Healthy Living Principle #4 - Kick the Sugar

Sugar is everywhere in the Standard American Diet, pretty much anything that comes in a package has sugar added to it somewhere.  Do you check nutrition labels before you buy things, I advise you start doing it immediately if you don't.  You'd be surprised where sugar is hidden - in your favorite jar of tomato sauce, most salad dressings and marinades, that quick go-to meal from Trader Joe's that you just have to saute... the list goes on and on, and the sugar isn't only in things that you think of as sweet like cakes and cookies. 

What's so bad about sugar anyway? I've done a few in-depth posts on sugar which you can read here: Sugar, It's not that sweet and Fructose, the not so innocent sugar.  Here are some highlights from those posts, and some facts about sugar to help you understand how you process sugar when you eat it, in any form.

The Buzz Around Resistant Starch

Over the past few weeks I've seen this idea of "Resistant Starch, RS" in a variety of places - a friend at the gym told me that they saw it on TV and Rachel Ray was talking about how amazing Resistant Starch is, Health Magazine's Carb Lover's diet is based on the concept of RS, and then another friend sent me this Yahoo article, 8 reasons carbs can help you lose weight. I read through it and was appalled, here are the 8 reasons and my take on them.

1. Eating carbs makes you thin for life - they cite research that "the slimmest people also ate the most carbs, and the chubbiest ate the least"  There are no facts at all on how this study was set up, I don't trust it.

2. Carbs fill you up - they claim carbs are an appetite supressant, I don't agree.  Fat and Protein have much higher saitey and trigger leptin, the hormone that tells your brain that you're full.

3. Carbs curb your hunger - "According to researchers, when dieters are taken off a low-carb diet and shifted them to an approach that includes generous amounts of fiber and Resistant Starch foods, something wonderful happens: Within two days, the dieters' cravings go away" -- I don't even know where to start with this, what cravings, how low carb are the dieters, really 2 days and cravings go away - no credibility here.

4. Carbs control blood sugar and diabetes - Um no, controlling your blood sugar controls insulin which relates to decreased insulin sensitivty (this is bad).  The less insulin sensitive you are, the higher your risk of type 2 diabetes.  Fat and Protein have a much lower impact on blood sugar than carbs do and do not contribute to blood sugar spikes -- therefore not negatively impacting insulin sensitivity. So I don't agree that carbs can control your blood sugar or diabetes - since they cause decreased insulin sensitivity and blood sugar spikes.

5. Carbs speed up metabolism - article claims that RS speeds metabolism by not depleting muscle mass, but protein is the real muscle builder in your body so not sure about this claim, I don't think they have much to base this statement on.





6. Carbs blast belly fat - carbs are stored as fat when eaten in excess of immediate energy needs (hint this is easy to do when eating large amounts of carbs).  Belly or Abdominal fat specifically is also sepcifically a stress/cortisol issue which doesn't really tie back to carbs at all, I don't agree with this one either.

Fructose, the not so innocent sugar

I've talked previously on the blog about sugar and how your body processes it.  Now I want to cover why Fructose, a specific type of sugar is particularly bad for you.  This all stems from the principal that all calories are not created equal when we are trying to fuel our body.  If you already subscribe to a Paleo/Primal lifesyle this concept probably makes sense to you.  If not you may assume that the key to weight loss and overall health related to Calories In - Calories Out , if you take in more calories than you burn you get fat, if you take in less calories or burn more calories than you take in, you lose fat.  A few "experts" on the all calories are not created equal subject are Gary Taubes who wrote "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and just released a new book which is a sequel to Good Calories, Bad Calories that is more digestible "Why we get Fat, and what to do about it" along with Dr. Robert Lustig whose lecture, Sugar: The Bitter Truth which was published on YouTube made a huge splash.

So losing fat isn't as easy as calories in being lower than calories out.  You need to take a look at what you're eating as well as how much.  As a nation Americans are getting fatter - on average we Americans weigh 25 more pounds than we did 25 years ago (~1985).  How are we gaining all this extra weight, beacause we're eating more and too much of the wrong stuff.  And the reason why we are eating more than we need, its because we are increastingly Leptin resistant. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain that you are full and you don't need anymore food to fuel your body. When you are Leptin resistant, that means that your brain doesn't respond as well to the leptin signals, meaning that even though you have enough food for fuel your brain doesn't register that I'm full signal and you still feel hungry, so you eat more than you need. What causes the letpin resistance in your body - one thing is the processing of fructose in the liver. If you look at what the extra calories are in today's diet, it is generally in the form of added carbohydrates.  In the 1990s when the nation started following the high carbohydrate and low fat diet have essentially doomed ourselves to a diet that will make us fat through the increase in carbohydrates in our diets.

   Did you know that 1 soda a day (additional 150 calories) is an additoinal 15 pounds of fat per year that is added to your body.

Americans today eat/consume a whopping 141 pounds of sugar per year!

Sugar, its not that sweet...

The average sugar consumption of an American has been steadily rising; the average American consumes 20 teaspoons of added sugar EVERY DAY and 120 pounds of sugar a year, approximately 25% of total calories consumed.

Going Paleo means changing your food and eliminating processed foods as well as other food categories primarily grains, legumes, and dairy from your diet - which to a person eating the typical American diet can seem pretty extreme. I didn't change my diet overnight to Paleo, and actually started with a No Sugar challenge. I'm urging you to try a No Sugar challenge on your own and by excluding sugar from your diet I'm not just talking about sugar that you add into things like coffee and rice crispy cereal or switching from Coke to Diet Coke, I'm talking about cutting out ALL added sugar that isn't found naturally in food. So don't worry about the sugar that occurs naturally in the apple that you're eating, as long as you're eating the whole apple or the lactose content of the glass of whole milk you just drank - the sugars in those foods are not the sugars that I'm worried about you over consuming since its hard to eat 15 apples in one sitting or to drink an entire gallon of whole milk in a day (Warnek excluded).

Sugar is pretty sneaky, especially added sugar. It goes by many names like our friend High Fructose Corn Syrup, Honey, Agave, Cane Sugar, Cane Syrup, Tapioca Syrup, Maple Syrup, Brown Sugar, and Sugar Alcohols: sorbitol, maltitol, xylitol, and mannitol.