Dark Side of Sugar

Overview

 Dr. Robert Lustig is a doctor who teaches students at a university in California. He says that most of the things we hear about food and health are wrong and that's why more people have diabetes.

 He made a video on YouTube called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" in 2011 and it was very popular. He also worked with a TV reporter named Katie Couric to make a movie called "Fed Up" in 2014. I think you should watch it. He explains that sugar can stick to fat or protein in our body and make us old faster. This happens when we cook food at high heat and it turns brown. Same happens in our body at normal temperature but slowly over time.

 He says that sugar can also make us sick by making too much oxygen in our body. We need some oxygen to get energy from sugar, but too much oxygen can damage our cells. We can protect ourselves by eating foods that have antioxidants, which are like shields for our cells. He says that not all sugars are the same. Some sugars are more round and stable, like glucose. Some sugars are more straight and unstable, like fructose. Fructose can stick to fat or protein faster than glucose and make us old and sick faster. That's why foods and drinks that have high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) are worse than foods and drinks that have sugar. But sugar that is added to foods and drinks is also bad for us. Sugar that is natural in foods is not bad for us. Dr. Lustig's main idea is that sugar that is added to foods and drinks can cause diabetes, high cholesterol and heart problems. He shows that drinking soda with the same calories as other foods can make us 11 times more likely to have diabetes.

Dr. Lustig also shows that eating too much sugar and HFCS can make your liver fatty. He talks about three kinds of fat in our body

1. Subcutaneous Fat: this is the fat under our skin. This is like a bucket that stores extra calories when we eat more than we burn.

2. Visceral Fat: this is the fat inside our body that covers our important organs. This happens when we are stressed or sad.

3. Liver Fat: this is when our liver gets too much fat and can’t work well.

There are many videos that explain why sugar is bad for us and why we can’t stop eating it. I have attached a short video by Dr. Lustig and a longer video from Britain that you can watch. If you want to learn more about how sugar affects our body, you can watch Dr. Lustig’s detailed lecture.

How to Reduce/Stop Eating Sugar 

I want to share some tips to help you quit sugar.

1. Buy some date sugar. It is just dried and crushed dates. It doesn’t taste good when you add it to tea, coffee or sweets because it has a strong flavor. So the trick is to mix it with your sugar and slowly increase the amount of date sugar in the mix. Start with 10% and add another 10% every few days. In a month, you will be off sugar completely.

2. Buy some soft and good quality dates. Cook them on low heat, take out the seeds, add some water. You can also peel them if you want. Blend them until smooth, then put them in a bottle. You can use this syrup for making most sweets.

3. For drinks, lemonade with salt is a good option and you will get used to it in three weeks. Another option is to add some fresh apple juice to your lemonade to make it sweet.

Artificial Sweeteners 

WARNING:

 I call them FAKE Sweeteners “All fake sweeteners are bad for you and you should stay away from them.” I wanted to say that clearly before I usually write more about this topic because sometimes people don’t get my message.

 Artificial sweeteners are things that make food and drinks taste sweet without using sugar. People have been making and using them for a long time. Many people, especially those who are overweight or have diabetes, think they are helping themselves by using them. I hope this post and the videos I attached will help you understand why they are wrong.

HISTORY:

 The first artificial sweetener was Saccharin and it was found by accident in 1879. Scientists were very curious about it but it became popular only when there was not enough sugar during the wars. People liked saccharin because it was cheap and had no calories. This was the time when people started to get fat because they had too much food, peace and cars, and not enough exercise. This led to the creation of diet sodas and SweetNLow in 1957, which had saccharin and another Artificial sweetener called Cyclamate. Some people were worried about the health effects of artificial sweeteners, but they were ignored until the law forced the FDA to ban saccharin for a while after it was linked to cancer. In 1977, a study from Canada showed that saccharin caused bladder cancer in rats. After this, Canada banned saccharin. Aspartame was another artificial sweetener that was found by accident in 1965 by a scientist who was working on a drug for stomach ulcers. In another experiment in 1977, the FDA found that 98 out of 196 baby mice died after being exposed to aspartame. Read here

Stevia 

Stevia is a plant that makes things sweet. People in South America and Japan have used it for a long time. Some companies made new products from stevia and another thing called erythritol. The most popular Artificial sweetener in the world is Sucralose (Splenda). It was found in 1976 and the FDA said it was okay in 1998. Sucralose is made from sugar but with some changes. They used a trick to make people think that Splenda was like sugar, but they had to stop because it was not true.

Erythritol 

Erythritol - It is a kind of sugar that does not affect your blood sugar. You can find it in some fruits like pears, watermelon, and soy. But the erythritol that you buy is not from fruits. It is either from corn or made in a lab. Most corn are not natural. Erythritol is not very bad, but some people can get sick from it if they eat too much.

Current Status 

NOW The FDA has stopped many artificial sweeteners from being used over the years, but aspartame is still one of the most common ones since 1983. There is a lot of proof that aspartame is dangerous, but the FDA has not banned it. Some people think that the government and big companies are hiding the truth. All https://www.fda.gov/media/89219/downloadsweeteners sold in the US have been tested and found to be safe, or so they say. But that does not mean they are really safe. We know that sometimes these tests are not honest and they show what they want to show.

The SCIENCE

Our body has learned over millions of years, when food was hard to find, to taste the food with our tongue. If the food was sweet, it told us to eat and eat until we were full because we did not know when we would eat again. Which is why we have appetizers. I have told you before that hunger is not about how much food we have in our stomach, but about our body clock and a hormone called Ghrelin. So even when we are not hungry, if we taste something sweet or fatty, our body wants more of it. Now think about what happens when we taste a fake sweetener. Our body is tricked into thinking that the food is good and it wants more and more. But artificial sweeteners don’t make us feel full. So we end up eating too much (including other foods around us).

 There is more and more proof that Artificial sweeteners make people fat and raise the risk of diabetes. But these food companies will argue and show many studies that say otherwise or are not clear, but we know in this group that sometimes these studies are not fair and they show what they want to show. In a study in 2016, they looked at many reviews on fake sweeteners and called it “Effects of Artificially Sweetened Beverages on Weight Outcomes: A Systemic Review of Reviews”. It showed this:

“Recent reviews of studies from the last 40 years have said that strong these artificial sweeteners can be good, bad or have unclear effects on how much energy we have or other things that affect our health.” The results depended on who was paying for the study.

A simple takeaway: 

When I am not sure, I personally avoid all things that are highly processed and things that don’t look like food. My recommendation for sweeteners are Dates, Date syrup or date Sugar, Jaggery , Molasses and Raw Honey,.

Let me know if this has been insightful or if this should be more simplified? Click here