Avoid too much sugar
Are you addicted to sugar?
If you answered 'yes’ to one of the questions above, you are addicted.
Learn more about sugar addition from this video. It begins with music so please turn off your speakers until you see the speaker begin their talk.
- Do you struggle to walk past a sugary treat without taking 'just one’?
- Do you have routines around sugar consumption – for example, always having pudding, or needing a piece of chocolate to relax in front of the television?
- Are there times when you feel as if you cannot go on without a sugar hit?
- If you are forced to go without sugar for 24 hours, do you develop headaches and mood swings?
If you answered 'yes’ to one of the questions above, you are addicted.
Learn more about sugar addition from this video. It begins with music so please turn off your speakers until you see the speaker begin their talk.
Up until the end of the 1920's the American Department of Agriculture records reveal that the average American was eating just 2 kg of a year of fructose (which came from fruits in season and some honey). Then, with industrialised food processing, fructose steadily increased until we're presently up to about 52 kg of sugar a year. And that's added each and every year of eating. Remember when our parents used to talk of the middle-aged spread, today our children and teenagers have it.
The movement is led by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco, author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar, numerous scientific and press articles, and presenter of “Sugar: the Bitter Truth”, a YouTube clip viewed more than 3,300,000 times.
His video is below (very long but interesting for anyone who wants to know more), unfortunately the introduction has music - please turn off your speakers until you see the professor speaking on the stage insha Allah.
The movement is led by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco, author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar, numerous scientific and press articles, and presenter of “Sugar: the Bitter Truth”, a YouTube clip viewed more than 3,300,000 times.
His video is below (very long but interesting for anyone who wants to know more), unfortunately the introduction has music - please turn off your speakers until you see the professor speaking on the stage insha Allah.
Lustig leads the field with his warning that not all calories are equal, because not all monosaccharides – the simplest forms of sugar, the building blocks of all carbohydrates – are equal.
At a basic level, sucrose, or table sugar (which is made up of equal molecules of the monosaccharides fructose and glucose) is not metabolised in the same way that a carbohydrate such as flour is.
He explains: ''An analysis of 175 countries over the past decade showed that when you look for the cause of type 2 (non-insulin dependent) diabetes, the total number of calories you consume is irrelevant. It’s the specific calories that count. When people ate 150 calories more every day, the rate of diabetes went up 0.1 per cent. But if those 150 calories came from a can of fizzy drink, the rate went up 1.1 per cent. Added sugar is 11 times more potent at causing diabetes than general calories.”
Why is this? Well, look more closely through the microscope, and Lustig (and others) believe it is the fructose molecule in sugar that is to blame. Lustig explains that instead of helping to sate us, some scientists believe that fructose fools our brains into thinking we are not full, so we overeat. Moreover, excess fructose cannot be converted into energy by the mitochondria inside our cells (which perform this function). “Instead,” he explains, “they turn excess fructose into liver fat. That starts a cascade of insulin resistance (insulin promotes sugar uptake from blood) which leads to chronic metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.”
Look online and you’ll see fructose described as “fruit sugar” – it’s the nutrient that nature put into apples and pears to entice humans (and birds) to eat them. So do we stop eating fruit in order to go sugar-free? It’s not that easy. Fruit is sweetened by fructose but it doesn’t contain very much, although you still shouldn’t eat very sweet fruit like grapes and melon to excess.
The problem lies in sources of sweetness like corn syrup, agave or maple syrup and honey, which contain a higher percentage of fructose than fruit, especially if they have been processed, meaning additional fructose is added in. Some agave nectars, for example, can be 92 per cent fructose, eight per cent glucose.
The food industry loves these sweeteners, especially high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), as they make every type of food more palatable – from soup to bagels, ketchup to bread. In the United States, HFCS is especially popular following governmental production quotas of domestic sugar, subsidies of US corn, and an import tariff on foreign sugar, making HFCS super cheap. As a liquid, it is also easier to blend and transport. In particular, it is used in low-fat foods (which would otherwise taste, says Lustig, “like cardboard”). His theory goes a long way to explaining why the low-fat diets which rose to popularity in the Seventies have coincided with a rise in obesity and related illnesses.
So before you can think about giving these sweeteners up, you have to turn label detective – and find them.
At a basic level, sucrose, or table sugar (which is made up of equal molecules of the monosaccharides fructose and glucose) is not metabolised in the same way that a carbohydrate such as flour is.
