How do I love sugar? Let me count the ways: Agave, anhydrous dextrose, brown sugar, cane crystals, cane sugar, corn sweetener, corn syrup, corn syrup solids, crystal dextrose, evaporated cane juice, fructose sweetener, fruit juice, honey…too many ways to count!

Did you know sugar is 8 times more addictive than cocaine? (NIH study,)

It takes over your brain and makes you eat more, even if you are not hungry! (How sugar makes you addicted). There is no one kind of sugar that is better for you than other sugar; sugar is sugar is sugar. Eating any kind of sugar in excess leads to obesity and insulin resistance, the root of so many other problems. (Is sugar toxic?)

SUGAR IS EVERYWHERE

Open up some spaghetti sauce, chances are you’ll find it. Cereal? Most cases absolutely. Tomato soup? Definitely! It makes foods taste good and makes you want more, so is often used in food preparation at restaurants and in highly processed foods.

In the US it has been recommended that women consume no more than 6 teaspoons of added sugar, and men no more than 9 teaspoons on a daily basis (I recommend not eating/drinking ANY added sugar on most days).

On average Americans consume 150-170 pounds of sugar per year (per USDA report). Broken down, that is about 90 teaspoons per pound, or 13,500-15,300 teaspoons of sugar per year. This comes down to average of 37-42 teaspoons, slightly more than a full cup of added sugar per day per American.

Would you be surprised to find out that the average can of soda has 9.5 teaspoons of added sugar, and a 20 ounce bottle has about 16 teaspoons. What about “healthy” 100% juice? Juice can average 26g of sugar in a one cup serving (5g=1tsp). Ounce for ounce that is the same as soda! Grape juice, lemonade as well as other kinds of mixed juices or juice drinks may seem healthier than soda but can end up being worse. Organic Capri Sun (advertised on website as”healthy and wholesome”) has JUST 17g, but they make their servings smaller at 6 ounces, so still over 3 tsp or half of daily recommended amount of added sugar in one pouch. Popular smoothie drinks that do not have “added sugar” already contain up to 57g of sugar (11 tsp) per bottle.

See how your other favorite drinks add up: SugarStacks.com

Recently it was a friend’s turn to bring snacks to her preschooler’s class and she was told to bring boxed juice and pudding. What she found when she read labels shocked her. Each pudding had 17g of sugar, and the 6.75oz box of white apple grape juice had 25g, supplying 42g or 8 tsp of sugar to preschoolers for a morning snack!

More snack food comparisons at: SugarStacks.com

Drinks are a quick way to sneak in sugar, and although processed foods are really no better, it is in the foods that we don’t expect the sugar that we need to find it.

It is important to know how to read labels to find where sugar is hidden.

Nutrition labels give you a lot of information. When eating LCHF or being sugar/carb aware you first want to pay attention to the number of carbs you eat and drink. The total carbs are a combination of the fiber, sugars, and other starches in a food. You can subtract the dietary fiber from total carbohydrates to get the food’s net carbs. You should count net carbs when deciding if a food fits in your daily goals. Second, ingredient lists – the ingredients are not listed by percent of calories in a product, they are listed by weight. The heaviest ingredient is listed first. Most high sugar foods will have 3-4 different kinds of sugar so by weight they can be listed further down the list. Here is an example of a popular “healthy, whole grain cereal” (not even an obvious kids’ cereal). Check out ingredients number 3-7: brown sugar, sugar, maltodextrin, malted barley extract, molasses – all different kinds of sugar.

Look first at amount of sugar in a Look first at amount of sugar in a product, and then if it seems high look for any sugar in the ingredient list (things like plain whole fat Greek yogurtcan be misleading as it does have some natural sugar in it without any added sugar, but get the brand with the least amount of sugar). Overwhelmed? There is no need to be. When you are at the grocery store, try to stay away from the center rows. That is where you are going to find the high sugar, processed food and drinks. Buy the majority of your food from the outside edges of the store (or freezer section for some great vegetable choices) where you will find the real food – meats, whole fat dairy and vegetables that are grown above ground. A good general rule is: don’t eat it if it has a TV commercial, comes in a colorful wrapper, has a mascot, or your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize it.

nuegreen.wordpress.com

LCHF is Low Carb, High Fat. This is a way of eating that helps reduce the risk of diseases caused and worsened by insulin resistance (more on that later). We have had significant increase in these diseases in the past 40 years. Prior to the 1950s we ate real food that contained real fat. In the 1950s it was postulated that cholesterol might be the cause of heart attacks, and that eating fat likely caused an increase in cholesterol. This was never proven, but it was successfully pushed by one researcher named Ancel Keys (see The Big Fat Surprise in book links) until it was finally accepted as science by leading health officials and nutrition experts in the US. In the late 70s the food pyramid resulted and “low fat” became the new way of life for most of Americans. We did very well at changing to low fat. Problem is that there are 3 macronutrients: protein, fat, and carbohydrates, and reducing one means increasing one of the others. Carbohydrate (especially processed) and sugar intake went up significantly. Add to that the advent of easily accessible highly processed and high sugar foods, vending machines, packaged foods in multiple flavors and the new science of “creating flavors”, food has become too easy, unreal (food-like substance) and very addictive.

With the food in the 70s came soaring obesity rates followed almost identically by diabetes rates about 10 years later. Other diseases, all linked to insulin resistance, such as cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, fatty liver disease, sleep apnea and many more increased as well. Most ironically, heart disease, which low fat was meant to prevent, has really not decreased. Primary medical treament for these diseases relies on multiple medical interventions, and we became a country of pill poppers to treat all of these diseases.

Simplified, the cause is insulin. We all need insulin – it is a growth hormone that is used by the body to get glucose (a sugar that is the end product of most simple carbohydrates) into the cells to be used as fuel. Another job of insulin is to take extra fuel and put it in storage as fat. When eat too much sugar and simple/processed carbohydrates our bodies start to not recognize our insulin very well, whether due to constant high insulin or constant high blood sugars. Our bodies then put out more insulin. This excess insulin then stores the extra blood sugar that can’t get into cells as fat, and we again feel hungry and crave more carbohydrates. This turns into a vicious cycle where we eat high carb diets, we feel tired and gain weight, we eat more carbs, again and again. Eventually this leads to diabetes in addition to many other metabolic problems.

Fat metabolism works completely differently and fat has been vilified for too long! Not only does fat NOT cause heart disease (there is not scietific proof that even saturated fat does), it does not cause the release of insulin either. Fat makes us feel satisfied, causing us not to eat or have cravings. Fat also helps us metabolize vitamins, and can be turned into a different, excellent kind of fuel called ketones. If we eat a high fat, moderate protein (more on this in a later post) and low carb diet most of the time, we will avoid metabolic problems, feel more full, maintain a better weight, and in general have more energy by avoiding the ups and downs of blood sugar changes caused by carbs. This is the reasoning behind LCHF.

There are many diets that can be considered low carb, high fat – LCHF, Paleo (to a point depending on dried fruit and potato intake), Banting, and Primal to name a few. My general recommendation is to find a way to eat real food (not food-like substance) that is doable for you, and then do it every day for the rest of your life.

Category Archives: Health and Nutrition

Sugar…white death

What Is LCHF?