Mira Dessy is The Ingredient Guru. A holistic nutrition professional, author, and popular public speaker, she knows that it’s not just what you eat, but what’s in what you eat. Over time this philosophy has been expanded to include helping people understand the basics of building a preparedness pantry as one of the ingredients for a healthy life.
Mira is a member of the National Association of Nutrition Professionals, the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, and the American Nutrition Association. Additionally, she is on the Board of Directors for the American Holistic Health Association.
Dr Ritamarie
You are what you eat is a common phrase that people use in healthcare and in general in life. You are what you digest and assimilate is an even better conversation to have, because if you don’t get it in, it’s not going to help. But what most people aren’t paying attention to, is actually the importance of what’s in the food. They may think it may be a healthy food, but there’s things hidden in our foods that make them not so good for us. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
So if you’re a health practitioner, it’s super important that you pay attention to this, because you’re giving people guidelines. You want to be able to tell them how to avoid the things that are added to the foods after the fact or during the fact, that may not work. And when I say after the fact, I kind of mean the packaging and how the pieces of plastic get into your food.
So I have a very special guest. Her name is Mira Dessy. She’s known as the Ingredient Guru. She’s a holistic nutrition professional and author, popular public speaker. And she knows firsthand that it’s not just what you eat, but what’s in what you eat. And over time, this philosophy has been expanded to include helping people understand the basics of building a preparedness pantry. I love that concept as one of the ingredients to a healthy life.
Mira is a member of the National Association of Nutrition Professionals, the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, and the American Nutrition Association. She’s also on the board of directors for the American Holistic Health Association. And we’re going to have a just mind boggling program today and conversation about what’s actually in the foods. So Mira, thank you so much for being here and welcome.
Mira Dessy (02:07)
Thank you so much and thank you for having me on as a guest. I am excited to chat with you.
Dr Ritamarie (02:12)
Well, I know how much you love talking about this, and I’ve seen you talk about this and giving people great tips on how to avoid the things we don’t want in our food. But I really want to say, I want to start with a question. What do you think are the top three to five ingredients that are added to foods that people need to be watching out for?
Mira Dessy (02:32)
And you know, it’s such an interesting question, because for some people, the top things they need to be watching out for are because they have a specific health condition. And so we need to take that into account. But if all things were equal, my top three, number one would be anything artificial. And so that’s artificial color, artificial flavor, artificial sweetener, some of which we can easily identify, some of which is getting harder to identify, because food producers, you know, will put in what the official name is, for example, of an artificial sweetener, but they won’t tell us that it’s artificial.
Dr Ritamarie (03:13)
so they’re sneaky about it, right? They’re sneaky. Okay. Yeah.
Mira Dessy (03:18)
Right. So I don’t like that. The other thing that I think everyone should avoid is carrageenan which is just a really awful ingredient. It can cause all kinds of digestive upset in laboratory settings. It’s been shown to cause renal bumps and ulcerative colitis-like symptoms. Part of the challenge is it’s such a good emulsifier that it is found in literally every aisle of the grocery store, including the pharmacy.
Dr Ritamarie (03:50)
Wow. Okay. So obviously the artificial, and we want to delve deeper into how they hide artificial. So, because obviously people know we don’t want artificial colors and flavors and all that stuff. Especially our holistic health practitioners who are listening, right? We know that we’re going to get people off that, but the carrageenan, because carrageenan is a seaweed derivative, right? So why is that so bad?
Mira Dessy (04:12)
Like I said, it is so distressing to the gut, because it’s very irritating. Part of the challenge is, carrageenan is a red seaweed. Most of the seaweeds that we eat tend to be more in the green or brown category. In the areas where it grows, if it’s processed the way those cultures historically process it, it’s not so bad. What we do is we take it, and we extract the parts of it that turn it into a good emulsifier. And so that’s where we start to have problems, because it’s been highly processed.
The other challenge is we’re getting far more of it than we really should. One of the biggest challenges we run into, there are things that appear in our food that are marked generally recognized as safe. And so the thinking is sure, a little bit won’t hurt you, but who’s keeping track of how much you’re eating? And you could potentially be getting a lot.
Mira Dessy (05:11)
And I have found in my own practice, which focuses primarily on digestive wellness, that people who have some sort of irritable bowel or some sort of irritable disorder or are highly sensitive, getting carrageenan in their food frequently, starts to cause bloating, gas, all kinds of digestive distress, and it’s just a really challenging ingredient that has been shown over and over again to be problematic.
