Sugar: The Bitter Truth

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

How much .. Where is it?

I am a dentist, and I keep telling my patients, their families and my friends.  "Sugar, it is not just about the cavities."  Cavities are just the beginning of the damage to your body.  Of far greater importance is the damage it causes to your metabolic systems in your body.

It is toxic.  Recently, Dr Gupta aired an expose on "60 minutes."  Your web search engine will find it, so look at it.  Far more convincing will be to go to u-tube and watch the 90 minute lecture given by Dr Robert Lustig from University of California San Francisco entitled "Sugar: the Bitter Truth."  All calories are not the same!  Excess sugar is more harmful to you than excess fat!  Look at these videos and see for yourself.

Sugar is addictive.  Yes, just like cocaine, sugar stimulates the area of the brain that tells you "I like this."  It drives you to seek more.  As you eat more, it develops tolerance (just like it does for cocaine) so as satisfaction decreases it drives you to consume more to achieve the same level of satisfaction.  Just like cocaine and methamphetamine!  The result?  You eat more and more sugar, gain more and more weight, suffer more and more heart disease and diabetes, and more recent research is indicating higher cancer rates!

And sugar destroys.  You all know it is a key factor in the destruction of teeth.  MORE IMPORTANT it destroys livers.  Specifically fructose (half of your normal table sugar and corn syrup) metabolism in the liver not only creates by products that cause harm in organ systems in your body, it also causes fatty liver degeneration.  When your liver fails your whole body will fail.

So where is the sugar in your diet?  I was in high school, college and dental school through the 1960s.  The average American ate 30 grams of sugar each day.  The average American today is eating 200 grams of sugar!  How could that be?  It has been a slow insidious process over a couple generations.  When I was in college, a cup of coffee, teaspoon of sugar and a donut would have netted a total of 150 calories.  In today's culture, 2 generations later, a small coffee mocha and a scone at Starbucks will net you 650 calories.  In the 1960s a great dessert at a restaurant was homemade apple pie, 420 calories of decadence, ha ha. Today a single slice of raspberry cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory will net you 1530 calories.  In the 1950s & 1960s I had a soda or other sweet beverage about twice a month.It was 7 or 8 ounces with about 20 grams of sugar.  Today, take the lowest calorie beverage sold in the stores, Vitamin Water, in what is considered a small to medium bottle, 20oz, and it has 33 grams of sugar in the one bottle.  That is more sugar than the average American ate in an entire day in the 1960s!  The average person is drinking 2 or 3 beverages a day!!  My bowl of breakfast cereal in the 1950s had one teaspoon of sugar  sprinkled on it (my mother allowed that).  There were no presweetened cereals.  Today the cereals marketed for kids have 3 times that in a bowl.  Your Catsup has 22% sugar in it (to appeal to that pleasure center in the brain).  Sugars are added to most processed foods at a level that does not necessarily taste sweet like a desert, but is enough to enhance the flavor and stimulate that addiction receptor in the brain.  It makes you want more.

This is not going to be easy.  If you are going to improve your health, it will take some attention to eating more real food.  Vegetables, Fruits, Meat, Grains, & Dairy.  Packages, boxes and bags contain processed food with additives, not real food.

Did you know the life insurance companies (the experts on predicting life span) predict for the first time in known history that today's young generation will live a shorter life span than their parents.  That doesn't bother me.  Living as an older person with the debilitating, life limiting and painful chronic diseases of heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer would REALLY bother me.

 Want to learn more, click HERE for Winning With Smiles.com

Scott Thompson, DDS

Pediatric Dentistry

Meadow Vista, California

Photo credit: wikipedia commons

Sugar, It's More Than Cavities

Sugar
It’s more than Cavities

Good research is finally clarifying what has been known a long time.  For lack of full understanding of the metabolic processes, this has been a hard subject to broach and expect anybody to make a serious change in their life.  After all, we all love our sweets!

In the 1970’s books like “Sugar Blues” told us that sugar was the culprit in our dietary errors, not fat.  Though excess fat in the diet is likely not healthy, it is not nearly the culprit that sugar is.  After all, Eskimo and Northern American Indians lived on fat a large portion of the year.  Yet, they did not suffer heart disease or diabetes.  After the introduction of refined carbohydrate to their diet by Europeans, things began to change.  Eskimos and Native Americans now have the highest diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dental caries, and obesity rates in the world.  Dietary fat is not the issue.  It is refined carbohydrate; sugar.

I enjoyed a recent discussion between 3 pediatricians who specialize in metabolic disease and research.  They discussed how sugar is truly addictive, just like illicit drugs.  Is it any wonder it is so hard for us to reduce sugar in our diet?  Is it any wonder food processors have added sugar to nearly all our packaged and processed foods to improve our appreciation of their flavor.  Catsup is nearly 40% sugar!  Just read the labels, sugar is everywhere.

Approximately 50% of the sugar we eat is Fructose.  No system in the body uses Fructose.  It is up to the liver to detoxify the Fructose in our body and change it into something useful.  At 50 grams Fructose per day the liver begins to fail.  Yes, fail.  The average American who ate 15 grams of Fructose in the 1960’s is now eating 100 grams of Fructose daily.  And yes, livers are failing.  There are numerous cases of teenagers with total liver failure and needing liver transplants.

It is time to look at what we are eating.  Read labels.  Vitamin Water (What a misnomer!) is the lowest calorie beverage you can buy in the store today; only 50 calories per 8 oz.  That translates, in grams, to a full 20 oz bottle (small in today’s standards) having 33 grams of sugar.  That is more than the average American ate in an entire day in the 1960’s.

Keep your eyes on the health literature; this is a growing hot topic as degenerative disease claims more of our friends at younger ages.  Keep your eyes on the labels of packaged foods and be surprised!  Consider doing more “cooking” of real food from the vegetable, dairy and meat perimeter walls in your supermarket.  Real food.  Fresh food.

Want to learn more, click HERE to visit Winning With Smiles.com

www.winningwithsmiles