Villainous Sugar

If you watch the link I posted last week of Dr. Lustig’s lecture you learned about the major damage sugar does to your body.  His words and proof of what he was saying certainly made a huge impression on me and has changed my eating habits significantly.  I’ve watched his video presentation twice and after that quickly got a copy of his book “Fat Chance” and devoured it. I’m so glad that I did.  Not only did I realize all the damage sugar was doing to my body but I began to see that what I believed to be true about how we process calories was, in fact, not true!

Most of us have been lead to believe that a calorie is a calorie regardless of the food we get it from.  So if we thin k that if we eat a 1,000 calories of food that is loaded with sugar versus a 1,000 calories of food that is relatively  sugar free the results to our bodies is exactly the same. But if you believe that (like I did) you’d be wrong.

The reason that one type of calorie can cause your body to gain weight and another one will not, is all in the way the body metabolizes the food.  So let’s say that in the next 6 months you ate 2000 sugar loaded calories a day. You might gain 5 lbs. But if you ate 2000 calories of non-sugar foods you might lose 5 pounds or stay the same weight.  But that’s just the beginning.

As Dr. Robert Lustig says in the beginning of his book, “Every good story needs a villain.  While I am loath to reveal it this early in the book, I won’t keep you in suspense.  It’s sugar…..a substance that now permeates nearly all food and drink worldwide.  It’s killing us … slowly, and I’ll prove it.  Every statement throughout this book is based on scientific study, historical fact, or recent statistics.”

Plain and simple, Lustig makes a totally convincing case that sugar is TOXIC.

If you read his book you will see all the ways sugar is doing damage to your body.  Lustig’s book certainly motivated me to cut out almost all the sugar and processed foods from my diet. By the way–did you know that there are dozens of different names that the food industry uses to hide sugar content, especially in processed foods? If you aren’t sure you can identify them, go to the USDA’s page here for a list.

And if you are thinking, like so many people, “I will just exercise more to counteract the sugar.” Sorry, that’s not going to work either.  Don’t get me wrong … exercise is not bad. In fact it’s very, very good for the body but that is not how you will counteract sugar or to lose weight. Why not, you ask? Well, I’ll talk about that next week. In the meantime, read your labels. See just how much sugar you are really taking in and try to cut it out of your diet. I bet you’ll be surprised just how many things you’ll have to eliminate but that just tells you how bad the situation is.