The interesting thing is that these days you’re starting to see a few labels at the grocery store that say no carrageenan. So that lets you know that some food producers are paying attention.
Dr Ritamarie (05:55)
They’re paying attention. Yeah. And so it’s from Irish moss usually, right? So does that mean that Irish moss is something people should avoid? Because I’ve had people ask me that, or is it because like you said,it was my understanding that it’s the way it’s extracted and then it’s powdered. And then the seaweed expands when you rehydrate it, and it can get stuck in the villi.
Mira Dessy (06:19)
it gets stuck in the villi. The other thing is because it’s a powder and because of its expansive qualities, it starts to pull way too much liquid into the system, because the body is trying to balance what’s going on in there. And so that doesn’t help either.
You know, and again, everything that I have learned from, you know, studying this and talking to people who live in areas where they can actually get it fresh is the actual seaweed itself, properly prepared, seems to be fine. It’s when we break it down. And honestly, that’s true for so many of the ingredients that appear in our food. The more we process it and the more we break it down, the harder it is for our body to be able to use it properly, because we are designed to eat real whole foods.
Dr Ritamarie (07:10)
Real whole foods, that’s right. Real food doesn’t have a label, so you just shouldn’t have to worry about it. You’d have to read it and say, this is an organic red pepper. This is an organic tomato. It doesn’t need that, but it’s when we combine those ingredients, they come in a package, and we have to be more careful.
Mira Dessy (07:19)
And I will share, know, this is one of the challenges that we run into as practitioners is, food has become so adulterated that sometimes even what appears to be real whole food is something that we need to be leery of. For example, there has just been an FDA approval that literally just came out, I think a week ago for a fourth variety of Arctic apple.
Arctic apples are genetically modified. So they’re genetically modifying different varieties of apples so that they won’t show bruising or turn brown. So it’s a benefit to the manufacturer, not to the consumer, and it’s genetically modified, which is typically not a great idea. There can be some significant downstream impacts from consuming a lot of genetically modified food. But on the shelf, it looks like it’s just an apple.
Dr Ritamarie (08:27)
So from my understanding of the way you avoid that, nobody’s required to say GMO or GMO-free, but, or if it says organic, there’s a certain criteria, and it cannot be genetically modified for it to be. So it’s like if you’re concerned and there’s certain foods, we can talk about what those are that you want to be careful of. I want to finish the top three and go back and ask you a few more questions.
Mira Dessy (08:52)
So the other one is more of, artificial is a pretty broad category. Carrageenan is very defined. This third one is again a broad category. And this is where you really need to read the label. Anything that’s all capital letters. If it is TBHQ, BHT, BHA, EDTA, all those are abbreviations for very long, you know, so for example, BHA is butylated hydroxyanisole.
That’s a lot of letters to put on the label. So they just abbreviate it BHA. If you see those abbreviations, you really don’t want to be eating them.
Dr Ritamarie (09:26)
Right, okay. So I want to go back to the artificial, because you said there’s sneaky ways they put them in there. So I want to hear those and then I want to go on to some others.
Mira Dessy (9:35)
And you know, the biggest one is the sugars. So for example, they’ll put sucralose, which is an artificial sweetener, but they won’t say it’s an artificial sweetener. So this is where you have to know what some of the sweeteners are in order to be aware of that. We’re very fortunate in the United States, if they use artificial colors, they have to at least put the name and the number. So they will say blue number two, or, you know, well, red number three just got removed from the food.
Well, and, and we still have to read the label. Here’s the deal with red number three. Yes, that is coming out. Food producers have two years to remove it. So it’s not until January of 2027. Pharmaceutical companies get an extra year. So, over-the-counter medications, pharmaceutical medications, anything that falls into that category does not have to stop using it until January of 2028.
Dr Ritamarie (10:43)
Okay, and so, know, here’s the thing with pharmaceuticals or supplements. You look at them, and they have this bright color, right? Bright red vitamins, bright red medicines. You don’t need them. Why do you need artificial colors in something like a vitamin? First of all, it’s kind of crazy. It’s to get the kids to love it and want to eat it. I don’t know. So it’s really important that we look, and we understand that, because first of all, the sugar part, anything that ends in an -ose, don’t eat it.
