There is one ingredient that is added more than 60% of the food and drinks we but at grocery stores. This one ingredient has been directly linked to increased heart disease risk, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, inflammation, obesity and diabetes to name a few. I am willing to bet that most people reading this think the culprit is fat. That’s because for the last 50 years that is what we have been guided to believe. Including the flawed science that became the food pyramid. We were instructed to eat 6 to 11 servings of bread, pasta, rice, and cereal daily and consume fats and oils as little as possible. So the food industry saw huge profits in this. The big food companies took full advantage of Gov’t subsidies to manufacture food like stuff that was cheap to produce, could be produced in large amounts and create huge profits. Than came the advertising directly to the consumer getting us to believe that the low fat foods these companies were producing were actually good for us. In fact these foods are only good for the producer.
The ingredient I am talking about is Sugar in all forms. It doesn’t matter what you call it, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, agave nectar, honey or one of the other 250 names they have created to disguise sugar in our foods. The food companies have become very clever in hiding the sugar in the ingredients list under several names you might not recognize. Recently the corn industry (lobbyists) have convinced the FDA to let them change the name on food label ingredients from high fructose corn syrup to corn sugar or natural sweetener. Can you believe this? They ( the FDA that is supposed to protect consumers) knows we do not want this garbage in our food. That why we have reduced the consumption of this garbage. Let the food companies change the name so they can keep feeding it to us. “Clearly the name is confusing consumers,” said Audrae Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association a Washington-based group, in an interview. “Research shows that ‘corn sugar’ better communicates the amount of calories, the level of fructose and the sweetness in this ingredient.” WHAT? These people are so full of S#!T. Better communicates the amount of calories, the level of fructose? You have got to be kidding me. They are killing us and the Government is in on it! All for the sake of profits.
Now lets look at this by the numbers. Americans now consume on average 152 pounds of sugar and 146 pounds of flour per year. Combined that almost a pound per day. Think about that for a minute. Lets focus on sugary drinks for a minute. These include soda, sport drinks, sweetened coffee, teas and juices. These liquid calories are actually much worse than solid sugar because they go straight into fat production and storage. They are biologically addicting and increase your cravings for more sugar (which leads to more profits) Your body does not recognize these calories as food so you end up consuming many more calories without knowing it than if you were consuming real food. In June of 2015 the journal Circulation published research conducted by Global Burden of Diseases Nutrition and Chronic Disease Expert Group that came to the conclusion that 184,000 deaths occur per year due to the effects of drinking these sugary drinks. The same study also reports these drinks are proven to be a cause of type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer. You don’t here about this in the news. But you do here about the 55,000 people a year that die from Opiates. And they call that an epidemic. 184,000 people a year is 516 people a day.
Lipogenesis (the creation of fat) is stimulated by a high carbohydrate diet, whereas it is inhibited by polyunsaturated fatty acids and by fasting. Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) decrease lipogenesis by suppressing gene expression in liver, (Jump et al., 1994). As opposed to a diet rich in carbohydrates which stimulates lipogenesis in both liver and adipose tissue, leading to elevated triglyceride levels. Fasting reduces lipogenesis in adipose tissue, which, combined with an increased rate of lipolysis, leads to net loss of triglycerides from fat cells. Read more here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1083868/ . For years we have been told the opposite that that high carbohydrate food would not make you fat and that all fats were bad. But if you were actually to look into this you would see medical journal articles and studies from around the world stating the exact opposite. Fat production and storage begins with sugar in any form. But we must be careful because not all PUFA’s are equal. basically PUFA’s are made up of 2 types of fatty acids. The good kind Omega 3 and the bad ones Omega 6.
The bottom line as we know right now. Sugar in all forms leads to multiple health issues including years of chronic diseases and early death. Knowing what you know right now are going to continue to do what you have been doing,which is what led you to this page or are you going to take control of your health and well being. Step number one in feeling better, losing weight and gaining energy is to eliminate Sugar and all its substitutes from your diet.
In regards to this blog, I’ve noticed that since I rarely eat sweets my tastebuds don’t like them anymore. I eat fruit. Lots of it in my daily, natural fruit, spinach smoothies.
On the rare occasion that I attempt to eat something sweet ( that looks yummy) it ‘grosses me out.’ I never thought I’d see the day that a piece of chocolate candy turns me off!
That is so true. At first I used to think there is no way I am giving up sweets. I had a special weakness for chocolate chip cookies. Now they don’t call my attention any longer. And, the last time I had one I thought to myself this is way to sweet! Definitely not worth the damaged the damage it would do to my body. Now I can walk right by a box of cookies and not even think about eating them. Something that just a year ago was not even imaginable to me. Now, I got to admit that the first few days were though, but something clicks after about 10 days. Janet keep up the good work. You know you are in a better place now than if you had not made those changes earlier.