In my last post , I discussed the problem of how the consumption of too much fructose in the diet overloads the liver’s capacity to process it properly; the excess fructose is then shunted into alternative pathways that directly contribute to the development of heart disease.
What I also mentioned is that our fructose consumption has increased significantly over the past 50 years. It is now far greater than what our bodies were designed for. In nature, the only foods containing fructose are fruits and honey; historically, fruits were only available for brief periods during the year, and honey was guarded by bees. So fructose was hard to get, and consumption was minimal. Nowadays sugar, either in the form of table sugar, honey, high-fructose corn syrup or under the guise of many other names, can be found in almost any processed food, and our overall intake of fructose is going sky high.
Look in your refrigerator and pantry. Almost everything has had some amount of sugar added, including both the obvious and the not-so-obvious. Ketchup, mayonnaise, salad dressings, tomato & spaghetti sauces, yogurt, granola bars, canned corn, bread, deli meats, hot dogs, cereals, salsa, soy sauce, and the list goes on.
And that’s just the hidden stuff. What about the over abundance of sugar laden treats to be found: cookies, pastries, muffins, soft drinks, ice creams, lattes, cappuccinos. Canadians can barely travel a few blocks in any direction without finding yet another doughnut shop. We Canadians certainly love our sweet stuff.
And while you ponder how much sugar is actually in your diet, I want to take you through an intriguing correlation. Over 30 years ago, In the late 1970s and early 80s, the “low-fat” craze began. “To lose weight, all you need to do is cut the fat!” Fat has more calories than protein or carbohydrate, so if you have less fat, you’ll take in less calories, and the weight will come off, right? Nice in theory, but somehow, instead of seeing big improvements in health, we had the beginnings of the obesity epidemic. Weights in North America have been getting higher and higher every year. Check out this interactive graph which tracks obesity rates in the US since 1985 (data was not collected previously). It’s actually a pretty cool tool.
What else happened at the same time? Manufacturers began developing low-fat products to help us achieve our weight loss goals. But in order to make foods lower in fat, without sacrificing any flavour, manufacturers add…guess what?…sugar! So in addition to the added sugar we have in all those products I had mentioned earlier, we also have these “low-fat” muffins, cookies, cereals, and what have you, that have even more sugar in them than the original versions.
But if we’re taking out fat and putting sugar in, we’re still saving some calories, right? So why would people be gaining weight when their calorie intake is less? Because, dollars to doughnuts (sorry, couldn’t resist!), their intake wasn’t actually less, it was more. To explain, protein foods and complex carbohydrates (eg. pasta or oats) digest slowly, so any sugar involved is released into the bloodstream little by little over time. Conversely, when we eat simple sugars like table sugar and honey, they digest more quickly, allowing the sugar to reach the bloodstream all at once, creating a spike. The higher the spike, the more insulin the body produces in response to clean out the extra sugar from the blood; but very often, the insulin works too well and too much sugar is removed, yielding us with rebound low blood sugars.
What happens when our blood sugar is low? We get jittery, cranky, irritable, and HUNGRY! So it doesn’t matter if that muffin we ate an hour ago had 300 calories, we’re hungry again. And what do we crave? Quick-energy CARBS! We wind up with cycles of peaks and valleys, leading us to snack all day and in a constantly hungry state. Is it any wonder portion sizes have gotten so big? Take out the fat and you take out a major satiety factor as well. We’ve simply compensated by eating more and more. (And we can’t forget the “permission” we often give ourselves to overindulge…the “it’s low calorie, so it’s okay to have more of it” mentality.)
To recap, not only does excess fructose lead to heart disease, but the evidence is mounting that added sugars in general are a significant cause of the obesity epidemic, which in turn is creating diabetics in record numbers. All in all, the label “toxic” seems more and more accurate, no?
The American Heart Association is now recommending that women consume no more than 100 calories from added sugars daily, and men no more than 150 calories. That translates to about 25g (5 tsp) for women and 37.5g (7.5 tsp) for men. Not an easy task, but I challenge you to see if you can do it for one week. And then two. The only way to eliminate cravings for sugar is to cut it out for a while; if you can manage it for a couple weeks, you’ll be well on your way to better health.
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