Rethinking Lifestyle

The other day, soap was on my shopping list. I won’t mention the brand, but I bought a pack of 4 bars, each bar being packed in an individual box and the four boxes packed together with a printed plastic overwrap. Attached to the 4-pack was another package containing “Cleansing Facial Wipes” that are no use to me anyway as I have a beard. If I want to wipe my face I am perfectly happy to wipe it with plain water. However I took a look at the ingredients and was absolutely shocked at what these facial wipes contain. Here is the list:

Aqua, Cetearyl Isononanoate, Panthenol, Tocopheryl Acetate, Glycerin, Cetearyl Alcohol, Ceteareth-20, Glyceryl Stearate, Ceteareth-12, Sodium Citrate, Disodium EDTA, Phenoxyethanol, Sodium Benzoate, Sodium Dehydroacetate.

Why would anyone want to put all these chemicals on their face? When I looked up these ingredients on the Internet one was normally used as a hair-conditioning agent and two of the others were preservatives. My grandmother had lovely soft skin and I’m sure none of these chemicals even existed in her day – except the aqua, which of course is Latin for water. And what a waste of unnecessary packing material.

It is the same with food. Do you read the ingredient list? Personally I never buy anything unless I know what all the ingredients are; otherwise I put the item back on the shelf. There was a very interesting item on CBC Radio “The Current” recently that talked about the good bacteria in our gut, called our microbiome, and that the more diverse the range of species, the more healthy we are likely to be. It is well known that antibiotics kill good bacteria as well as the target bad ones and it has been shown that the more courses of antibiotic a person has had, the higher the chance of that person being obese. The good bacteria are also severely reduced on a diet of processed foods – likely they say due to the emulsifiers, additives and sweeteners. This is why I always read the ingredient list and after the CBC item I will be a lot more particular.

Now this is the really interesting thing for me. Tests on identical twins where one twin was obese and the other slim, the obese gut contained far fewer varieties of bacteria. Additionally the slim gut contained one particular bacteria that was absent in the obese gut. This ‘skinny’ bacteria was isolated and introduced to mice, and then the mice were fed an unhealthy high fat, high sugar/carb diet but they remained slim.

The other thing was that in order to encourage a more diverse variety of bacteria one should eat lots of fibre in things like chickpeas, lentils, beans and vegetables. Leeks were noted to be especially good.

Putting all these things together, it would be interesting to know whether there is a difference in obesity rates between vegetarians and meat-eaters, and yes, there is (per Google). Note to self: avoid unknown food additives and eat more fibre.