Every minute of every day, you and I are getting older. Have you ever wondered what causes your body to age? Well there’s been a lot of research into that and there are some very simple things you can do – to slow down that process. Interested?   Eat Healthy, Be Healthy You and I have been given such an amazing body, and it’s the only body that we’ll ever get. It’s been wonderfully, exquisitely, uniquely handcrafted and yet so many of us are abusing it into an early grave. All because of what we’re putting into our mouths. You are what you eat – literally. Way to many people are contracting diseases that, just a century ago were rare as hens teeth. As we saw last week on the program, cardio-vascular disease was almost unknown in the early 20th century. Today, the World Health Organisation estimates that through heart attack and stroke, cardio-vascular disease kills 16.7 million people every year. That’s one third of all deaths worldwide. And please don’t think that this is all coming from wealthy countries. Two thirds of those deaths are coming from low and middle-income nations. There’s probably not a one of us who doesn’t know someone who’s had a heart attack or a stroke. Well, if we had been having this discussion back in 1901, almost none of us would have known anyone who’d had a heart attack or a stroke. And yet by 2020, the World Health organisation estimates that there will be around 25 million cardio-vascular disease deaths worldwide. It’s on the increase. It’s the same with cancer, same with diabetes, same with obesity. People we are eating ourselves into an early grave. And the more research that comes out, the more it all points to the so-called Western Diet. I believe, I know that God gave you and me the most amazing bodies, and the reason we’re dedicating a few weeks to talking about this stuff on this program, is because I want to help you avoid becoming a victim of your western diet influences. The thing that sets the western diet apart as we’ve seen if you’ve been able to join me, is not it’s fat content – there are plenty of instances of traditional diets high in animal fats where the people have a zero rate of cardio-vascular disease, diabetes and obesity – the thing that sets it apart is the high content of processed and refined carbohydrates. Sugar: there’s sugar in just about every processed food you buy in the supermarket, white flour, white rice. Sweet drinks, sweet sauces, sweet cereals, sweet just about everything. Last week I shared with you that my top secret for losing 25 kgs (that’s 55 lbs)  that’s a lot of weight, was simply removing refined carbohydrates from my diet. I just want to talk about that a bit more today, because people are shocked. Some think I’m crazy. Others put it down to another fad diet thing. I told someone about it recently, and they said, ‘but aren’t you hungry?’ We are so conditioned to believe that refined carbohydrates are a normal part of a healthy diet. But they’re simply not! If you turn the clock back a century – back to the days when cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and a string of other diseases (which today are pandemics on the increase) were almost completely unknown – the one thing that stands out like a sore thumb, is that refined carbohydrates were a complete rarity in people’s diets. People want to know, ‘Well, Berni, if you don’t eat bread and cereal and tomato sauce and cakes and biscuits and chips and stuff, what in goodness’ name do you eat?’ That’s the question I’d like to answer for you today, as I sit here with my blood pressure normal, my blood sugar normal, my triglycerides and bad cholesterol low, my good cholesterol high. I wish I could have invited you to dinner last night. It was awesome. My wife Jacqui cooked a roast vegetable salad while I grilled some tandoori chicken on the BBQ. The salad was stunning. She cut up zucchinis, peppers or capsicums, mushrooms, baby tomatoes, onions, beans (I actually can’t remember all the veggies that were there) and drizzled them with healthy olive oil and roasted them for half an hour in the oven. Preparation time – about 10 minutes. We then tossed the roasted veggies in a bit of vinegar, added a little salt and pepper and served them up warm with the tandoori chicken that I’d cooked. What was missing was any sauce with sugar in it. What was missing was roast potatoes or white rice or white pasta that would spike your blood sugar level and produce nasty triglycerides in your blood. But do you know, those veggies contained all the carbohydrates my body needs. I had a stack of them too; they tasted exquisite. The meal contained mostly carbs, some protein and some fat – the way a meal is meant to – only the carbohydrates were tucked away inside a whole bunch of natural fibre, which made them slower to digest. Meaning I wouldn’t get hungry for a long time, and my blood sugar wouldn’t spike. That’s how people ate back at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact that’s how they’ve been eating for millennia – plenty of unrefined carbs, unrefined grains which are slow to digest, with plenty of fat – animal fat included and plenty of protein. If we had the courage to turn the clock back 150 years on our diet, to a time when obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease were virtually non existent, what we’d doubtless discover, is that many of the diseases that are the products of the 20th and 21st century western diet would go away. And the exciting thing is that the food is fantastic. My biggest insight? Vegetables rock. Animal fat, rather than increasing my cholesterol levels, actually keeps your blood sugar under control, keeps your appetite under control, and doesn’t make you fat. The research is done. The studies are in. And I’m walking proof. There is so much fantastic, natural food out there, and if we were prepared to go for it what we would discover is a whole new food sensation, a healthier body, a body that ages much more slowly, a body that is mentally and physically sharper and far less prone to 20th century diseases. Are you serious about looking after that one body you’ve been given? Really? So, what are you going to do about it? You are what you eat.   Slowing Down the Ageing Process Now that I’m in my mid fifties, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research about is the process of ageing. What I’ve observed is that you can take two people of the same age, and one looks much younger than the other. A smoker will often look much older than a non–smoker of the same age. A person who is significantly overweight will often behave much older as their leg and hip joints struggle with the weight, than a person who is not overweight. I see people who are my age using walking sticks, or hobbling, or finding it hard to get up out of a chair. Is that a random process, or is it something to do with the lifestyle that we lead? Does the process of ageing strike according only to the programming in our DNA, or are there environmental factors that influence ageing? In other words, is there something that you and I can do – in how we live – to slow down the ageing process. That’s not a new thought, there’s a lot of research going on in this area as our population ages. There are a few different theories of ageing. The most widely accepted one in the medical community is the free radical theory of ageing. You’ve probably heard of free radicals, but, much like me before I became interested in the ageing process, you haven’t paid much attention to them. In a nutshell, the free radical theory of ageing goes like this: Many of the activities of life produce free radicals in our body – these are unstable molecules in search of a spare electron – we won’t go too much into the molecular science here, or we’ll be at it all day. Heavy exercise produces fr...

Released on 27 Jun 2021