As diabetics, we don't have to starve, we don't have to forgo tasty meals, we just need to find new ways of cooking and make some substitutions for high glycemic index ingredients.
It comes in a white, crystalline form and gives us a pleasurable high – but refined sugar is as habit-forming as cocaine or nicotine, according to a review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Animal studies show that sugar is the drug of choice for lab rats which, when given a choice of levers to pull, will switch from cocaine to sucrose in the twitch of a tail.
In evolutionary terms, we worked for our sugar fix by eating honey and ripe fruit. We then stored any surplus energy as fat for the lean times when bison were scarce. Now that sugar is available as highly concentrated sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup – both stripped of nutritional value (minerals and vitamins are lost in the refining process) – we’re hooked.
Sugar makes us obese, can promote the development of type 2 diabetes, raises our blood pressure and give us fatty livers. But it also alters our mood, making us feel rewarded and euphoric.
The solution
The lead author of the review, James DiNicolantonio at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, says that, unlike salt, sugar has no “aversion signal”. “Salt taste receptors will ‘flip’ when you’ve had too much, but this doesn’t happen with sugar – so we have a built-in safety mechanism that protects us from overconsuming salt but not sugar,” he says. “People can eat an entire bag of cookies or endless bars of chocolate and still want more.”
Whether refined sugar is technically addictive or not has long been debated. What isn’t in doubt is that we eat too much of it. And we should forget the notion of moderation – any refined sugar is excessive. In the US, the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine says: “The lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life apparently is zero, provided that adequate amounts of protein and fat are consumed.”
DiNicolantonio argues that refined sugars can produce bingeing and cravings – indicative of an addictive substance. And then there’s withdrawal. He says: “Withdrawal symptoms from sugar come from dopamine deficiency in the brain. This may lead to symptoms such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and it may even create a similar state in the brain as found in patients with depression.”
There is some evidence of genetic differences in our response to sugar because we all perceive sweetness differently. But, overall, the review says, refined sugar gives us one of the most intense sensory pleasures of modern life. Which is worrying for many reasons.
More on fructose, a sugar more dangerous than glucose.
This article by Ruby de Luna was published on the KUOW.org web site on 11 DEC 2015.
Juice boxes and children seem to go together. Juice is often the main drink in school cafeterias and at kids’ parties and sports events. But at Swedish Medical Center's First Hill campus, fruit juice is now off the pediatric menu.
Dr. Uma Pisharody pushed for the change after a young patient went in for a liver biopsy several months ago. When the patient woke up from anesthesia, the nurse gave him a glass of juice. It was standard procedure.
“The mom called me and said, you know that’s interesting because you’ve been telling me not to give my kid any juice for so long, and I found it interesting that the nurse in the hospital was giving him juice,” Pisharody recalled. “So that touched a nerve with me.”
Pisharody is a pediatric specialist at Swedish Medical Center. She treats kids with liver diseases like metabolic syndrome, a condition caused by consuming too much sugar. It’s very much like fatty liver, usually associated with adults who abuse alcohol. But in kids, the culprit is fructose.
Pisharody advises parents to cut back on sugar in their kids’ diets — from sweets, sodas and fruit juice. Yes, even natural, unsweetened fruit juice.
She says not all sugars are created equal. Fruit juice contains fructose: Only the liver can metabolize fructose, and when the body is inundated with sugar, your liver is stuck with it all. The liver “doesn’t know what to do with it,” Pisharody said. “So it just gets stored and leads to this metabolic syndrome.” She says it’s better to have kids eat their fruit than drink it.
The experience of the biopsy patient’s family led Pisharody to lobby hospital administrators and colleagues to remove fruit juice from its pediatric menu and find a fructose-free alternative. She says she was surprised there was virtually no pushback. The proposal went through a committee review and approval.
Swedish First Hill is the first to remove juice as part of its pediatric care. Pisharody expects other Swedish Medical Center campuses will soon follow. She believes Swedish is the first system in the state to do that.
Seattle Children’s does not offer sugar-sweetened drinks but still offers unsweetened fruit juices to patients.
According to the American Liver Foundation, almost 10 percent of all children in the U.S. are affected with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
This kind of sugar triggers a very different reaction in the brain
New evidence suggests fructose—the simple sugar present in fruit and fruit juices—may be messing with your brain and appetite in a way that actually makes you hungrier.
Dr. Kathleen Page, MD, assistant professor of medicine in the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, tested the idea when she fed 24 people a sugar-water mixture with one of two types of sugar: glucose or fructose. Each drink had 75 grams—about as much as your typical 24-ounce sugary drink, Page says. Then, she and her team performed an fMRI on the people in the study to see how their brains responded to the sugars, and showed them pictures of food (and non-food items as controls) while they were in the brain scan. Everyone had the chance to try both drinks on two different days.
After drinking the fructose mix, people had more activation in some brain regions involved in reward processing when they were looking at pictures of food, Page says, compared to after they consumed the glucose drink. “We think that it might suggest that fructose has less appetite-suppressing effects, and that in turn could motivate people to continue eating, even though they’ve already consumed quite a lot of calories when compared to glucose,” Page says. (For more on the difference between glucose, fructose and sucrose, read this piece about how all sugars aren’t the same.)
The findings are preliminary, but brains on glucose behaved as the scientists expected them to when they received an infusion of calories: with less activation in regions that control appetite. In other words, they were sated. Brains on fructose—which is far sweeter than glucose—just appeared to get hungrier.
