My whole family ate dinner last night at Beef O’Brady’s with a bunch of friends after a soccer game.. I hate Beefs because everytime I eat there I usually leave feeling pretty rotten. And, if I don’t feel terrible when I walk out of the place, it is a pretty good bet that I will feel terrible within a few hours or the next morning when I wake up.
It certainly wasn’t my choice to go to Beef O’Bradys. If it was up to me, I would have chosen some other restaurant that wasn’t a chain.
Chain restaurants serve the worst quality food, have you noticed? To get a decent meal, you really need to go to a sole proprietorship type of restaurant where the cook is usually the owner (or at least milling around the kitchen area) and there is some degree of pride in the quality of the food that is served.
But, you can’t live in a bubble, especially if you have children. When a bunch of friends want to go to Beef O’Brady’s to hang out after the big game, you go along and try to eat whatever will cause the least amount of pain and suffering later.
I’ve tried the “I’m going home to eat” approach and found that it just doesn’t work very well. Socializing with friends over a meal is a big part of getting to know folks and enjoying their company. Figuring out how to navigate the processed food landmines at a place like Beefs is just part of learning how to stay healthy in a world of garbage food. It isn’t easy, but it’s just part of the challenge.
All this blah blah blah about Beef O’Brady’s is a roundabout way of bringing me to the main point of this blog: Industrial Food Sickness, also known as IFS.
What is Industrial Food Sickness anyway?
Anyone who has embarked upon an unprocessed, Real Food lifestyle instinctively knows exactly what I’m talking about here.
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| Food That Will Cause Industrial Food Sickness |
Industrial Food Sickness is the short term illness folks experience when they eat highly processed, msg and additive laden food when their diet is unprocessed, nutrient dense, and whole foods based the majority of the time.
Dealing with IFS is one of the biggest concerns folks express to me when they transition to the unprocessed, Real Food way of life to experience their best health.
“Why can’t I eat out anymore without feeling terrible for 2 days afterward?”
“Church and school potlucks make me feel ill and I find that I don’t enjoy going anymore, why is that?”
Why do folks suddenly become prone to IFS? Why do foods that never seemed to bother you before you began to eat healthy suddenly keep you up all night with any combination of IFS symptoms: stomach cramps, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, joint pain, dizziness, and the most common symptom: absolute exhaustion (note: I zonked out on the couch for about an hour after getting home from Beefs).
The reason is because when you start eating whole, unprocessed Real Food the majority of the time, your gut begins to heal. Beneficial bacteria begin to re-establish dominance over the gut pathogens that have been ruling the roost for years, maybe even decades. Nutrient absorption improves tremendously as the perforations in the gut wall begin to heal and the enterocytes that are responsible for breaking down our food into particles that can be absorbed into the blood grow stronger with each passing day.
Throw some highly processed, additive laden food into this improving gut environment and suddenly, the entire healing process takes a violent step or two backwards. Processed food does not nourish beneficial gut flora; it encourages the growth of pathogens. This is why even a single meal of highly processed foods can cause a rapid surge of the gut pathogens at the expense of the beneficial flora. This battle between good and bad bacteria in your gut is what makes you feel so tired and sick after a meal at a typical American style restaurant, a potluck, or a birthday party with supermarket cake and high fructose corn syrup juice boxes.
Industrial Food Sickness can be compared to a teetotaler drinking a fifth of vodka and ending up in the Hospital Emergency Room with alcohol poisoning whereas a drunk doing the same thing would show little signs of drunkeness.
The difference is that the drunk is used to it!
Does being “used to it” mean that the fifth of vodka isn’t harming the drunk?
Absolutely not! The drunk’s liver is still getting slammed every time he drinks a fifth of vodka.
Similarly, just because you used to be able to go to Beef O’Brady’s and eat whatever you wanted and not feel sick for 2 days does not mean that it wasn’t devastating your insides!
Be thankful that now your body has healed enough from your Real Food lifestyle to tell you that it is in distress from the garbage you just fed it!
Industrial Food Sickness is your canary in the mine that what you just ate wasn’t the best of choices.
I used to detest Industrial Food Sickness. It used to bother me that I couldn’t eat garbage food anymore without feeling terrible.
