Toxic Processed Food Ingredients: Why People Eat More Than They Realise

Processed food is the bane of civilisation. The facts are that the average American eats 110 tons of sugar per year. In 1999, soybean oil made up 7% of US total calories, a single oil of a single unhealthy seed which originally grew in Chinese wetlands.

We could discuss the economics of this all day. How sugar makes food ever more irresistible, and how soybeans are incredibly cheap for food companies compared to milking cows for dairy. But today, we’re going to discuss why people eat so much processed food without even realising it.

Processed food and acne are partners in crime, and most people have no idea why their acne is so bad. Is there a connection? Absolutely.

Are you tired of using new cleansers? Are you convinced that you’ll have acne forever? You won’t – mark my words – and read this article first to find out why: the real causes of acne. 

 

Marketing madness

Our first point is the simple epidemic of the world “healthy” on cereal boxes, or for that matter, meat sauces or fruit juice.

In corporate buildings everywhere, the signal is beaming in from their advertising allies that the world healthy alone will double your profits within milliseconds. Unfortunately, the interests of consumer’s health and an avalanche of bank notes don’t tend to align.

Therefore, we have sugary cereals which boast of b-vitamins and iron. We have veggie burgers which are “animal free”, but loaded with hydrolysed vegetable protein extracted from cheap soybean meal using chemicals. Both are only surface level heath requirements.

Another classic is boasting of less added sugar, despite being a paltry 2 gram reduction. Even a newspaper article announcing that 6 energy drink companies have agreed to reduce sugar slightly can make processed food feel safer, less risky. People see these healthy claims and think they’re in safer waters.

Of course, none of this would work if customers weren’t in cahoots either. Not officially, but subconsciously.

We all want to be healthy, but sometimes, rather than a fully-fledged, well planned system, it’s more of a nagging feeling at the back of your mind. Maybe you’ve felt this – most of us have. Most people have the nagging voice of the health angel whispering in your ear versus the spiky tailed devil of greed in the other ear.

So whenever they buy a superficially healthy processed food, this doubt gets satisfied. People believe that they’re making an effort, when it’s really a fresh coat of paint – the product is about 1% healthier.

Often, they’re adding in a healthy substance (vitamin D, iron), but not removing the real offenders. For true health and clear skin, you have to do both. You can’t pile on antioxidants and keep acne-causing sugar in place, no matter how hard you try.

 

The mind

Similarly, people often add in two pieces of fruit per day, and feel as though that’s the problem solved.

Let’s face it – on the road to health, it’s much more fun to add foods than it is to outlaw them. But the same principals apply. A pomegranate is rich in antioxidants, but it will never counteract wheat. It doesn’t work like that, but in your mind, it feels like it might.

Pomegranate can deactivate free radicals with its antioxidants, while gluten weakens nutrient absorption by deregulating your gut lining. Broccoli is packed with vitamin C, but it doesn’t counteract the immune system chaos triggered by soybean oil.

We could go on all day. Adding fruit to an underlying base of acne won’t work. It’s a similar concept to dieting, where people often feel great after a 40 minute exercise session, and celebrate with a pizza.

It all boils down to people’s nagging voice of health being satisfied prematurely. Satisfied by decisions with a small, but ultimately insignificant benefit.

Then, they go back to their normal way of eating, and sometimes, if a news report comes on about the grave epidemic of heart disease or diabetes sweeping America, they’ll shake their heads disapprovingly with the vaguely satisfying memory of their recent “healthy” decision in mind. In fact, they’re just as unhealthy as everyone else! Or un-acne-friendly.

 

We’ve let our guard down

Processed foods also feel completely normal, because we’ve grown up with them. A poptart feels as natural as an apple growing on a tree (hint: it’s not), like it always existed.

Meanwhile, your Grandma probably mistrusted any store-bought food with more than two ingredients. It’s all psychological, but people have a trust of foods packaged and prepared far away that they wouldn’t have done 100 years ago. In turn, they trust the ingredients inside, unless they’re addicted to natural health websites.

It’s all in the mind. Your Grandma might have been slightly over-paranoid, but she had a mental buffer that people today don’t. Imagine growing up on a farm in Ireland with free range chickens roaming the yard.

