Obesity, the Problem That Just Won’t Go Away

We’ve heard over and over again with practically every health bulletin, the developed world is getting fatter and subsequently less healthy due to metabolic syndrome.

Metabolic Syndrome is a group of risk factors which are:

1. increased belly fat
2. High triglycerides
3. Elevated blood pressure
4. High blood sugar
5. Low HDL

People who have metabolic syndrome are five times more likely to develop diabetes and twice more likely to develop a stroke or heart attack.

We are well aware that it’s not just about counting calories but about the glycemic index of carbohydrates that quickly convert to glucose in the bloodstream. High glycemic carbs convert to glucose so quickly that they trigger a rapid and excessive insulin release. Insulin is that powerful hormone which instructs the body’s adipose tissues to store fat immediately, and not only that, but put a padlock on it so no matter how many hours on the treadmill, it can’t be accessed.

On the glycemic scale of 1-100, the higher the number the larger the spike in insulin. Pure glucose has a glycemic index of 100.

The food industry knows that sweet foods taste better and therefore sell more. The real issue doesn’t lie with the sugar bowl on your dinner table, it lies with the added hidden sugar that we find in practically all prepared foods. If you read food labels, you will be hard pressed to find foods with zero sugar added. But the real culprit lies with the soft drink industry with, in some cases,  a whopping 9 teaspoons of sugar per 12-ounce can.

It’s not the sugar bowl on our table, per se, all indications point to added sugars in our foods as the main culprit to our health decline.

Jack LaLanne’s Story About Sugar

Jack LaLanne was a popular TV exercise personality and health guru in the fifties and was ultra-fit and healthy. But was a self-confessed sugaraholic as a teenager.

“I was a weak, sick kid. When I was thirteen years old, I developed this terrific habit of eating sugar. My whole life was sugar, sugar, sugar. It destroyed all the B vitamins and affected my brain. I had this uncontrollable temper, tried to kill my brother on two occasions, failing grades, troublemaker in school and then, when I was about fifteen, the authorities had the doctors take me out of school for six months.”

Soon thereafter, LaLanne heard an inspirational talk given by a local nutritionist at the Oakland Women’s City Club and he committed to overcoming his sugar addiction, “I went home that night and I said, ‘Dear God or somebody, I need help.’ I didn’t say, make me a Mr. America; make me a straight-A student. I said, just give me the willpower to refrain from these foods that are killing me, all this sugar, sugar, sugar, all this processed food.”

Of course, he did and was an inspiration to all of us until his death at the age of 96.

Sugar Turns Your Skin into an Old Boot

Care about your complexion? Then be acutely aware of the hazards of sugar.

According to Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a noted and highly published dermatologist and expert on anti-aging, sugar actually accelerates skin aging:

“Even a healthy body is damaged by sugar in a phenomenon known as glycation. When foods rapidly convert to sugar in the bloodstream, as high glycemic carbohydrates do, they cause browning, or glycating of the protein in your tissues. …When glycation occurs in your skin, the sugar molecules attach themselves to the collagen fibers where they trigger a series of spontaneous chemical reactions. These reactions culminate in the formation of gradual accumulation of irreversible cross links between adjoining collagen molecules. … the bond between the sugar and collagen generates a large number of free radicals leading to more inflammation… Over time, skin begins to resemble a cross between beef jerky and an old boot. ”

Wait, It Gets Worse

Did you ever have a sugar craving; you know, one of those nights in front of the TV where you’d give your kingdom form a Hershey’s bar? For those of you that are closet junk food junkies, you may actually have a physical addiction.

In a noted Princeton University study, scientists found that the urge to eat sugar shares some of the physiological characteristics as drug dependencies, similar to morphine or heroin.

Bart Hoebel’s Princeton team studied rats who binged on sugar and showed signs of withdrawal — such as “the shakes” and changes in brain chemistry — when the scientists blocked the effects of sugar in the rats’ brains.

Hoebel says sugar triggers production of the brain’s natural opioids, “We think that is a key to the addiction process. The brain is getting addicted to its own opioids as it would to morphine or heroin. Drugs give a bigger effect, but it is essentially the same process,”

Why are We Obsessed with Sweetness Anyway?