He explains: ''An analysis of 175 countries over the past decade showed that when you look for the cause of type 2 (non-insulin dependent) diabetes, the total number of calories you consume is irrelevant. It’s the specific calories that count. When people ate 150 calories more every day, the rate of diabetes went up 0.1 per cent. But if those 150 calories came from a can of fizzy drink, the rate went up 1.1 per cent. Added sugar is 11 times more potent at causing diabetes than general calories.”
Why is this? Well, look more closely through the microscope, and Lustig (and others) believe it is the fructose molecule in sugar that is to blame. Lustig explains that instead of helping to sate us, some scientists believe that fructose fools our brains into thinking we are not full, so we overeat. Moreover, excess fructose cannot be converted into energy by the mitochondria inside our cells (which perform this function). “Instead,” he explains, “they turn excess fructose into liver fat. That starts a cascade of insulin resistance (insulin promotes sugar uptake from blood) which leads to chronic metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.”
Look online and you’ll see fructose described as “fruit sugar” – it’s the nutrient that nature put into apples and pears to entice humans (and birds) to eat them. So do we stop eating fruit in order to go sugar-free? It’s not that easy. Fruit is sweetened by fructose but it doesn’t contain very much, although you still shouldn’t eat very sweet fruit like grapes and melon to excess.
The problem lies in sources of sweetness like corn syrup, agave or maple syrup and honey, which contain a higher percentage of fructose than fruit, especially if they have been processed, meaning additional fructose is added in. Some agave nectars, for example, can be 92 per cent fructose, eight per cent glucose.
The food industry loves these sweeteners, especially high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), as they make every type of food more palatable – from soup to bagels, ketchup to bread. In the United States, HFCS is especially popular following governmental production quotas of domestic sugar, subsidies of US corn, and an import tariff on foreign sugar, making HFCS super cheap. As a liquid, it is also easier to blend and transport. In particular, it is used in low-fat foods (which would otherwise taste, says Lustig, “like cardboard”). His theory goes a long way to explaining why the low-fat diets which rose to popularity in the Seventies have coincided with a rise in obesity and related illnesses.
So before you can think about giving these sweeteners up, you have to turn label detective – and find them.
David Gillespie, a Brisbane-based lawyer turned researcher whose Sweet Poison books chart his own decision to stop eating sugar, resulting in him losing six stone without dieting in a year. He explains: “You are breaking an addiction, so you need to stop consuming all sources of the addictive substance. They are all hard to give up because they are addictive – but they are all easy to give up once you understand what you are doing and why.”
He adds: “Your palate adjusts significantly and quickly when you delete sugar. You can suddenly experience a whole range of flavours that either you didn’t know existed before or were muted by the presence of sugar. One thing people often remark on after they’ve been off sugar for a month or so is that suddenly they can smell it. They can tell you where the confectionery aisle or the breakfast cereal aisle is in a strange supermarket by smell alone.” What worries Gillespie, though, is not the candy by the checkout – but the fructose lurking in your ready-meal. “Very few of us are making conscious decisions about the sugar we eat,” he says. “The average Briton is consuming more than a kilo – 238 teaspoonfuls – a week, but I bet they’d be flummoxed accounting for more than a few teaspoons of that. Sugar is deeply and thoroughly embedded in our food supply.”
He’s right. We’re buying fewer bags of granulated sugar. And Defra statistics show that we’re consuming fewer calories from “free sugars” such as table sugar, honey and sugars found naturally in fruit juices – although at 13.9 per cent that is still higher than the recommended 11 per cent we should be aiming for – than in previous years.
Even the actual number of calories we consume has fallen: Defra figures show that there has been a long-term downward trend in energy intake since 1964, with average energy intake per person 28 per cent lower in 2010 than in 1974.
Yet, obesity rates continue to rise: currently 26 per cent of Britons are obese, half of us are overweight. This is a mighty problem: direct costs caused by obesity are now estimated to be £5.1billion per year. Obesity is associated with cardiovascular risk and with cancer, disability during old age, decreased life expectancy and serious chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and hypertension.
Like Lustig, Gillespie sees our innate weight problem as connected to the rise in consumption of hidden sugar. Unlike Lustig, Gillespie’s ideas were inspired personally, from looking down at a belly that was expanding year on merciless year, regardless of what trendy diet he tried.
First, what is fructose—and why is it unhealthy?
Sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), despite its name, and table sugar (sucrose) are both composed of two smaller sugar molecules, glucose and fructose, in roughly equal proportions. (HFCS and sucrose are virtually chemically equivalent, say most scientists and doctors.) While glucose is used to run the billions of cells in our body, fructose “is a chronic poison,” Lustig says. “It doesn’t kill you after one fructose meal, it kills you after 10,000. The problem is, every meal now is a fructose meal.” HFCS is being added surreptitiously to processed foods from pretzels to ketchup.
Over time the mega-shots of fructose from added sugar uniquely gums up our inner workings and causes metabolic syndrome, the constellation of disorders, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and fatty liver disease, that are devastating our country.
All of this happens when we’re consuming too many calories—and most Americans are eating 200 to 300 extra calories a day. Lustig is quick to point out that he only means the fructose found in added sugar, the super-high levels of sucrose and HFCS we eat in processed foods and drinks (including fruit juices), not the lower levels found in fiber-rich whole fruit or the sugars (lactose) found naturally in milk.
Is there actually science to back this up?
The Nurses Health Study, one of the biggest epidemiological studies around, found that drinking a small glass of fruit juice daily (full of fructose) is associated with a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes; and, consuming one (or more) sugar-sweetened beverages daily, which also contain a lot of fructose, raises the risk of heart disease. The Framingham Heart Study showed that people who drank more than a can of soda a day were more likely to have metabolic syndrome. However, other large, epidemiological studies show a relationship that’s tenuous at best between fructose and metabolic syndrome. And a 2010 paper that reviewed all the epidemiological studies said, “epidemiological studies, at this stage, provide an incomplete, sometimes discordant appraisal of the relationship between fructose or sugar intake and metabolic cardiovascular diseases.”
Sources of Sugar
He adds: “Your palate adjusts significantly and quickly when you delete sugar. You can suddenly experience a whole range of flavours that either you didn’t know existed before or were muted by the presence of sugar. One thing people often remark on after they’ve been off sugar for a month or so is that suddenly they can smell it. They can tell you where the confectionery aisle or the breakfast cereal aisle is in a strange supermarket by smell alone.” What worries Gillespie, though, is not the candy by the checkout – but the fructose lurking in your ready-meal. “Very few of us are making conscious decisions about the sugar we eat,” he says. “The average Briton is consuming more than a kilo – 238 teaspoonfuls – a week, but I bet they’d be flummoxed accounting for more than a few teaspoons of that. Sugar is deeply and thoroughly embedded in our food supply.”
He’s right. We’re buying fewer bags of granulated sugar. And Defra statistics show that we’re consuming fewer calories from “free sugars” such as table sugar, honey and sugars found naturally in fruit juices – although at 13.9 per cent that is still higher than the recommended 11 per cent we should be aiming for – than in previous years.
Even the actual number of calories we consume has fallen: Defra figures show that there has been a long-term downward trend in energy intake since 1964, with average energy intake per person 28 per cent lower in 2010 than in 1974.
Yet, obesity rates continue to rise: currently 26 per cent of Britons are obese, half of us are overweight. This is a mighty problem: direct costs caused by obesity are now estimated to be £5.1billion per year. Obesity is associated with cardiovascular risk and with cancer, disability during old age, decreased life expectancy and serious chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and hypertension.
Like Lustig, Gillespie sees our innate weight problem as connected to the rise in consumption of hidden sugar. Unlike Lustig, Gillespie’s ideas were inspired personally, from looking down at a belly that was expanding year on merciless year, regardless of what trendy diet he tried.
First, what is fructose—and why is it unhealthy?
Sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), despite its name, and table sugar (sucrose) are both composed of two smaller sugar molecules, glucose and fructose, in roughly equal proportions. (HFCS and sucrose are virtually chemically equivalent, say most scientists and doctors.) While glucose is used to run the billions of cells in our body, fructose “is a chronic poison,” Lustig says. “It doesn’t kill you after one fructose meal, it kills you after 10,000. The problem is, every meal now is a fructose meal.” HFCS is being added surreptitiously to processed foods from pretzels to ketchup.
Over time the mega-shots of fructose from added sugar uniquely gums up our inner workings and causes metabolic syndrome, the constellation of disorders, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and fatty liver disease, that are devastating our country.
All of this happens when we’re consuming too many calories—and most Americans are eating 200 to 300 extra calories a day. Lustig is quick to point out that he only means the fructose found in added sugar, the super-high levels of sucrose and HFCS we eat in processed foods and drinks (including fruit juices), not the lower levels found in fiber-rich whole fruit or the sugars (lactose) found naturally in milk.
