.

RM: So that would affect the brain.

GK: Yes it would affect the brain. It affects a lot of parts of the body. You know the saving grace is that, you know, we’re eating small amounts of it. But small doses of a lethal drug, should we be eating that? Of course not.

RM: What about other sweeteners Dr. Kohls?

GK: Well, lately there’s been a change in the soft drink industry and a lot of industries where instead of using sucrose, cane sugar, beet sugar, they’re using high-fructose corn sugar, which is mass produced from corn. What they do to make it, they mash up the corn, they add sulfuric acid to the corn mash and then out of that somehow they obtain this sweet sugar called fructose, and there’s probably other ingredients in there too. They can make it cheaper than sucrose, which isn’t toxic. And so it’s cheaper to put in the Coke® and the Pepsi® and most of the pops.

RM: Now the sugar isn’t toxic. Is that what you just said?

GK: The sucrose is not toxic. It’s empty calories, it might make us overweight, give us high insulin levels or something like that. But there’s a lot of evidence that this high-fructose corn syrup, which is very sweet, is toxic. There’s evidence that it can actually cause diabetes and cause obesity, etc. And it’s not a natural sugar. You know there’s a half a dozen, maybe eight different natural sugars that we do need. We do need glucose for brain…the whole body needs glucose to burn as energy and fuel. Fructose of itself is not very unnatural, but there’s more than fructose in the fructose corn syrup, the high-fructose corn syrup. There’s more in there than that. And maybe some residue of the chemicals that are used to manufacture it. There are other sugars that are important. We get too much of fructose and sucrose but we don’t get as much as we should of half a dozen other sugars.

RM: But just plain fructose is from fruit, right?

GK: Right. It’s a disaccharide, two sugar molecules of some sort. It then has to be broken down. But there’s a lot of evidence out there that this is not a healthy sweetener for us.

RM: The high-fructose corn syrup.

GK: The high-fructose corn syrup, right. Now the pop industry is trying to counter that by saying, “Oh, it’s safe, it’s safe.” Well industry is always trying to discredit the good science that proves that industry’s products are dangerous by having fake research that substantiates…they just flood the airwaves with propaganda.

RM: So you recommend eating a wholesome, organic diet with natural sweeteners, I would think.

GK: Absolutely. Absolutely. Now stevia is totally safe. That’s a natural substance. It’s in nature. There’s no evidence that it’s toxic at all. It’s the synthetic things that come out of the chemist’s vat that we should worry about.

Chlorine gas is non-existent in nature. There’s no such thing as chlorine gas. We have to make that out of salt, sodium chloride, a salt solution, electrolyze it, put a current through it and then chlorine gas comes off of that solution with electrolysis. That’s the only way to produce chlorine gas, which is a deadly poison. And any kind of bleach. You know you have to have chlorine gas and that attaches