Some experts contend that “sugar is sugar” and that it’s all equally bad for the body, but this study suggests that glucose and fructose might have very different effects because they’re processed differently in the body, says Page: Glucose is the main sugar that circulates in our bloodstream, and it’s metabolized in highly regulated ways, releasing hormones like insulin and leptin that help us feel full. Fructose, on the other hand, is extracted from our bloodstream directly to the liver, where it’s metabolized.
“Our bodies don’t secrete insulin and leptin as much as when we eat pure fructose,” she says. “We think that the differences in some of the responses of these hormones that are important in suppressing appetite may help to explain these findings.”
Many food-lovers worry about pasta making them fat. But could simply cooling and then reheating your meal make it better for you, asks Michael Mosley.
There are few things that really surprise me about nutrition, but one of the experiments from the latest series of Trust Me, I'm a Doctor really did produce quite unexpected results.
You are probably familiar with the idea that pasta is a form of carbohydrate and like all carbohydrates it gets broken down in your guts and then absorbed as simple sugars, which in turn makes your blood glucose soar.
In response to a surge in blood glucose our bodies produce a rush of the hormone insulin to get your blood glucose back down to normal as swiftly as possible, because persistently high levels of glucose in the blood are extremely unhealthy.
A rapid rise in blood glucose, followed by a rapid fall, can often make you feel hungry again quite soon after a meal. It's true of sugary sweets and cakes, but it's also true for things like pasta, potatoes, white rice and white bread. That's why dieticians emphasise the importance of eating foods that are rich in fibre, as these foods produce a much more gradual rise and fall in your blood sugars.
But what if you could change pasta or potatoes into a food that, to the body, acts much more like fibre? Well, it seems you can. Cooking pasta and then cooling it down changes the structure of the pasta, turning it into something that is called "resistant starch".
It's called "resistant starch" because once pasta, potatoes or any starchy food is cooked and cooled it becomes resistant to the normal enzymes in our gut that break carbohydrates down and releases glucose that then causes the familiar blood sugar surge.
So, according to scientist Dr Denise Robertson, from the University of Surrey, if you cook and cool pasta down then your body will treat it much more like fibre, creating a smaller glucose peak and helping feed the good bacteria that reside down in your gut. You will also absorb fewer calories, making this a win-win situation.
One obvious problem is that many people don't really like cold pasta. So what would happen if you took the cold pasta and warmed it up?
When we asked scientists this question they said that it would probably go back to its previous, non-resistant form, but no-one had actually done the experiment. So we thought we should.
Dr Chris van Tulleken roped in some volunteers to do the tests. The volunteers had to undergo three days of testing in all, spread out over several weeks. On each occasion they had to eat their pasta on an empty stomach.
The volunteers were randomised to eating either hot, cold or reheated pasta on different days.
On one day they got to eat the pasta, freshly cooked, nice and hot with a plain but delicious sauce of tomatoes and garlic.
On another day they had to eat it cold, with the same sauce, but after it had been chilled overnight.
And on a third day they got to eat the pasta with sauce after it had been chilled and then reheated.
On each of the days they also had to give blood samples every 15 minutes for two hours, to see what happened to their blood glucose as the pasta was slowly digested.
Dr Denise Robertson (back, left) and Dr Chris van Tulleken (back, second from right) with the volunteers
So what did happen?
Well we were fairly confident the cold pasta would be more resistant than the stuff that had been freshly cooked and we were right.
Just as expected, eating cold pasta led to a smaller spike in blood glucose and insulin than eating freshly boiled pasta had.
Our leftovers could be healthier for us than the original meal”
Dr Chris van Tulleken
But then we found something that we really didn't expect - cooking, cooling and then reheating the pasta had an even more dramatic effect. Or, to be precise, an even smaller effect on blood glucose.
In fact, it reduced the rise in blood glucose by 50%.
This certainly suggests that reheating the pasta made it into an even more "resistant starch". It's an extraordinary result and one never measured before.
Denise is now going to continue her research - funded by Diabetes UK - looking at whether, even without other dietary modifications, adding resistant starch to the diet can improve some of the blood results associated with diabetes.
Chris was certainly blown away by this finding.
"We've made a brand new discovery on Trust Me I'm A Doctor", he says, "and it's something that could simply and easily improve health. We can convert a carb-loaded meal into a more healthy fibre-loaded one instead without changing a single ingredient, just the temperature. In other words our leftovers could be healthier for us than the original meal."
Even if you're not diabetic you can benefit from a reduction in sugar in your diet. Here's how one family did it.
"Eve O. Schaub is the author of Year of No Sugar: A Memoir. She holds a BA and a BFA from Cornell University, and a MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her personal essays have been featured many times on the Albany, New York, NPR station WAMC." —everydayhealth.com
The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.
Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.
What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.
Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.
Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of...two fats [omega-6 and omega-3]. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6...a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.
There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.
by Dr. Dwight Lundell - from: PreventDisease
Excerpts only are quoted above. Read the full article at tunedbody.com.
The Oct. 22, 2012 issue of The New Yorker published an article entitled "Germs Are Us", by Michael Specter. The damage caused to the human organism and its attendant "enormous cloud of microorganisms" by widespread use of antibiotics is cogently and persuasively set forth. The reason why probiotic treatment could help to right the imbalances caused is outlined, along with the caveat that almost nothing is proven, and little is known about what probiotics could or should consist of. The article is about six pages long, and well worth the read. I have scanned it and made it available on the web.
For those of you who watch what you eat, here's the final word on nutrition and health. It's a relief to know the truth after all those conflicting nutritional studies.
Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.
Getty ImagesPhoto by: Getty Images