Is there actually science to back this up?
The Nurses Health Study, one of the biggest epidemiological studies around, found that drinking a small glass of fruit juice daily (full of fructose) is associated with a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes; and, consuming one (or more) sugar-sweetened beverages daily, which also contain a lot of fructose, raises the risk of heart disease. The Framingham Heart Study showed that people who drank more than a can of soda a day were more likely to have metabolic syndrome. However, other large, epidemiological studies show a relationship that’s tenuous at best between fructose and metabolic syndrome. And a 2010 paper that reviewed all the epidemiological studies said, “epidemiological studies, at this stage, provide an incomplete, sometimes discordant appraisal of the relationship between fructose or sugar intake and metabolic cardiovascular diseases.”
Sources of Sugar
Learn which foods in your diet are surprising sources of added sugar.
Most of us eat too much sugar. On average, Americans consume 475 calories of added sugars every day (that’s 30 teaspoons), which is 3 or 4 times what’s recommended by the American Heart Association.
If you’re trying to cut back on added sugars in your diet, you’ve probably already tackled the obvious sources: sugar-sweetened beverages and desserts.
But what about the less-obvious sources of added sugars? It’s difficult to know how much added sugars are in most processed foods because food manufacturers aren’t required to disclose the amount in their products on the Nutrition Facts Panel. But, unless there is fruit and/or milk (which contain naturally occurring sugars, fructose and lactose, respectively) in the product, you can safely assume the amount of sugar listed on the label is added.
Here are a few healthy foods that may have added sugars lurking in them:
Tomato-Based Pasta Sauces
One leading brand of sauce delivers 15 grams of sugar (almost 4 teaspoons) per ½-cup serving—and in reality, most of us eat closer to a cup of sauce with our pasta. The same brand lists sugar as the third ingredient after tomato puree and tomato juice
Fat-Free Salad Dressings
Fat-free salad dressings are often laden with sugar because, in order to eliminate the fat but keep some flavor, manufacturers rely primarily on sugar and salt. As a result, the calories in fat-free salad dressings come almost exclusively from sugars like honey and concentrated fruit juice. Sometimes there’s as much as 8 grams of sugar (2 teaspoons) per 2 tablespoons of dressing.
Smoothies
Smoothies might seem like a great way to add fruit and dairy to your diet. But most commercially prepared smoothies have added sugars lurking in them. One major brand boasts 38 grams of sugar (9½ teaspoons) and 230 calories in a single-serving bottle.
Barbecue Sauce
You should always use barbecue sauce sparingly: just enough to add some flavor. But some are healthier than others: one popular brand of barbecue sauce has 12 grams of sugar (3 teaspoons) in only 2 tablespoons.
Multi-Grain Cereals and Crackers
Multi-grain crackers and cereals can be good for you—often delivering a healthy dose of whole grains and fiber while also being low in fat. The plain versions of shredded-wheat cereals have no added sugars, but beyond that you should check the ingredient list. One leading brand of multi-grain cereal has 6 grams of sugar per 1 cup serving (1½ teaspoons)—and sugar is listed as the third ingredient with a second source of sugar further down the list.
Breaking a Sugar Addiction
Giving up smoking is dead easy. I bet that got some ex-smokers’ attention.
A smoker is addicted to nicotine. Nicotine is found in cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, nicorettes and insecticide. It’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to come across by accident. In fact anyone consuming it, is doing so very much on purpose.
If you decide that you no longer wish to be addicted to nicotine, there is a very short list of things you should stop doing:
There. Done. Now you just need to wait about three weeks for the addiction to pass. Easy.
A Sugarer (the collective noun for people addicted to Sugar – and yes I did just make that up) has a much more daunting task ahead of them.
The active ingredient (from an addiction point of view) in sugar is fructose. Thanks to the marvels of modern food production, fructose is now embedded in almost every single food item on the supermarket shelf. Imagine how hard it would be stop smoking if everything you ate or drank contained the addictive ingredient.
Giving up fructose is far harder than giving up nicotine. You still have an addiction to fight but before you even get that far you’ve got to pick your way through a minefield of fructose filled foods. But there are some big food groups that anyone giving up fructose should absolutely avoid. They are:
Avoid those foods and you will have skipped 90% of the fructose you are likely to encounter in a day. Obviously there are exceptions. For example you can eat natural yoghurt (but you’d better get used to the sour taste) and you can eat porridge and most other unflavoured oat cereals.
