Sugar -- Our Sweet Enemy

Forget about ISIS and terrorists. We are killing ourselves without their help. No guns. Just spoons and forks. Americans are eating ourselves into poor health and major diseases. Just ask the authors of the three books I have been reading: (1) JJ Virgin’s Sugar Impact Diet: Drop 7 Hidden Sugars, Lose Up to 10 Pounds in Just 2 Weeks; (2) Suicide by Sugar: a Startling Look at Our #1 National Addiction; (3) Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. The authors, respectively, are JJ Virgin, Nancy Appleton and G.N. Jacobs, and Robert H. Lustig.

These three books have scary titles that describe their content. They all point out in different ways that sugar and related sweeteners plus processed foods have made Americans and people around the world heavier and sicker than they were in the 1980s and earlier. They tell us about the science of our metabolisms and how sugars, especially high fructose corn syrup, are in almost all processed foods in addition to obvious sweetening additions to our meals. They also suggest ways to reverse our copious use of sweet things. They know whereof they speak. The three books are sprinkled with stories about people who turned their lives around.

JJ Virgin is a bestselling author who has appeared in television, magazines and blogs. Her book is chatty and appears aimed at women who enjoy light reading. It also has content with its conversational style.

Nancy Appleton has a BS in clinical nutrition and a PhD in health services, and has a private practice in California. G.N. Jacobs is a reporter and filmmaker.  Appleton focuses on sugar as addictive for many people. Her story is about homeostasis, which she says is “the internal balance of the body’s electro-magnetic and chemical systems.” She says our bodies need balance for health: “Our bodies heal when we are in homeostasis.” It takes a book to make this sound relevant and interesting.

Robert H. Lustig is a medical doctor who has spent twenty years treating childhood obesity and studying the effects of sugar on the central nervous system and metabolism. Lustig is somewhat trendy now and appeared this week on Wisconsin Public Television in addition to being on YouTube and publishing a DVD with information about sugar consumption. In addition, I have spotted him on the Doctor Oz Show. Lustig’s book is the most scientific and is less easy to read than the others, but the person who reads it all learns a lot about how sugar is bad for our metabolisms from birth throughout life.

It looks as if we need to slow down on sugar consumption and that it isn’t easy for most people. The three authors agree that Americans get hooked on sweet foods, especially soda and processed foods, and it is giving us metabolic syndrome, which according to Lustig is a cluster of five chronic conditions familiar to most people: “obesity, diabetes, lipid problems such as high triglyceride and low HDL, hypertension, cardiovascular disease), any or all of which increase your chance of early death.” (Lustig, p. 94.) Lustig’s ongoing statement is, “a calorie is not a calorie,” meaning that calories are not all alike. Broccoli and soda are very different. Appleton’s list of factors for metabolic syndrome includes elevated blood pressure, elevated C-reactive protein, high fasting blood glucose levels, high triglycerides, a large waistline, low levels of HDL, raised LDL, and raised total cholesterol levels.

Appleton has a chapter that gives 140 reasons why sugar is ruining your health. She gives a list of thirty-one forms of sugar. She says Americans eat sugar and other similar sweeteners at about forty-eight teaspoons per person per day, while about two teaspoons of added sugar two or three times a day is usually the body’s threshold for added sugar. Virgin says that the average American eats about twenty-two teaspoons of sugar every day. I don’t know where they get their statistics, but either figure is a lot of sweet stuff. Virgin says, “It will blow your mind when you see how much sugar is sneaking into your diet—mountains of it, even in things you would swear have no added sugar.” (Virgin, p. xv.)

Virgin talks about hidden sugars that are in the processed foods that many people eat. She says, “…refined sugar by itself is a bad thing (especially liquid sugars like juice and soda), but you should avoid processed foods with added sugar and fat together at all costs—it’s a fat-storing, metabolically toxic combo.” (Virgin, p. 43.) She rates sugars into low, medium and high impact in accordance with the damage they can do. She has suggestions on how to eat in restaurants and fast food places. She says that exercise is good but we need to get our eating right first. She tells us to go easy on grains, roots and fruit, low-fat and no-fat dairy and diet foods, sweet drinks and dressings, and sweeteners and added sugars.

Lustig compares food addiction to established criteria for substance dependence. He’s the doctor, so he gives us an essay on what constitutes addiction: seven criteria, of which an addict usually has three: tolerance, withdrawal, binging, desire or attempts to quit, craving or seeking, interference with life, and use despite negative consequences. (Lustig, p. 55-56.) He expresses concern that many obese children come to his office and that type 2 diabetes is becoming common in children as well as adults. He says the goal of obesity management is to keep insulin down. He tells us about insulin and other hormones that affect our eating.