Right? Just don’t eat it, because it’s not good for you. It may not be artificial, but it’s going to mess around with your metabolic health. It’s going to mess around with your blood sugar, your insulin levels, your microbiome. It’s going to feed the bad critters in your microbiome, the undesirable ones versus the desirable ones. So I just say anything with an -ose, but you’re right. I mean, you have to read, and you have to know, and consumer beware. As practitioners, we get the opportunity to educate people and that needs to be a part of your education, I believe, with every single client that comes in.
Mira Dessy (11:46)
And the other thing to keep in mind is part of reading the label is learning how to avoid some of the manufacturer manipulation that happens. And especially you were just talking about sugar. One of the things that they’ll do is in order to keep sugar from being the number one ingredient on the ingredient panel, I have sometimes seen as many as seven different kinds of sugar. They’ll use lots of different kinds of sugar because they list them by volume.
And so we also have to watch out for that learning what the different kinds of sugar are. And then in addition to that, sometimes you will see, and it doesn’t happen so much with sugar, it happens more with trans fats, but they will say it equals zero. And you read the ingredients. And there’s an ingredient that clearly belongs in that category. And you think why? Why is that?
What’s going on? And it comes down to a federally mandated guideline that says if there is less than half a gram per serving, we’ll come back to that in a second, they can say it’s zero. The challenge with that is there’s no federally mandated guideline for serving size, so they can say the serving size is whatever they want, and I believe that sometimes food producers manipulate the serving size so that they can get things down to where they want them on the label.
Dr Ritamarie (13:14)
Yes, absolutely. I’ve seen that, and you can look at a thing, and it says there’s 17 servings in it. And you’re like, I can eat that in two bites. That’s not 17 servings. So they do that because then you go below that half a gram. So it’s really learning this stuff.
Mira Dessy (13:30)
Right. Or they go below calories as well, because with very sweet beverages like juices and things like that, it used to be one bottle. They used to say it was two servings because then they could get it down to what looked good. But it was eight ounces. Like people would drink that in one go. And so some of that has been adjusted.
But really, it’s about the practitioner teaching the consumer how to be a smart consumer and how to stay on top of some of the things that food producers do in order to manipulate us to buy more.
Dr Ritamarie (14:06)
Yeah, and the labeling, know, natural, gluten-free, 100% green or whatever, and then you read the labels, right? So people take things at face value, they look at the pretty packaging, it looks very organic and whole and natural, but then if you really read the label, ain’t so, it just ain’t so.
Mira Dessy (14:27)
And that ties into something called front of package labeling. And food producers are very good at figuring out what are the buzzwords that we’re attracted to? I don’t know if you remember this, but years and years and years ago, the whole thing was, you know, it was how many whole grains are in what you’re eating. And they would tell you how many grams or how many kinds of whole grain. And then eventually it became how much probiotic was in what you’re eating. And now it’s how much protein is in what you’re eating, because they know that’s what we’re focused on.
And so they put those things on the front of the label. I have actually seen corn chips that on the front of the label in very big letters say made with organic blue corn. And you think, wow, that’s pretty awesome. Organic blue corn. And then you flip it over and you see that it’s fried in regular canola oil, which is one of the most highly genetically modified crops on the face of the planet. And it’s like, well, that completely reverses any benefit from the organic blue corn. They’re hoping someone’s going to see that label and just buy it.
Dr Ritamarie (15:32)
But they’re right though, because that’s what most people do. They don’t turn it over and look, and they don’t look at the fat grams and the sugar grams, and they don‘t look. Now they have to put on added sugar, right? So in the case where there are 17 sugars listed and you’re looking at, sugar is way down on the list, no big deal. You look at it and go, 10 grams of added sugar, 20 grams of added sugar per minuscule serving, which is way smaller than anything anybody normal and human would eat.
Mira Dessy (16:03)
Well, one thing that really annoys me about the new food label is that they have set a percentage for daily value for sugar. We don’t need sugar. Yes, we need protein. Yes, we need fat. Yes, we need, but we do not need sugar. And yet now we have a daily value. And so people are thinking like, well, it’s below my daily value. It’s like, no, you don’t have to have.
Dr Ritamarie (16:30)
Yeah, so we talked about the top three ingredients that people need to watch for, and I’m sure there’s lots, lots more, and we can get into a few more of those, right? So artificial anything and watch for those hidden ingredients.
