You’re probably already aware that you’d better avoid this type of food.
But if you have chronic kidney disease (CKD), you must cut it out immediately.
Because a new study that just appeared in the journal Science Advances reveals that this food directly (and quickly) destroys your kidneys.
A science team led by researchers from Australia’s Monash University put Sprague-Dawley rats on a thermally processed diet for 24 weeks, meaning that they ate almost only foods processed or produced with lots of heat.
Why use a thermally processed diet to investigate the effects of a processed diet?
Well, because most of our processed foods are processed with heat. Extreme heat generates chemical compounds called advanced glycation end-products. These are the chemicals that give fried, roasted, and grilled foods that great flavor we all love.
Consequently, food manufacturers have worked out how to isolate these chemicals and put them into most of our processed foods: think chocolate, potato chips, processed meats, and pretty much everything that comes out of a bakery, including many breads.
When these researchers examined the intestines of the rats on this processed diet, they discovered that many of them had leaky gut syndrome, a condition in which small gaps develop in the walls of the intestines.
These advanced glycation end products then leaked out of the intestines of the rats into their blood streams. Since their bodies identified these chemicals as potentially harmful, they turned on their innate immune complement systems.
These systems are good at dealing with common pathogens, but if there is no real pathogen present, as in this case, an overactivation of this system simply causes massively high levels of inflammation that attack our organs.
This was precisely what happened to the rats, and some of the most-attacked organs were the kidneys.
Let’s recap to make this clear.
1. Advanced glycation end-products in processed foods cause leaky gut syndrome.
2. When they leak out of the intestines, these chemicals cause inflammation.
3. This inflammation harms the kidneys.
To prove their hypothesis, they fed some diabetic mice a high-resistance starch/fiber diet. This diet maintained the walls of their intestines so that advanced glycation end-products could not leak through, resulting in less inflammation and kidney injury.
Sadly, this means that you should start cooking, stewing, or steaming more of your food.
But, more than anything, it means that you should start buying fewer processed foods, as most of these contain these harmful advanced glycation end-products.
To balance the processed foods that you will inevitably buy and the roasts and fries that are so irresistible, include lots of foods high in resistant starch fiber in your diet.
These include oats, barley, cooked or steamed brown rice, and lots and lots of legumes.