The World is Waking Up to the Consequences of Sugar Addiction

There have been several articles written over the summer about the obesity epidemic with it’s resulting damage to our health.  It is particularly interesting to see that the experts are starting to recognize that the main cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and the other conditions caused by underlying inflammation is caused by the amount of sugar in our diet.  One of my mantras is that “it isn’t fat that makes you fat, it’s sugar that makes you fat”.  I didn’t make that up of course, Dr Sears wrote about the dangers of too much sugar in our diet in his first book “Enter the Zone” and in his subsequent books which have sold millions of copies around the world.  His book “The Inflammation Zone” was another book about his groundbreaking research so it is gratifying to see that there is now also more and more comment in the media about the dangers of underlying chronic inflammation.

Back to sugar…there was an article in the Sunday Star Times (Feb 9 2014) titled “Oh sugar, it’s worse than we thought”.  It lists the amount of sugar in several New Zealand foods including baked beans (6 teaspoons or 24.6 grams), tinned fruit salad in light syrup with no added flavor (13 teaspoons or 52 grams), Pad Thai stir-fry sauce ‘all natural’ (14 teaspoons or 55 grams) plus baby foods with nearly 3 or 4 teaspoons of sugar.  People eat these things every day without much thought about the sugar they contain. They go to the gym to try and lose weight but come out and have a drink of Pumped Berry water ‘low in sugar’ with over 4 teaspoons or 17 grams of sugar in it and wonder why they can’t lose weight and our children are carbohydrate addicts.

There was another article in the Dominion Post today (Feb 18 2014) which is a very interesting story about the late Professor John Yudkin who wrote a book in 1972 called Pure, White and Deadly.  His research was part of a movement in the 1960’s when laboratories were trying to work out why there was such an alarming rise in levels of heart disease.  The conventional thinking was that it was caused by high levels of fat in the diet.  Yudkin’s research pointed to the main culprit being sugar hence his book.  Unfortunately the food industry did not want to hear this so he was vilified and largely discredited until Robert Lustig, a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of Califrinia, said that Yudkin’s work was “prophetic”.  Lustig  delivered a lecture called “Sugar, the Bitter Truth” which was posted on YouTube in 2009 and has had over 4 million hits..  Lustig wrote about the dangers of sugar and how it should be treated as a toxin, like alcohol and tobacco.  As a result of the increasing rise in sugar consumption and the parallel increase in the number of diabetics and people dying of heart disease, the World Health Organisation is considering reducing it’s recommendation of 22 teaspoons of sugar a day to almost half of that.

Eating in the Zone gets rid of sugar cravings very quickly as you are not on that roller coaster of fluctuating sugar levels all day.  Some basic tips are don’t drink fruit juice, limit coffee to no more than 2 cups a day or drink decaf, cut out bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereal, bananas and dried fruit.   If you want to know more please contact me or come and see me.  If you are an existing client there is no charge for a “rev up”.