If you don’t know it, it’s not something you would have in your cupboard or use in a recipe. Look it up. It might be a problem. And then the second one was carrageenan. And that’s actually part of a very good food, Irish moss, but it’s the processing of it in the way it affects the gut and can cause a lot of things that I’ve seen links between carrageenan and colon cancer. as well. So we’ve got to be really careful about that. And then the third one was…
Mira Dessy (17:12)
Abbreviations, capital letters.
Dr Ritamarie (17:14)
Abbreviations, capitalized abbreviations, right? So like BHT, you don’t have that in your cupboard. You’re not going to go and say, this recipe calls for BHT, let me go put it in the food. So we have to be conscious of that.
Mira Dessy (17:27)
And again, they’re getting sneaky about it. When I go to the grocery store, sometimes it takes me a little bit longer, because I love to just sort of wander and see what they’re doing, even if I’m not going to buy it. And one thing that they’ve started doing in the cereal aisle, which is seriously annoying, is below the ingredient panel. So we have the nutrition panel, we have the ingredient panel. Below the ingredient panel, so outside of that paragraph, is a line that says, BHT added to packaging for freshness. So they’re putting BHT in the packaging material. So it’s a food contact material, which means, hello, it’s touching the food. And if it’s touching the food, it gets into the food, but they no longer have to disclose it as part of the ingredient, because it’s part of the packet.
Dr Ritamarie (18:18)
So we have to be a student and really read these and teach our clients and patients to read the labels carefully, not just to look, yes, it’s got this many grams of sugar, it’s fine, this many grams. No, we have to look very carefully to make sure we don’t have these dangerous and hidden ingredients.
So I wanted to ask you about one that gets a lot of flak, but we wonder why, like the gums, like guar gum and all that kind of stuff. We think they’re fiber, they should be good for us.
Tell us about those.
Mira Dessy (18:46)
And again, some of this comes down to personal bio individual body state and some of it comes down to how much are you getting? Part of the challenge is food producers are always looking for ways to try to shift without too much difficulty, and food gums are a great way to emulsify and thicken things like alternative plant milks and soups and other products like that.
In and of themselves, I do not believe that the majority of food gums are harmful. However, the dose is what really gets you because those gums get into the gut and again, they start pulling water, and we wind up having usually diarrhea, sometimes constipation if we’re not hydrated enough, because it appears in so many things and how much are you getting? There are some people, and we’ll just use alternative dairy, for example.
Someone could have a smoothie in the morning, and they’re using almond milk to make it, which has a couple different kinds of food gums in it. And then, during the day, maybe they have a plant-based yogurt, which is going to have more food gums. And then for dessert that night, they’ve decided they want a little treat. So they’re having a plant-based ice cream which has more. So like we’re getting it multiple times throughout the day and potentially getting quite a lot. And you do that every single day and your body is beginning to really struggle to balance how much of that you’re getting.
And that’s just one category of food. I mean, it can appear in a lot of different foods. So then we start adding in things like soups or even lunch meat can have some food gum sometimes if they’re using it to hold it together. And one of the challenges that I find, yogurt used to be just yogurt. It was just yogurt, and it was prepared and allowed to culture so that it could thicken.
Now we frequently find they’ve either put food gum or pectin into it, because they’re trying to make it faster. The faster they make it, the worse it is for us. Right, it has less probiotics. Yes. And so that’s not great. I remember the frustration that I went through over the winter holidays this year.
I literally had to go to three different stores to find a whipping cream that was just cream with nothing else in it. That’s ridiculous.
Dr Ritamarie (21:24)
I have a yogurt, a couple of different brands of yogurt that we get, that are just, you know, probiotic cultures, whatever the substrate is, if it’s coconut or cashew, whatever, water and probiotics. So that’s good, but there’s a lot of them when you read them, they are loaded with gums.
So there’s a lot of things that are for me a no-go. I will not eat a food if it has certain things in it. With gums, if occasionally some of it slips in, not a problem, but like, a lot of protein powders have gums in them, right? So if you’re eating those daily, then you’re getting it all the time. So it’s not like one dose is going to kill you, but it’s really important to avoid it on a regular basis. So like you said, dose dependent, I think that’s great to know.
Mira Dessy (22:08)
And I also encourage, you know, I think, unfortunately, for so many people, we get so accustomed to not feeling great that we forget what it feels like to feel wonderful. And as a practitioner, one of the best things that you can do is encourage your clients to do five to seven days worth of food journaling.
