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