According to Barry Sears, author of the Zone Diet, to understand the optimal human diet we need only to look at our pre-historic ancestors and what they ate. That’s because we stopped evolving about 100,000 years ago and our bodies are fine-tuned to the hunter-gatherers we were at that time. There were no sugar refineries back then.

Our ability to cultivate mass quantities of sugar cane and refine it, and ship it worldwide is a relatively new phenomenon. It wasn’t a staple in our survival diet when we were hunter-gatherers. In fact, it didn’t start to become popular in Europe until around 1650; yet today, one would be hard pressed to find anyone with a diet totally devoid of sugar. Its consumption curve has been a continual upward slope.

The Sugar Odyssey

With the premise that the homo sapiens’ body stopped evolving about 100,000 years ago,  if we want clues as to the food mixtures our bodies evolved to optimize, we have to be aware of what our hunter-gatherer forbearers were consuming on a consistent basis. One food in particular that did not exist on a recurring basis was sugar. In the millions of years of evolution, sugar has only been a staple in our diet in relatively recent times and it has raised havoc with our health.  And guess what else? Fossil discoveries indicate that our hunter-gatherer forbearers also had excellent teeth, little or no tooth loss due to cavities, it’s the sugar, stupid.

Prehistoric	Hunter-gatherers only ate occasional sugar from foraged fruits, berries and honey.  That’s the level our bodies evolved to being able to healthily consume.
8000 BC:	Sugar cane was first domesticated in New Guinea.
6000 BC	Sugar cane made its way to the Philippines and then India.
1000 AD	Few Europeans even knew of the existence of cane sugar.
1100 AD	Sugar arrives in Europe in small quantities, it was only afforded as a novelty by the wealthy class.
1493 AD	Sugar Cane was brought to the New World from the Spanish Canary Islands by Columbus on his second voyage. Later, Santo Domingo was successful in growing it as cash crop.
1516	Sugar fields are established in the Caribbean and sugar began a steady flow back to Europe used primarily as a medicine, a spice or decorative substance.
1650	Sugar began to change from a luxury to being more widely adopted in major European nations.
1750	Peoples’ lust for sweetness takes hold, sugar cane is grown in mass quantities and refinement methods improve, output expands, prices drop and most people can now afford sugar, even the poorest English farm laborer’s wife took sugar in her tea.
1800	Sugar starts to become a necessity in Europe and U.S., a staple in the kitchen, consume about 4 pounds per person per year.
1886	Atlanta druggist Dr. John Styth Pemberton invented “Coca-Cola” syrup using melted sugar, water and other ingredients.
1876	Daniel Peter, a Swiss candy maker, developed milk chocolate made with copious quantities of sugar
1894	Milton Hershey established the Hershey Chocolate Company, which mass produced quality chocolate bars at low prices. Another bullet in the sugar chamber.
1950	Since it became readily available in 1750, per capita sugar consumption grows more than 400% in 200 years
1970’s	High Fructose Corn Syrup is developed as an alternative to table sugar. It is used mainly as a sweetener in processed foods.
1980	Hurricane Allen destroyed much of the sugar crop in Caribbean and South U.S. , so high fructose corn syrup came in to take its place as a sweetener and it became more prevalent.
1995	Average Americans consume about 20 teaspoons of table sugar per day.
2000	Average Americans consume about 100 pounds of sugar per year.
2003	Added sugar comprises about 15.7% of the calories consumed by the average American and 20% of teenagers.
2020	Average Americans drop sugar consumption to 90 pounds per year, yet obesity and diabetes kept rising.

 

We’ve increased our consumption of sugar by 25x to 100 lbs. per year, from 4 lbs. per year in the early 1800’s to 100 lbs. per year today.

Sugar consumption in the US peaked in 2000. Then, from 2000 – 2020 it dropped from 100 lbs. per year to 90 lbs. Yet the obesity rate kept rising. What gives?  It turns out to be the cumulative effect of sugar consumption over the previous years.

How Did We Get Here?

In our “modern society” it’s all about convenience and saving time. This pertains particularly to mealtime. Who wants to peel potatoes and cut up carrots, it’s so much easier to grab a pre-packaged meal out of the freezer, a few minutes in the microwave and “presto, dinner’s ready”.