Most of us eat too much sugar. On average, Americans consume 475 calories of added sugars every day (that’s 30 teaspoons), which is 3 or 4 times what’s recommended by the American Heart Association.
If you’re trying to cut back on added sugars in your diet, you’ve probably already tackled the obvious sources: sugar-sweetened beverages and desserts.
But what about the less-obvious sources of added sugars? It’s difficult to know how much added sugars are in most processed foods because food manufacturers aren’t required to disclose the amount in their products on the Nutrition Facts Panel. But, unless there is fruit and/or milk (which contain naturally occurring sugars, fructose and lactose, respectively) in the product, you can safely assume the amount of sugar listed on the label is added.
Here are a few healthy foods that may have added sugars lurking in them:
Tomato-Based Pasta Sauces
One leading brand of sauce delivers 15 grams of sugar (almost 4 teaspoons) per ½-cup serving—and in reality, most of us eat closer to a cup of sauce with our pasta. The same brand lists sugar as the third ingredient after tomato puree and tomato juice
Fat-Free Salad Dressings
Fat-free salad dressings are often laden with sugar because, in order to eliminate the fat but keep some flavor, manufacturers rely primarily on sugar and salt. As a result, the calories in fat-free salad dressings come almost exclusively from sugars like honey and concentrated fruit juice. Sometimes there’s as much as 8 grams of sugar (2 teaspoons) per 2 tablespoons of dressing.
Smoothies
Smoothies might seem like a great way to add fruit and dairy to your diet. But most commercially prepared smoothies have added sugars lurking in them. One major brand boasts 38 grams of sugar (9½ teaspoons) and 230 calories in a single-serving bottle.
Barbecue Sauce
You should always use barbecue sauce sparingly: just enough to add some flavor. But some are healthier than others: one popular brand of barbecue sauce has 12 grams of sugar (3 teaspoons) in only 2 tablespoons.
Multi-Grain Cereals and Crackers
Multi-grain crackers and cereals can be good for you—often delivering a healthy dose of whole grains and fiber while also being low in fat. The plain versions of shredded-wheat cereals have no added sugars, but beyond that you should check the ingredient list. One leading brand of multi-grain cereal has 6 grams of sugar per 1 cup serving (1½ teaspoons)—and sugar is listed as the third ingredient with a second source of sugar further down the list.
Breaking a Sugar Addiction
Giving up smoking is dead easy. I bet that got some ex-smokers’ attention.
A smoker is addicted to nicotine. Nicotine is found in cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, nicorettes and insecticide. It’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to come across by accident. In fact anyone consuming it, is doing so very much on purpose.
If you decide that you no longer wish to be addicted to nicotine, there is a very short list of things you should stop doing:
- Do not put cigarette in mouth.
- If you discover a cigarette in your mouth do not light it.
- Do not drink insecticide.
There. Done. Now you just need to wait about three weeks for the addiction to pass. Easy.
A Sugarer (the collective noun for people addicted to Sugar – and yes I did just make that up) has a much more daunting task ahead of them.
The active ingredient (from an addiction point of view) in sugar is fructose. Thanks to the marvels of modern food production, fructose is now embedded in almost every single food item on the supermarket shelf. Imagine how hard it would be stop smoking if everything you ate or drank contained the addictive ingredient.
Giving up fructose is far harder than giving up nicotine. You still have an addiction to fight but before you even get that far you’ve got to pick your way through a minefield of fructose filled foods. But there are some big food groups that anyone giving up fructose should absolutely avoid. They are:
- Confectionary and biscuits
- Flavoured drinks (Not just softdrinks. This includes juice and flavoured milk)
- Breakfast cereals
- Condiments (For example BBQ sauce has more sugar than chocolate sauce)
- Muesli Bars
- Yoghurts
- And anything you add table sugar/honey/fruit juice concentrate/ rice syrup/agave syrup etc to..........................tea, coffee, baking. If sweetener absolutely required, try a small amount of glucose powder (sold as Glucodin in the pharmacy) or experiment with whey protein concentrate in baking!
Avoid those foods and you will have skipped 90% of the fructose you are likely to encounter in a day. Obviously there are exceptions. For example you can eat natural yoghurt (but you’d better get used to the sour taste) and you can eat porridge and most other unflavoured oat cereals.