And then if we start seeing patterns about their eating a lot of the same thing, let’s drill down what’s in those things that you’re eating all the time. And then we begin the process of elimination and see how you feel. And I do find a lot of times with gums, with a lot of other food ingredients, when we take those out, usually within 7 to 10 days, the belly swelling goes down, maybe a little achiness goes down. It doesn’t mean that that’s going to be the case for everybody, but for a lot of people, that one small change can have a powerful impact.
Dr Ritamarie (23:08)
Yeah, and that’s what people want. I always say nothing tastes as good as healthy feels. I don’t care how good this tastes, it’s 30 seconds on my tongue. I want to think about the long-term effects, whether it’s within a couple of hours, a couple of days, a couple of years, how is that food and the accumulation of that particular food going to affect? And I think that’s something to really keep reinforcing with our clients.
So we all know that trans fats are not good. We’re going to avoid trans fats and mayonnaise and margarine and any things that you read, and it says partially hydrogenated soybean oil or whatever. But are we still getting them? Are they sneaking in like some other things?
Mira Dessy (23:49)
They are, you know, it’s very interesting, because trans fats were removed from the generally recognized as safe list, but they were not banned in the food supply. And so they do still sneak in there. Now I will say one of the good things is they do have to disclose them on the label. So if you see hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated things, that’s fine. Believe it or not, olestra still exists.
Dr Ritamarie (24:20)
Even though it says on there that it can cause fecal incontinence, like seriously, thank you very much, but I’m not going down that path.
Mira Dessy (24:27)
You can still find it in some products, not very many. It’s not as big as it used to be. But you know, so just being aware of the fact that we shouldn’t be afraid of fat. We want real fat, healthy fat, we don’t want modified fats. And I think one of the interesting things that happens though is food producers are getting again a little sneaky about things.
I was astonished at the store the other day to see a butter that looked like it was pretty good until you read the actual label that said 95% grass-fed, and I was like hmm what’s the other 5%? It turns out the other 5% is not great, because it can be a trans fat, or it’s just not organic or grass fed. And so they’re using that 95% to try to get people to buy their product.
Dr Ritamarie (25:27)
Again, yeah, 95% is a good number, right? And that’s why we have to be educated, and we have to educate our clients, our patients as we go along. There are a couple of other things. I’ve heard you say that, you know, the whole concept of shopping the perimeter to stay safe, you’re going to debunk it. So why is it not necessarily safe to shop the perimeter of the store?
Mira Dessy (25:53)
And I will start by saying you’re more likely to find more healthy things on the perimeter of the store. The interior, except for the frozen food section, does tend to have more highly processed food. Frozen foods by and of themselves, if they are whole foods like frozen peas or frozen broccoli, those are not bad. They just happen to be flash frozen for convenience. So that’s fine. It’s when they add things.
Crackers and cereals and all those kinds of things in the center aisles, those are highly processed, ultra processed foods, most of which do not represent a good choice. So we are likely to find more healthy things on the perimeter of the store. Where it gets tricky is, food producers and grocery stores pay a lot of attention to how you shop.
And that is why, for example, most grocery carts are very big. They know just like with our dinner plate, the bigger the cart is, the more we’re tempted to fill it. They know that. They put in music that encourages people to slow down and spend more time, because the more time you spend in the grocery store, the more money you will spend. With the perimeter, they have learned that people think that the perimeter is healthy. And so there is something called product creep.
And this is where they take something that does not belong on the perimeter of the grocery store, and they put it there. For example, I have seen in the summer, strawberries, and they wheel out this little refrigerated case, and they put it next to the strawberries, and it could be organic strawberries like it doesn’t matter which strawberries it is, but it’s this little case, and it has whipped cream in a can and cool whip and little yellow spongy things. And they’re like, it’s strawberry shortcake season, because they’re trying to convince you you don’t have to go to the rest of the store to buy that. We brought it right here for you.
I have seen salad dressings moved into the produce aisle, and if you read most of those salad dressings they’re not great. Plus the other thing is these days, I mean salad dressing is so easy to make at home, like we don’t need to be spending eight dollars a bottle.
In the meat department, they have things like all kinds of seasonings and rubs and sauces and things. They’ve moved it to try to make you think that it’s more convenient, because they’re trying to boost how much you will spend if you’re only shopping the perimeter.
