Sugar: How Bad is Bad? Part 1: It’s Bad
Just to get this party started, here are a few facts taken from The Lancet (12/13/2012) for you to “digest”: Two-thirds of American are overweight or obese
The CDC projects that 1 in 3 children born in 2000 will develop type 2 diabetes
Obesity is now a greater global health crisis than hunger
What’s going on here?
Answer: we eat way too much sugar.
In 1821, the average American ate about 10 pounds of sugar a year, much of it molasses. Today, it’s about 150 pounds, much of it high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) [1]. We have a river of refined sugar rushing through us (sodas, sugary yogurt, and cereals and other starchy carbs that turn into sugar). It’s not hard to see why we have so many health problems today.
Mother Nature did not design us to run on sugar. She built us for the nomadic lifestyle, moving around a lot every day. She figured our biggest need would be to raise our blood sugar levels to give us energy for all that movement. So she gave us three hormones to raise blood sugar, and only one hormone to lower it. That one hormone, insulin, gets overused and worn out.
What does that look like in the body?
You eat a slice of cake. Your body sees that sugar bomb as an emergency and releases as much insulin as it can pronto to bring your blood sugar level back down to normal. However, it tends to overestimate the emergency and your blood sugar level drops a bit too much. So now you feel bad, you’re crashing, and your brain tells you, “Hey, eat a cookie!” At the same time, your body pumps out other hormones to also help raise your blood sugar. You eat the cookie, your blood sugar levels spike, and your body senses another emergency. More insulin. Another crash. This is the blood sugar rollercoaster many people ride daily. (Natalie we need to figure out how to insert an image for this roller coaster just a sidebar)
Here’s the other nasty piece: once your cells have all the sugar they need for energy, but you are still eating more sugar, insulin takes that sugar out of your bloodstream and sends it to the liver, where it is converted to body fat and stored. Voila – you gain weight.
The long short of it: sugar makes us fat. Sugar is bad.
https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/dphs/nhp/documents/sugar.pdf
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Heidi Toy Functional Medicine Blog
Did you know most people didn’t have refrigerators in their homes until well into the 1900’s? It wasn’t even invented for large scale commercial use until the mid 1800’s [1]. So how did people keep their milk cold and make their food last longer? Fermentation. It sounds like a gross concept, because we often associate fermentation with a bad odor, but foods like cheese, yogurt, sauerkraut and pickles are all fermented foods. And those aren’t gross, are they? Well, some might disagree with me about sauerkraut, but that’s beside the point. Fermented foods are digestive aids. Microscopic living organisms in fermented foods help extend the food’s shelf life, enhance flavor, and help the body absorb minerals. These organisms pre-digest the food, getting rid of harmful components, and create more vitamins and enzymes than the food began with. Enzyme-rich foods have many benefits including [2]: Increase digestibility of food we eat Boost immune system Increase alkalinity; neutralizing pH levels Provide a healthy balance of friendly flora in the gut (Learn more about your microbiome in my other blog posts ) Tone the colon and help with elimination Control cravings for unhealthier foods Eliminate toxins and undigested wastes in the body In the “old days,” people use to ferment all kinds of foods through pickling, canning, pasteurization and added salt. Nowadays, however, large scale fermentation has lost many of its nutritious benefits due to the need for speed to get the product on the shelf as fast as possible and as cheap as possible. The only true fermented foods you will find are sauerkraut, kombucha, yogurt and kefir, beans, wine and beer, some meats (such as salami and pastrami), legumes and nuts (such as tofu, soy sauce and miso), sourdough bread, and various kinds of vegetables [3]. Fun facts about sauerkraut: The Germans “stole” it from the Chinese! Sauerkraut (probably not labeled as such for the Chinese, but the same recipe) was one of the main foods for those who built the Great Wall of China. Genghis Khan brought it to Eastern Europe during an invasion. It also contains high levels of vitamin C, and sailors often took it on long journeys to prevent scurvy.
How can we best keep blood sugar stable? Do what our body is designed to do – use fat for energy. Our species did not survive the Ice Age because of vanilla coffee lattes and cheesecake. Throughout most of our history, we ate a diet that was likely 50-70 percent fat. Look at the old family photo albums, specifically pictures of people in the first half of the 1900s, before we had so many processed foods. You won’t see many fat people--in fact, most look darn skinny. If they lived on the farm, they ate lots of eggs, meat, milk, and vegetables out of their own backyards. “Diet foods” were non-existent. Heart disease was almost non-existent. Our metabolism is designed to work much better with fats better than with sugar. Fats provide the slow and steady fuel our body likes to use for energy. Think of fats as a slow-burning log on the fire. One log (i.e. one meal containing fats) lasts for hours. Starchy carbs, on the flip side, are like kindling. You constantly have to throw more twigs (chips, pasta, bagels) to keep the fire burning. The first step is to know your sugars by reading the labels, and then avoid said sugars as much as possible.
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Omega-3 and Omega-6 are considered “essential” fatty acids because they cannot be produced by the body--we get them from the food we eat. They are biologically active upon ingestion, which means the body utilizes them right away and cannot store them up for later. They are essential because they help with both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory responses.
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