Alongside mountains of potatoes, your grizzled old farmer grandad would regularly put delicious fresh chicken and eggs down on your plate (and in 50 years, you’d surely be one of those old timers who insist that “chicken don’t taste the same no more”).

Suddenly, KFC is born, a breadcrumb-coated extravaganza. What the hell is this? It contradicts everything you know about chicken. The ingredients contradict it, and the preparation in a faraway factory contradicts your grandma slicing it up with love and care by hand. The mistrust is there from day one.

Meanwhile, to today’s generation, KFC is chicken. Most US chicken consumed is processed and covered with breadcrumbs.

You can’t underestimate this psychological aspect. It makes people instinctively less questioning. If your Grandma found out about toxic BHA or soybean oil, she would be onto it like a laserbeam; she would never shut up about it. Today, people might be concerned for a moment, but then dismiss it. With something so familiar, the fear just doesn’t register in the same way.

That’s another way that your vegetable oil intake can slowly creep up.

This ties in closely to another theme – that people’s dietary choices are often ingrained since childhood. Have a donut to celebrate a hard day at work being finished? That’s fine – you’ve been doing it since elementary school. Always have a bag of beef-flavoured potato chips during your lunch break? That’s fine – your mum gave them to you for school at age 6.  Again, these things are so normalised that even questioning them feels odd. They become a serious blind spot for people. Many of these points tie together.

 

Processed foods are subtle

Another point is that in your 20s, you rarely notice the health consequences of these villains. You’re young and fit and everything bounces off you.

The processed food villains that cause acne, like sugar, soybean oil and MSG, tend to be insidious villains. They don’t knock you back on your feet instantly, they reveal their dark hand after many decades, creating the classic Western health problems like diabetes and heart disease. Consequently, there’s no instant motivation to clean up your diet.

Remember that cardiovascular failure was a strange, unintelligible term back in 1900. It was trans-fats and later sugar that created it – processed food villains. It’s true that if you switched to a purely natural diet today, your health and vitality would soar (and this is something to get excited about, by the way). Your thought processes would sharpen, your energy would be high enough to power interstellar space travel, and your dreams could even get more vivid.

The point is though, that most of us have been eating processed foods since birth. Therefore, we don’t know what’s on the other side. It’s all we know.

It feels normal to be at 50%, with no health problems, but maybe a little bleary when rolling out of bed in the morning, or with grey-looking skin compared to that nut who lives in a Colorado ski town for 8 months of the year. If a 22 year old reads his soybean oil and sugar intake, he’d probably shrug his shoulders and say “it never did me any harm”. But he doesn’t know the power of the natural side.

Again, it’s psychological. The shock factor is missing. He doesn’t realise that big benefits are still possible – big acne-clearing benefits, to be precise.

 

The fog of processed food

Acne is a classic health condition which doesn’t indicate imminent death but shows that the body isn’t working at tip-top potential.

It’s below par, and indeed, acne is caused by inflammation, which correlates closely with creaky joints and brain fog. These conditions build up slowly over the years, so they’ll never spook you into suddenly cleaning up your diet.

It’s the old frog boiling slowly in water scenario, adjusting to the gradual temperature increase, minute by minute, until it’s too late. If acne-causing processed foods caused you to wake up in bed paralysed, that would be an instant wakeup call.

Of course, even if people did realise that their energy and depression were subpar, would they link it to processed food? Probably not, their first thoughts would jump to a vitamin deficiency, or they might ask their doctor to prescribe a medication. Poor energy is a complex condition – there’s no cast iron scientific study pointing the finger at Oreos. It’s all very murky.

Essentially, the bodily symptoms of too much processed food are too subtle for the average person to notice. Compare that to vitamin C – it leads to scurvy, where old wounds reopen, teeth loosen, and blotchy patches appear on the skin.

 

Mission easily possible

The point then? You need to avoid this lack of clarity. Don’t fall into the same trap! Don’t eat a single apple and be fooled by the same kick of “I’m trying” satisfaction.

You need to snap out of this fog of confusion. Don’t worry – most clear-skinned people stumbled around aimlessly at first, including me. Maybe you’ve tried one strategy in isolation, like applying argan oil, adding ginger to your coffee, or, but never brought it all together into a fantastic whole.