Now I realize that IFS is just a signal that my body is so much healthier than before. My body is well enough to feel sick when it is assaulted by processed food instead of just numb. That is a very good thing!
If you are reading this and you haven’t ever experienced Industrial Food Sickness, I would recommend that you change over to the Real Food Lifestyle as quickly as possible. You are like the drunk drinking a fifth of vodka and not feeling a thing. Your body is so messed up it has become numb to the pain.
Industrial Food Sickness is the one illness you want to experience as it is a very strong deterrent to eating the foods that will bring you chronic ill health. It’s also a very good sign that your health is improving!
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Thank you so much for this post! IFS has been making me wonder if things were getting worse, not better! This post really encouraged me to stick the course and keep trying to improve my family's diet. We've made the change to raw milk, and now my family has a hard time drinking any other kind. Next up: farm fresh eggs … I finally found a local source!
I loved your comment about the need for social time with others … when we eat industrial food, this is usually the reason why! I appreciate that you didn't "guilt trip" us but recognize the important social aspects of food. I am working on teaching my friends and family (many of whom still eat "faux food") about the better choices out there. Starting to see some progress …
Awesome post, and awesome blog! I've been really enjoying your site. Thank you!
Excellent suggestion, Candace! Steak is definitely one of the safest choices when eating out.
UGH! We know this feeling all too well; but like you, we too enjoy socializing over dinner and a drink occasionally with our family and friends. Both my husband and I, though, will get extreme stomach upset and headaches from the "crappity crap" served at restaurants these days. Just a suggestion, though, which is one thing that we try to do, is to stick to the basics as much as possible. For example, you can stick a bunch of fillers and "crap" into meatloaf, but not into a steak. So in this example, we would always choose the steak … it's the lesser of two evils.
Momma G –> faux food! I love that phrase!!
I feel like it was a disguised benefit for me now when I had to stop eating at all fast food places because they would make me feel sick – even though I wasn't eating a lot of real food at that point! From the time I was 10 till about 20 I gradually stopped eating at chain restaurants and stopped eating ice cream, donuts, etc. They would make me feel sick.
Now that I've been eating real food for several months, the rare occasion of eating something like Steak n Shake, doesn't make me feel quite as ill as it used to, but does leave me starving! It truly has been amazing to see how other things I did eat all the time were truly affecting me, and it's so awesome how much my true-american junkie husband promotes real foods with his friends and family!
Thank you so much for reminding me of this! I've had several instances of this lately — twice with what I suspect was MSG, and then over this last weekend (my birthday), I ate a bunch of sugar, which I've almost completely cut out otherwise. UGH. Heart palpitations, aching lymphnodes, fatigue, and that feeling you get behind your eyes when you're about to get a cold.
It seems so unfair that my husband can handle that stuff so much easier than I can. Thanks for reminding me that it's a good thing! I can tell when something is horrible. What a gift, after years of eating crap with few symptoms.
This is so true, and what I've also found is that the food that I used to love so much just doesn't taste good anymore either. I ate a cheesy, meaty, white pasta dish that I had been avoiding for over a year, expecting it to be as fantastic as I remembered & it was just "ok". My husband was disappointed for me, but I was actually glad that the temptation & craving was no longer there for me. I keep reminding myself that there are no foods in this world that I'm willing to be sick or die for…anything can be given up for better health and a longer life.
We don't eat grains. We are low-carbers. We eat some veggies and fruits. We do eat alot of pastured meats and healthy fats – lard, beef tallow, coconut oil.
I'm not embarrassed at all to tell people we don't do grains and we just eat meat, fats, and low carb veggies/fruits. There were cupcakes at our last social outing and my kids didn't even ask for them but they begged for cherry tomatoes!
Tina
I think the OP raises an interesting point: Can a restaurant prosper by producing meals based on real food?
Wow, this already has a lot of comments – obviously this happens to a lot of us once we start eating Real Food! For me it's vegetable oils and I can't eat any fried food when we're eating out or I get terrible stomach upset. As much as I love onion rings or chicken tenders, I just eat those at home now (fried in tallow-yum!) and they taste better anyway – no icky coating in my mouth.
Kelly