A question we often get is: Why did we create NACPro+?
NACPro+ was created out of necessity in 2020. However, the last two years have shown our team that inflammation is a trend that we need to help stop.
Our company believes inflammation stems from processed foods. Many sources cite refined carbs, artificial fats and sugar (which itself is processed from plants like sugar cane) being highly inflammatory, but the general public does not believe it is proven without a doubt. For instance, added sugar is bad, but fruit sugars are still not believed to cause inflammation, so it causes confusion. It is well documented in medicine that added protein and fat are believed to be inflammatory and can kill you in the long run, but protein supplements and high-fat diets are very popular because of the short-term weight-loss benefits they offer.
Why Whole Instead of Processed Foods?
Why do we believe processed foods are very bad for your health?
Because food is meant to be eaten whole.
Take an apple as an example. When you bite into an apple, nature has protected our cells from the surge of calories in a “casing” called fiber, which controls the release of caloric nutrients, carbohydrates, proteins and sugar trapped in that apple. In addition, the apple’s fibers feed our gut microbes to make molecules to reduce inflammation. The micronutrients in the apples also reduces inflammation.
When we process the apple - whether we are baking, frying, blending, or juicing it - we have destroyed this natural casing, as well as some of the micronutrients.
Society today is built around the idea of chasing after what we want: delicious food, looking muscular, having sex organs bigger than anyone else's. But evolution built our bodies to chase after sustenance, things you need to survive. And unfortunately, these two desires do not work well together.
OK, So What’s This Got to Do with Inflammation?
Over the last two years, stories of how so many people are suffering from brain fog and continued fatigue have become more common. These are signs of chronic inflammation, but it is not easy to identify inflammation when it occurs at a low, but persistent level like this.
Worse yet, causes of inflammation, such as alcohol, excessive weight, stress, etc., are all self-perpetuating things that we as humans have trouble eliminating from our lives. Many of us enjoy eating food, drinking alcohol, and some of us even seek out high stress jobs because it excites us!
Our lives are filled with things that will cause us inflammation, but that’s OK. Inflammation is necessary for your immunity to function. You just don’t want too much of it in your life and you definitely don’t want it to linger persistently, behind the scenes. Otherwise, it can surface when your body is overstressed and you can’t handle the amount of stressors being thrown at it.
In other words, eliminating chronic inflammation requires you to make a drastic change to your lifestyle so you don’t have lingering bits of it always hanging around in your system.
So, the Healthcare Industry Will Help Me?
No. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
Doctors aren’t life coaches. Nurses don’t work at restaurants, waiting to answer questions about what you should or shouldn’t eat. Healthcare professionals are trained to hopefully prevent you from dying or being seriously hurt. They are not trained to help you make better choices in life.
While this is a drastic oversimplification of what doctors do, the primary difference between a doctor and many other types of healthcare professionals is their ability to prescribe, or supervise others to prescribe, medicine.
After the ability to prescribe, another defining feature of being a doctor is the understanding of procedures, best practices and ways to prevent you from dying or being maimed. Surgeons are trained on how to implant medical devices to save your life. Dermatologists are trained to remove things from your skin that can kill or maim you. The list goes on, but professionals with medical degrees are basically learning effective ways to treat significant health problems, after you get them.
What doctors don’t do is figure out what went wrong in your life that led you to your current health complication. Family care or personal physicians may be able to advise you along the way, but again, they are not personal chefs. Doctors understand vitamin deficiencies and how they can cause certain types of diseases, but they do not advise you on what fruits and vegetables to eat unless you have a condition that will worsen your symptoms. They will prescribe the necessary vitamins to you to alleviate the disease you are suffering from, but it’s to alleviate a symptom that may kill you. They won’t prescribe vitamins to prevent the disease from happening in the first place, because doctors know we should be getting vitamins from our foods.
And sure, doctors know you need vitamins, but does the general public? As of February of 2022, this woman did not, and in 2021, there were more than 10,000 people in the UK that apparently did not know they need vitamin C either, even though scurvy has been well documented in the medical community since the 18th century.
Wait, So Who Can Help Me Prevent Inflammation?
All this background is to help you to better understand that the healthcare community is not structured to help you prevent health problems. In one study by the CDC on why preventative services are not more popular, one anonymous interview said that “With no margin, there is no mission.” Meaning, if healthcare providers can’t sell services, they can’t stay in business. Need a translation? It means, there really is no incentive for them to help you not get sick, but there are many incentives for them if you do get sick.
In fact, society at large is not structured to prevent health complications. The FDA exists to ensure the safety of food and drugs, but it also tries to make it explicitly clear that it does not know what will prevent any type of disease or health issue (see the example of FDA stickers below for many products, including our own product, which has never been tested to see if it can prevent any disease, nor do we ever claim it can prevent any type of disease).
What NACPro+ can do is support anti-inflammation, because it is made from important vitamins, minerals and nutrients in plants. It can’t replace whole foods, but it supplements you for the times when you may not have eaten everything you need, for optimal cellular function.
But going to back to the FDA, the only clear directive (that we are aware of, but please let us know if you know of others) the FDA has in place around prevention is not smoking tobacco. The FDA does not have any preventative directives around alcohol, despite very strong evidence strongly suggesting alcohol causes liver disease. The CDC does strongly recommend a minimum drinking age and even the federal Minimum Legal Drinking Age Act of 1984 makes the purchase of alcohol illegal for those under 21, but that is far as the government goes. Many states actually allow for drinking under the age of 21 in certain circumstances.
That’s right, even though many organizations (John Hopkins, Mount Sinai, Stanford) believe alcohol is linked to liver disease, it is still as popular a vice as ever. Americans have very famously proven that we do not want alcohol banned in any shape or form. Even if it has more than a 90% chance to make your liver as hard as a rock and eventually kill you from inflammation. The fact is, the public enjoys alcohol and has proven that it wants alcohol to always be available.
Therefore, public services pretty much leave it up to every individual to decide if these health hazards are risks they are willing to include in their lives.
I’m Confused - Is There Nothing I Can Do?
Hopefully, a recurring theme has begun to emerge from this blog post.
The only way to prevent inflammation is to determine what is right for you and make choices that will benefit you.
Our company believes inflammation is largely caused by processed foods and the overconsumption of foods with too many calories in them. We don’t have the money to prove this, but even if we did, we do believe that the benefits you will receive from eating healthy foods, exercising and eliminating stress are free and easy to do, so there is no reason not to try it.
And because of the way preventative healthcare works, hospitals, insurers and even governments are placing the decision on if preventing inflammation is important enough to you on you and your wallet.
And in our opinion, the first place to start is to incorporate more whole foods into your diet, so your body can benefit from the nutrients in them.
So go out and eat an apple. Your body will thank you.