Dr Ritamarie (28:20)
Wow, yeah, there’s a lot to think about, right? I’m really a big fan of getting people to eat foods that don’t need labels, so you don’t have to learn to read the labels. The produce now has those little numbers. So if it’s a four digit number, it’s not organic. If it’s a five digit number with a nine at the beginning or something, it is.
Mira Dessy (28:44)
Yes, if it’s a nine, it’s organic. If it’s an eight, it’s genetically modified. I have never yet seen an eight. Imagine that. Because it’s not mandatory.
Dr Ritamarie (28:51)
So another thing, we talked about sugars earlier, and people want their sugar, right? And we live in a society where 93% of the population is metabolically unwell. And so sugar is a problem. It’s a big problem. And metabolic imbalance leads to heart disease and cancer and kidney failure and all kinds of really serious stuff. So, they label certain sweeteners as good.
Agave nectar, maple syrup, et cetera, et cetera. So let’s touch on a little bit about the sugars and what’s a good sugar and what’s not. And because I see people talking about artificial sweeteners, and they’ll label stevia as an artificial sweetener. And I went out, and I went to my garden, and I took a video of the stevia plants. I’m like, does that look like an artificial sweetener to you? Yum, it’s sweet. It looks like mint. So it’s helping people to understand what is an artificial sweetener, what’s not. And even among the natural sweeteners, which ones are good and which ones are not, and how do we how do we discern.
Mira Dessy (29:54)
Sure, I will say agave nectar is one of my least favorites, because it gets promoted all the time as a healthy sweetener, because it doesn’t spike blood sugar the way other things do. The challenge is that it is a very high fructose sweetener. The only organ in your body that can process fructose is your liver. If you consume too much, first of all, your body saves some of it for later. So we get a lot of adipose tissue, belly fat. And then we also can start having fatty liver disease, because our body just can’t keep up.
So high fructose corn syrup by itself is approximately 55% fructose by volume. Agave nectar, 70% fructose by volume. So it’s even more. But it’s being promoted as this healthy sweetener. I really struggle with how much it has made its way into so many products on the grocery store shelves, because everybody thinks it’s healthy.
There’s one that’s actually even worse that is not as prevalent, but if you read the label, you can find it. And it’s called crystalline fructose, which is a name that kind of annoys me, because it sounds very innocuous. know, crystalline, crystals, fructose, fruit, sugar should be good, right? No. That is in very, very simplistic terms. That is dehydrated high fructose corn syrup, and it is 90% fructose by volume.
The biggest place that you tend to find it is in those self serve yogurt bars. I don’t want to mention any brands by name, but you go in, and you choose the yogurt you want. And then you go over to the candy bar, and you top it with candy and then they weigh it by the pound, and that’s what you buy. That is the sweetener of choice and that does tend to be crystalline fructose. It can sometimes also appear in sports beverages and other things like that. Some of them are starting to take it out.
So anything with a lot of fructose, not good for us, not great. I will say I think the biggest challenge, before we address sweetener types, is reading the label and learning how to remove the sweet from the savory, because we are biologically programmed to like things that are sweet. Like we learn that as babies, breast milk is sweet. And so we just, we sort of start there.
And then food producers know that we are programmed for that, and they add it to everything. So there are sweeteners in condiments, in crackers, in all kinds of things that we don’t think of as a sweet food. But if you’re constantly getting this low level dose of sugar, how much more does it take for dessert to taste like it’s got some sweetness to it? So if we back it up and read the label and remove as much sugar as possible from those things that are not meant to be sweet in the diet, we all of a sudden find ourselves much more satisfied with something that is not excessively sweet.
Dr Ritamarie (32:58)
Got it, wow. Yeah, there’s just a lot to think about, right? And again, going back to things like stevia, which is not an artificial sweetener, it just has this chemical, the steviosides that trick the body into thinking it’s sweet, but it doesn’t provide any sugar or any calories. And it grows in the ground. Lohan, which is a plant that grows in China, it’s even used medicinally in Chinese medicine, and it has that sweet taste to it. So those are not artificial, but sucralose and saccharin and all those others are artificial.
And then we have the higher glycemic, the fructose containing, which you’re naturally not going to be high glycemic, because you can eat pure fructose, and it generally doesn’t raise your blood sugar. That doesn’t mean it’s good. It means it’s killing your liver, right? So it’s looking at all this stuff and really helping people to discern, first of all, to teach them to love the savory and like the savory better.
But you’re right, sticking them in crackers and breads and tomato sauce and ketchup and all that that has sugar in it. I didn’t think about that before. It desensitizes the tongue so that now you need to have dessert, it needs major sugar.
