By Cherie L Dreves
Last month I wrote about the high sugar consumption in the Standard American Diet (SAD) and all the names that have been given to sugar to fool an unsuspecting public. This month I want to explore the effects of sugar on the human body.
According to Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist, author of “Fat Chance, Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease” and research team member for Sugarscience.org “More than half of the U.S. population is sick with Metabolic Syndrome, a group of risk factors for chronic disease such as heart disease, diabetes and liver disease that are directly related to the excessive consumption of added sugars in the Western diet.”
It is a widely held belief of the medical establishment that obesity causes Metabolic Syndrome. “Although it is a marker for many diseases, Lustig said it is not the cause. Too much sugar causes chronic metabolic diseases in both fat and thin people and instead of focusing on obesity as the problem, we should be focusing on our processed food supply.”
To sum up Dr. Lustig’s findings in a nut shell; it doesn’t matter if you are fat or thin, too much sugar, furnished by our processed foods system, in our diet leads to chronic disease, and not just obesity.
Now armed with that tidbit of knowledge it seems that the way to steer clear of chronic disease is to steer clear of processed foods. Those which come in packages with unpronounceable ingredients, made by “Big Food” companies that really don’t have our good health as the focus of their business.
It’s not just companies like Pepsico, General Mills and Kraft that are misleading customers. Take a walk down the isles of the local health food store and be amazed at the number of “poison products” all dressed up to look healthy, outfitted with “healthy sugar” names such as brown rice syrup or evaporated cane juice. These sugars are extracted from their natural state just like white sugar from sugar beets. Processed sugar is processed sugar in all forms.
A very SAD fact – Dr. Dean Schillinger another researcher from the SugarScience team pointed out that during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars 1,500 American soldiers lost limbs in combat. In the same period 1.5 million Americans lost limbs to amputation from Type 2 diabetes, a preventable disease.
The American public has gotten increasingly sicker in the last 50 years. This correlates directly to the rise of processed foods in our diets. Food companies spend billions on developing products and advertising them to get people to buy food, (I use that term loosely), that damages their health.
Make a choice – choose life and good health over convenience. Choose to eat real food in it’s natural state for example, an apple instead of apple juice, a roast turkey breast instead of lunch meat from the deli counter. Are these choices less convenient? Maybe in the beginning while learning to change but what it comes down to is planning and conscious choices. There isn’t a single product offered by processed food manufactures that is worth the risk of your health.