The three say in various ways that it’s not our fault. The food industry is in there with thousands of appealing processed foods. People are eating fast food in their busy lives. School lunch programs give kids processed sugary foods. Deceptive advertising is ubiquitous.  Our way of living and eating is a big problem, but not insurmountable. Virgin has chapters that tell how to taper, transition and transform. Appleton offers three food plans to follow.  Appleton and Virgin give recipes to help people who need help. All three give suggestions that can make a difference.  Lustig calls for global sugar reduction because the problem is not just American.

It’s about our health. If everyone stopped eating sugars, our medical establishment would shrink, food processors would need to change or cease to exist, and we all would feel a lot better and have longer lives. Yes, sweet foods are delicious and hard to resist. But life and health are precious. Virgin in her chatty way says, “So let me shout this from the mountaintop—it’s the impact of sugar that matters. You don’t have to eliminate sugar completely, but you need to choose your sugars wisely.” (Virgin, p. xiv.)

Year of No Breakfast

I am near the end of a year of skipping breakfast…sort of. Yes, it has been a year. No, it hasn’t been perfect; there were some skips (skipping skipping breakfast). Did it change much for me? Not really. Most people I know eat breakfast and many say it is the most important meal of the day. On the other hand, some doctors advocate skipping it. I became interested in it as a way to lose weight and be healthy. Is this crazy or ill advised?

One day more than a year ago I read about something called intermittent fasting in an online column by Dr. Joseph Mercola, who sends his messages to about a hundred thousand Americans, among them me. His online existence is at www.mercola.com. He wrote about benefits of intermittent fasting, which include good health and longevity. Then I found books: The Mini-Fast Diet: Burn Fat Faster than Ever, by Dr. Julian Whitaker and Peggy Dace, and The Fast Diet: Stay Healthy and Live Longer with the Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting, by Dr. Michael Mosley.  It sounded like the great panacea. Well, maybe.

These doctors presented stories about people whose lives were greatly changed by intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is not starving oneself. It is timing one’s meals to allow for regular periods of fasting a couple of days a week, or daily shorter periods. There are various ways to do it. They also recommended exercise during the fasts. As I understood it, during the fast the body goes into a state called ketosis, which burns fat. The other recommendation was to eat a low glycemic, or low carb, diet.  The people quoted in the books lost many pounds and reversed chronic diseases. They were more overweight and obese than I have ever been. Maybe that’s why the program worked for them so dramatically.

I opted for Dr. Mercola’s version, which was to abstain from all food daily for sixteen to eighteen hours but drink plenty of water. I chose to fast from evening supper until late morning or noon the following day. It’s easier to fast while one is sleeping, so it looked like the best way to me. (I hesitate to say it looked like a piece of cake.) I am rarely hungry in the morning, so that was a plus. The doctors spent a lot of pages telling people that this diet would eliminate their hunger and cravings; I wasn’t experiencing hunger and cravings most of the time. So I said this would be easy.

Most days it was easy after the daily arguments with myself about whether my interest in food was coming from my stomach or my brain. I wouldn’t call this craving, and it never was hunger. Partly it was a habit of eating in the morning, and partly it was my brain telling me that just eating a little bit would be a good idea. That little gremlin in my brain never stopped talking to me for the eleven-plus months of skipping breakfast. Sometimes it won; sometimes I won. Mostly I didn’t eat in the morning. But often I changed my supper time to occur early in the evening so my sixteen hour fast would end by about ten o’clock in the morning, when I could eat again. I never was a big breakfast eater. Dr. Whitaker said to eat breakfast at noon if one thinks breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Exceptions to this plan occurred when it was time to eat breakfast with other people such as my family when I was with them, when I had a later dinner with friends, and when I was on vacation. These occasions were infrequent. I caved in and ate.

Well, did it work? As I said earlier, sort of. I lost ten pounds from January through April. Then came the plateau that lasted the rest of the year. Possibly Dr. Whitaker was mistaken when he said that his diet would result in calorie reduction of about four hundred calories per day. I think that works only for people who spend their lives eating big high carb breakfasts. I am not one of them even when I eat in the morning.