Mira Dessy (34:14)
It needs to be wow. And part of the challenge is food producers know we want sweet. And so they’re always looking for new sweeteners that they can bring on the market. I just wrote about this this past week.
There is a new sweetener that was just granted GRAS status by the FDA. And it is made from the African Serendipity Berry, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take to come to market, but it is going to be an artificial sweetener that is going to be get this 2,000 times sweeter than sugar, and part of the problem is so many of the artificial sweeteners are already two and three hundred times sweeter than sugar what do we need with something that’s two thousand times sweeter? Like that’s just ridiculous, right?
And I’m guessing that if you eat the berries by themselves, it’s incredibly potent and wonderful, and you don’t really need a lot of them, but you grind it up into a powder and then you process it. Who knows how they’re going to do that. There’s a lot of different ways that they can, usually using something like aspergillus or some other kind of fungus or bacteria. And then we have this, what’s going to be potentially the new darling sweetener that everybody’s going to rush to, because we want to have the sweet without the calories. Whereas, if we learned to simply modify, we would get so much more enjoyment out of our food.
And I think as practitioners, teaching our clients how to eat mindfully and how to really tune in is a big part of the equation.
Dr Ritamarie (35:55)
It’s huge and be careful about what you eat and all that. So there’s a lot here. There’s a lot to unpack. We can go on and on. I wanted to ask you, do you have a guide of some sort where people can look up what’s artificial, and where these things are hidden? That would be an amazing thing to have. You do.
Mira Dessy (36:12)
I actually wrote a book. And I’m sorry, this is my personal copy. So it has like a whole bunch of notes, because I use it sometimes when I write newsletters and stuff. It’s called The Pantry Principle: How to Read the Label and Understand What’s Really In Your Food.
Dr Ritamarie (36:26)
Great, we’ll put a link to that. Because it’s important, it’s an important thing. I was first starting out in practice, so 30 years ago or more, I would do these label reading classes at my house in my living room, and people were just floored. And there’s so much more now, 30 years later, there’s so many more chemicals and additives and things for us to learn about.
Mira Dessy (36:49)
And I love what you said earlier, I agree completely. If you’re reading a label, and you don’t know what something is, put it back. I mean, here’s the thing, when we first had acai pop into juices and other things, it was like, what is that? Like, now we know that it’s a very antioxidant rich berry and in moderation can be great. However, if you didn’t know what it was when you first read it, the goal was to put it back on the shelf, figure it out.
Dr Ritamarie (37:21)
Don’t eat something, and you don’t know what it is. Don’t put something in your body. And as practitioners, we’re working with people to restore balance and to help them overcome health challenges that, face it, Western medicine hasn’t really been able to help with, because they don’t have the tools to understand the root causes. So putting all these chemicals in the body, this chemical soup in the body, is not helping them. It’s hurting them. It’s going against the other things that you’re teaching them how to do.
So I appreciate you being here. And what’s the best way for people to stay connected? You have a website?
Mira Dessy (37:58)
I do. So my website is theingredientguru.com. And if people are interested in more food news, I actually have a sub stack now it’s miradessy.substack.com. And every week I share the food news you can use in a newsletter where I talk about all the weird stuff that’s going on in the world of food.
Dr Ritamarie (38:20)
I love it. I love it. Because you have to keep up with it, and you’re doing that work, so we can take advantage of you doing that work and read your stuff and buy your book and all that.
So I really appreciate you being here and sharing. We’ll make sure that we have all the links to all those things. I’m pretty sure you sent them to us, but if not, make sure you do. So we’ll make sure it’s all in the show notes, so you can follow up. So I hope this was helpful for you guys to listen to, you know, how to help people actually eat well.
Wwe didn’t even get into microplastics, and how they get in, but that’s a story for another day. Oh, that’s really scary. But we are the future of healthcare. We, who care about food, care about what we put into our bodies, and guide people to that. That’s what true healthcare really needs to be, not the outdated emphasis on symptom suppression, but really getting true health from the inside out.
So I’ve dedicated my life to helping people to get to the real root causes and be healthy and really live life to their fullest up until their hundredth and beyond year. So if you’re ready to take your practice to the next level, visit our inemethod.com site and learn more about how you can really educate yourself to be like that person who helps people to get to the root cause and gets well.
And until next time, shine on.
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