There’s a price to pay for this. We’ve subordinated the preparation of our food to an external entity that is less concerned with the nutrition going into our bodies than it is with profit growth. They want you to buy today and buy even more tomorrow. Hence, they’ve flavored the meal and/or snack to make it absolutely addicting. The easiest way to do that is with added sweeteners. They’ve been engineered to have the perfect ratio of sugar, fat, salt, and in some instances crunch, that tickle our taste buds and the dopamine rush keeps us coming back for more.

Our taste buds have grown so accustomed to sweet tasting foods that all foods taste downright bland without those sweeteners. But, healthwise it takes a toll.

Metabolic syndrome, obesity and Type II diabetes are continually on the rise with little end in sight. Now there’s a new malady showing up, fatty live disease, that was originally thought to be caused solely by alcohol consumption, but since 5-year-olds are now contracting it, that blows that theory out of the water.  Mounting evidence shows that it is most likely fructose, a very particular form of sugar, that can only be processed by the liver.

Fructose – The hidden Nemesis

Sounds so innocuous, have a fruit pack for a snack or 100% fruit juice with your meal.  All those vitamins, right? Well, not so fast, they’re also loaded with fructose.

  Why is Fructose a Concern?

A down and dirty lesson on sugar. Table sugar is sucrose which is actually a disaccharide composed of roughly 50% glucose and 50% fructose. When you digest table sugar, it broken down into those two component parts and is picked up by the bloodstream.

Glucose is actually needed by the human body, it is used to retore needed glycogen in the muscles and liver for immediate energy. If you eat an apple, yes it has fructose, but it’s not that damaging. That’s because you’re balancing the natural fructose with fiber and water which slows down its digestion to a more innocuous level.  But too much manufactured fructose can cause issues according to UC San Diego School of Medicine.

“Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is the most common cause of chronic liver disease in the world. It can progress to more serious conditions, such as cirrhosis, liver cancer, liver failure and death,” said Michael Karin, Ph.D. “These findings point to an approach that could prevent liver damage from occurring in the first place.”

“…Fructose is two to three times more potent than glucose in increasing liver fat, a condition that triggers Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. And the increased consumption of soft drinks containing high fructose corn syrup corresponds with its growth.”

Kick the Sugar Habit — Actions you can Take Today

Don’t rely on the government to look out for your health. The USDA’s original food pyramid was actually a major contributor to our rampant obesity problem. Too many food corporation lobbyists had their fingerprints on it. So, take it upon yourself to monitor your food intake.

Sounds obvious, but read the food labels. If there are ingredients that end in “ose”, that’s sugar added (lactose, fructose, sucrose, etc.). Minimize the intake of these, you’ll go a long ways to regaining your health.

Stop all intake of high fructose corn syrup. If you see a food label with it as an ingredient, drop it as if it were scalding your hands.

In addition to reducing your intake of sugar, reduce your intake of high glycemic carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are converted to sugar. Luckily, not all carbohydrates are created equal, some are converted to sugar more rapidly than others.

The Glycemic Index ranges from 0 to 100. Pure table sugar (sucrose) has a glycemic index of 100. Low-glycemic foods have a glycemic load of 55 or lower and typically include most vegetables, beans, and some whole grains. Foods such as bananas, raisins, and sweet potatoes are considered to be medium-glycemic foods and are ranked between 56 and 69. High-glycemic foods are ranked at 70 and above and include white and French breads, most breakfast cereals, instant rice, French fries, and cheese pizza.

Meats, fish and olive oil typically rank zero on the glycemic scale.

Food substitutions

Now that you’re aware to pivot toward lower glycemic foods, think about merely making the following substitutions when you prepare meals:

• Replace corn with dark rice
• Replace peanut butter with almond butter
• Remove the burger bun and replace with lettuce
• Replace white potato with sweet potato
• Replace wheat pasta with chickpea pasta
• Replace cow’s mike with almond milk

Keep Moving

Movement and exercise will go far in burning off excess sugar in your system.  Between limiting your ingestion of sugar and burning off what you can, you’ve started the path to better health.