Fifty years of doctors’ advice and government eating guidelines don’t tell us the full story.
We’ve been told to swap eggs for cereal. But that recommendation is dead wrong. In fact, it’s very likely that this bad advice has killed millions of Americans.
Sugar is the number one inflammatory agent we can put into our metabolic engines. Look at our diabetics. They are the ones who unduly suffer, not just from heart disease but from diseases of the nervous system, renal system and the ophthalmologic system.
Sugar produces Age Glycosylated End (AGE) products – no pun intended. We are prematurely aging.
One rigorous new study shows that those with the highest sugar intake had a four-fold increase in their risk of heart attacks compared to those with the lowest intakes. That’s 400%!
Drinking one 20-ounce soda increases your risk of a heart attack by about 30%. Also drinking one soda leaches minerals from the bones and creates a weak infrastructure.
A study of more than 40,000 people, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, accounted for all other potential risk factors including overall diet quality, total calories, smoking, cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity and alcohol. Sugar added on top of all of these other risk factors is seed for disaster.
Why do we ignore what kills?
Proper nutrition and adherence to a nutritional protocol that fights against chronic disease should be the goal. Instead we hide our heads in the sand and pretend that one more snickers bar won’t hurt, or that we will start eating better tomorrow.
In fact, the Institute of Medicine recommends getting no more than 25% of your total calories from added sugar. This number is likely high as the chronic conditions of metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance and diabetes have not been looked at or considered.
Most of the adult (and increasing young) population is overweight or obese. Sugar is poison. It is like putting an atomic bomb in the system, just waiting for the day it explodes.
More than 70% of Americans consume 60% of their daily calories from sugar.
The food pyramid needs deep thought as to its contribution to heart disease. Why would sugar be in the nutritional plan of a diabetic? There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate, yet we reach for carbs like its crack cocaine.
U.S. Dietary Guidelines provide no limit for added sugar, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still lists sugar as a “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS) substance. That classification lets the food industry add unlimited amounts of sugar to our food.
If one of the first five ingredients is sugar, you know it is a loaded weapon.
At least the American Heart Association recommends that our daily diet contain no more than 5% to 7.5% added sugar. Yet most of us are eating a lot more.
We are unaware that most seasonings contain sugar, or that fruit yogurt has more sugar than a Coke, or that most breakfast cereals — even those made with whole grain — are 75% sugar. That’s not breakfast. It’s an arsenal for a health disaster.
This is a major paradigm shift. For years, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that fat causes heart attacks and raises cholesterol, and that sugar is harmless except as a source of empty calories.
They are no empty calories. As it turns out, sugar calories are deadly calories. Sugar causes heart attacks, obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and is the leading cause of fatty liver failure in America.
That is right, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH, fatty liver) and sugar are best friends.
The biggest culprit is sweetened beverages.
The biggest culprit is sugar-sweetened beverages, including sodas, juices, sports drinks, teas and coffees. They are by far the single biggest source of sugar calories in our diet.
In fact, more than 37% of our sugar calories come from soda.
The average teenage boy consumes 34 teaspoons of sugar a day, or about 544 calories from sugar. Even more troubling, this isn’t just putting kids at risk for heart attacks at some remote later date in their lives. It’s killing them before their 20th birthday. This is not to mention the psychiatric borage they take on being overweight and picked on.
This new research syncs with decades of data on how sugar causes insulin resistance, high triglycerides, lower HDL (good) cholesterol and dangerous levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol. It also triggers the inflammation we now know is at the root of heart disease. Inflammation is the root of ALL chronic illness.
Fats have been unfairly blamed.
With the exception of trans fats and hydrogenated oils, fats are actually protective. Protective fats include the omega-3 fats found in nuts and olive oil, which has proven to reduce heart attack risk by more than 30% in a recent large randomized controlled study.
Omega 3 fatty acids have an anti-inflammatory effect on the system.
Be curious and start cracking the code of long term wellness by caring for your own personal machine. That is the one that will carry you to the grave. You live with yourself 365 days of the year and you only see your healthcare practitioner 1-2 a year.
How are they going to know everything about you?
How to Cure Sugar Addiction
America lags far behind the rest of the world in addressing this problem. Why do we not take the obesity crisis caused by sugar addiction seriously?
It is not mean to think about consequence, creating a system that induces accountability may get a foot hold on the problem. Implementation of plans that include taxing soda, banning junk food television advertising, and eliminating processed foods, junk food and sugar-sweetened beverages from schools are a few places that would have great impact.
More than 15 countries have targeted sugar-sweetened beverages by taxing them — a strategy that’s proven successful.
What if we revamped food labeling to make it clear if a food is good, should be consumed with caution, or is bad for you?
Most of us never read labels and for all we know we could be consuming arsenic. It is said that man perishes for lack of knowledge. Many of our nutritional issues are a lack of education.
In the United States, even someone with a Ph.D. in nutrition has trouble deciphering food labels. How can the average person be expected to know?
Sugar is as much as eight times more addictive than cocaine.
Recent and mounting scientific evidence clearly proves that sugar and flour, which raises blood sugar even more than table sugar, is biologically addictive. Breaking a sugar addiction is harder to break than an addiction to crack cocaine.
After all you have to eat every day, but if you stay away from the drug, you never have to go back. In fact, sugar is as much as eight times more addictive than cocaine.
The average American consumes about 152 pounds of sugar and 146 pounds of flour a year. It’s imperative that we revamp our outdated and dangerous dietary guidelines.
We need clear strategies and medical programs to help people understand and address the health risks and addictive nature of sugar and refined carbohydrates.
Start by educating yourself.
Ask your health care provider, read up on the glycemic index, and get to know how sugar and insulin are either friend or foe. Don’t be one that is in the dark and allowing your own health to go down the tubes for lack of knowledge or because of an addictive stronghold.