Dr. Whitaker’s book has a chapter about obstacles to weight loss related to intermittent fasting. Mine is thyroid related. He didn’t say that hypothyroid people would have an easy time. He said, backed up by many testimonials, that this works for many people. Dr. Whitaker runs a weight loss clinic.

Dr. Whitaker’s book offers a summary of why intermittent fasting, which he calls the mini-fast with exercise, works:

·         Cuts daily caloric intake by skipping a meal;

·         Reduces the need for calorie counting and making difficult food decisions throughout the day;

·         Switches you into the fat-burning mode and keeps you there for hours;

·         Curbs appetite by triggering ketosis and eliminating blood sugar swings;

·         Allows you to eat what you want—within reason—for the rest of the day;

·         Improves underlying risk factors such as insulin resistance inflammation, and oxidative stress, and “turns on” antiaging genes. (p.66)

I expect to continue with intermittent fasting for a while, even without dramatic results.

Year of No Sugar - Book review

What’s it like to live without sugar for a year? Eve Schaub found out and wrote about it in Year of No Sugar, an amusing book that she calls a memoir. Schaub, her husband and two daughters all took part in this dietary adventure for a year. Schaub did this after watching a You Tube video, “Sugar: the Bitter Truth,” presented by Dr. Robert Lustig. Lustig is the author of Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease, which explains that sugar is the reason for the worldwide obesity epidemic

Eve Schaub watched the video and said her brain caught fire. She said it changed her life. The video called sugar a poison that makes people sick, overweight, obese and unhappy. That was eye opening for Schaub, so she decided to stop eating added sugar, and her family joined in. She kept a blog about the experience. She wrote the book. The family established rules, such as don’t eat added sugar but do eat foods like fruit containing naturally occurring sugar. They agreed to eat one sugar containing dessert per month and another on a birthday. Sweets at school were optional, but the girls mostly did not eat them.

Schaub’s book covers a bit about sugar’s destructive characteristics, but most of it is about the family’s day to day experiences during a year without sugar. It’s not a long essay about the evils of sugar, but rather a chronicle of avoiding the ubiquitous sugar that they learned is in a great many foods. Schaub learned to cook without sugar but with substitutions like dates to give some sweetness. Her sugar free cookies pleased the family and others. The holidays were there, including Halloween and Christmas, with attendant pitfalls. She pointed out that the trick or treat candy was saved for consumption after the year was finished.  The family took a trip to Italy and stayed on the diet. . The family stayed with the project with no mutinies. There were times when one or another family member wanted sugar very much.

What did they learn from the experiment? They learned that sugar is everywhere, especially at school. Schaub became a label reader. Her awareness of the prevalence of sugar was heightened. Schaub became acquainted with David Gillespie, an Australian who publicly advocated about sugar’s destructiveness in his book Sweet Poison. Lustig and Gillespie are support people behind her book.

I haven’t read many books like this. It reminded me a bit of A.J. Jacobs’ book, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Jacobs tried various diets and weight loss techniques for a period of time that might have been a year, and then wrote about his experiences. Like Schaub, he didn’t preach, he just told the story.

The Big Fat Surprise – Book Review

Fat. Healthy or unhealthy? Saturated vs unsaturated, trans fat. Fat science, fat politics. Diets: low fat, Mediterranean, paleo, low carb.  Dean Ornish vs Robert Atkins. Gary Taubes. These are covered in The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, by Nina Teicholz. I was fascinated as I read about how the book turns conventional dogma about fat upside down. Teicholz, a writer and apparently not a doctor or nutritionist, spent ten years on this book and gives us about a hundred pages of documentation, including notes and bibliography, for her assertions that the last sixty years’ advice on fats have been wrong.

To quote the author, “The more I probed, the greater was my realization that all our dietary recommendations about fat—the ingredient about which our health authorities have obsessed most during the pat sixty years—appeared to be not just slightly offtrack but completely wrong. Almost nothing that we commonly believe today about fats generally and saturated fat in particular appears, upon close examination, to be accurate. “(p. 2).

Teicholz points out that once the low fat, low cholesterol hypothesis was in place, it was very difficult to write or talk against it. She goes through the history of America’s advice and experiments about dietary fats. According to Teicholz, studies that contradicted accepted belief were often not given credibility or not published; researchers were unable to get funding for further studies. Even prominent experts in the field were not believed. Meanwhile, Americans found themselves with growing epidemics of chronic disease related to diet.