You can’t follow the path of clear skin until it’s completely clear in front of you. Otherwise, you’ll alternate between waves of worry and bursts of optimism when new treatments appear, which quickly go nowhere.

For a moment, you need to see the ugly truth. You might be shocked at first, to see what you’re really eating. That’s a good thing, and it’s setting you up for a brighter, happier future of clear skin. You’ll look back at this as the moment when it all started.

What would you rather have?

A: the perfect diet, with barely any sugar and the perfect acne fruits slotted in perfectly, to utter perfection. Plus a faceful of acne. Or…

B: 200 grams of sugar daily, a daily lunchtime packed with vegetable oil, and no thought about your diet at all. Plus a faceful of acne.

The second scenario might send a justifiable jolt of panic down your back, but it also gives you dramatically more room for improvement. Like many people, you could be an inch away from far clearer skin. You could be a few easy decisions away from never worrying about pimples before the school bus pulls up ever again. So many people have all the pieces of the puzzle floating around in the back of their minds. They have all the knowledge, but it just doesn’t come together at once.

 

Media cycles

It’s not surprising – think about all those magazine articles you read, or newspaper columns. At least twice a year, The Times will detail a fantastic new study showing that fish oil lowers inflammation (the root cause of acne).

Next month, there’ll be an article showing yogurt consumption to lower inflammation, and then, that just 1 extra serving of broccoli works wonders. People, possibly including you, tend to read these articles and feel excited for a moment, but there’s never a single movement or thrust for any individual concept. It’s simply a treadmill of positive looking articles.

Week by week, they go past in the blink of an eye. When was the last time anything really changed? Big health bodies still recommend less sugar (accurate), wheat as the base of the food pyramid (inaccurate) and canola oil as a nourishing fat (inaccurate).

The point is that people are ambling through life, with no direction, despite almost having the keys. It’s like being a treasure hunter, on the correct beach of the correct topical island, but missing the cave where the treasure chest was hiding by inches simply because a bush was hiding the entrance.

You too could be almost there. Make a few simple changes, and the floodgates of clear skin could all open at once after years of struggling for seemingly no progress. You could be on the precipice of clearing acne!

Right now, it might feel hopeless, but that’s all mental – your future could be different to what you envisage. Much happier, specifically.

Also, that newspaper cycle applies directly to processed foods. One week, MSG might be criticised for damaging neurons, while next week, BHA/BHP is criticised for heart trouble. But there’s no real focus, so people forget about specific ingredients. At best, they get a general unease about processed food.

It’s one thing to read all these articles and have a vague, cursory knowledge, it’s another for the message to truly sink in. For it to rip back the psychological curtain and show you where your diet is flawed, and inspire you to make a change. It’s like awakening from a lung slumber. My guess is that if you’re here, you’re already on this journey.

 

Don’t forget the basics

The classic factor, which we’ve hammered home again and again on this website, is how sugar is sprinkled everywhere, in totally unexpected places.

Meat sauce, breaded fish, actual bread – what’s the need for sugar there? There’s isn’t one, except for making the product subtly more enticing than the company’s competitor, and increasing profits. This competitor in turn plays catch up, before the original company throws some MSG into the big old breaded fish boiling pot alongside a satchel of brown sugar he had lying around for good measure. It causes a never ending spiral of processed food competition.

See this article for a full guide to unexpected sugar sauces. You might obtain some revelations and fresh acne strategies from this alone. When you normally think of sugar, fruit juice, chocolate, and candy comes to mind.

 

Conclusion

The hardest part isn’t finding out this information. The internet takes care of everything – the hard part is planting the first seed in peoples’ minds.

It’s all psychological, people being unable to see what’s right in front of them. Processed food is hiding in plain sight!

Hopefully, you now have a way forward in your skin-clearing quest. Remember that there’s far more opportunities than you realise. The story doesn’t have to be benzoyl peroxide 1st, antibiotics 2nd, accutane 3rd, and a dermatologist shrugging his shoulders 4th. Clear skin is almost certainly in your future.

Occasionally, there are extremely stubborn cases of acne, female hormones running wild which even the meaning of life can’t compare to in mystery. But in the vast processed food wastelands of 2020, the potential of clear skin is there for almost everyone.

 

Thanks for reading!