Much of the book examines the story of nutrition science regarding dietary fats as its advice went from bad to worse. In the 1950s medical experts looked for ways to reduce heart disease and came up with the idea that saturated fat, or primarily animal fat, caused heart disease. Ancel Keys developed what various writers have called the cholesterol hypothesis, which said that high cholesterol caused heart disease. From that came the low fat diet, and advice to replace fats with carbohydrates. Teicholz takes us from that to saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat conclusions, bolstered by President Eisenhower’s heart attack. Lots of science, both good and bad, appears here. Bad or flawed science comes from studies which were designed with a particular conclusion in mind, or studies with data points that support the hypotheses but not the ones that do not, and other flaws of design, participation or follow-up. Teicholz read and reported on a great many studies.

Sugar never got much study, according to this book. Teicholz suggests that studies have shown that sugar causes heart disease, not saturated fat. And so Americans went from the saturated fat veto to the low fat diet, to trans fats and manufactured fats to the Mediterranean diet to high fat low carb. At the end the Atkins diet wins after being scorned by doctors and nutrition people for many years. The Atkins diet is characterized by high fat meat and low carb vegetables. Teicholz reports the studies, large and small. She credits nationally known food journalist Gary Taubes with breaking through the accepted story because he is outside the system, not a doctor or nutritionist. She also says she was able to write the book for the same reason.

Food manufacturers are not vilified in this book, but the part they played in creating foods for these diets is told, as is the politics of food that gave us the food pyramid. The USDA continues to say stay the course and avoid saturated fats. Teicholz says that death from heart disease has declined but the actual occurrence of it has not appeared to decline, possibly because medical treatment has improved. She points out that Americans “have experienced skyrocketing epidemics obesity and diabetes.” (p. 327). She says that recent studies have showed the absence of negative effect of saturated fat on heart disease, obesity or diabetes. She concludes that “bias and habit present powerful, if not impenetrable, barriers to change.” (p. 326).

Teicholz does not address the effect of her conclusions on the environmental consequences of trying to feed animals to millions of people beyond saying that she recognizes it but environmental impact is not within the scope of her book. She also does not advocate for or against vegetarian diets but shows that they come up in studies of fats.

This book is one more addition to my library of ideas on how to eat well as a way to stay healthy. I read other well qualified writers and understand that not all agree with her dietary conclusions.

Bread Pudding - Delicious But is it Good for You?

Bread pudding is delicious, but should we eat it? Here are some reasons for and against consuming bread. Then I’ll tell you how to make a little bread pudding so you can decide or just want to eat it anyway.

For bread consumption:

1.      It tastes good.

2.      It is filling.

3.      It helps the grain producing industry (if you favor that).

Against bread consumption (backed up by Grain Brain, a book by David Perlmutter):

1.      If you have celiac disease (gluten intolerance), you might be at risk for developing mental delay, learning difficulties, tic disorders and ADHD.

2.      If you have gluten sensitivity, you might have severe depression and anxiety.

3.      White bread is a simple carb, so your body treats it like sugar. On the way to diabetes, or worsening it if you already have it.

4.      You are likely to gain weight if you eat bread regularly, assuming you eat the standard American diet.

5.      Modern grains, including refined white flour, “arguably our our beloved dietary staple, [are] a terrorist group that bullies our most precious organ, the brain…but also will accelerate your body’s aging process from the inside out. This isn’t science fiction; it’s now documented fact.” (Dr. David Perlmutter, Grain Brain, p. 5.)

Have you heard enough? Bread pudding is a terrorist?

I seldom eat bread, but when I do, one of my favorites is bread pudding. Ok, I know it will do me no good, but like many people, I sometimes deviate from my usual meal plan. If I haven’t talked you out of health ruination, which is a real threat to well being, read on to learn how easy this is to make. To help you avoid too much temptation or weight gain, this recipe makes only a little bit of the stuff. You can bake the dish in your toaster oven.

Bread Pudding for One or Two

2 slices bread (stale is good)

Butter

1 egg

1 ¼ cups milk (I use whole milk)

¼ cup sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ cup raisins

Nutmeg

Butter a baking dish that will hold a quart or less. I use a standard Pyrex loaf dish. Spread butter on the bread and cut it into dice size cubes. Place them in the baking dish. In a bowl, beat the egg. Add milk, sugar and vanilla and mix well. Pour the mixture over the bread and let it stand until the bread is soaked, about 5 minutes. Add the raisins.  Sprinkle nutmeg over the top. Bake at 350 degrees about 45 minutes until it is firm and browned slightly. Eat it warm or cold.