What happens when you go without sugar for 10 days?
By Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Medical Correspondent
- A study showed dramatic improvements' in kids' health by cutting back sugar for 10 days
- It shows that "all calories are not created equal," Dr. Sanjay Gupta writes
(CNN)No one wants to hear more bad news about sugar, especially just a few days after Halloween. As a dad of three little girls, though, I found a recent study about sugar somewhat encouraging.
By cutting back sugar for your kids, you can see dramatic improvements in just 10 days. That is pretty remarkable, if you think about it. All of the children dramatically reduced their risk of diabetes, as their blood sugar and insulin levels normalized. Again, just 10 days. And while the study was done in children, there's no reason to believe the benefits wouldn't extend to adults, as well.
It speaks to what was once an unspeakable idea -- in fact, all calories are not created equal.
As much as we love the simple accounting principles of calorie counting, there are some calories that are simply worse than others, and for most people, sugar is at the top of the list. The table sugar most people know is sucrose, made up of equal parts glucose and fructose. But it is the fructose that is such a bad actor, Lustig told me. The reason why is really fascinating.
Because our bodies use glucose as the preferred energy source, it is easily metabolized and used just about everywhere and the extra is stored in our muscles or liver as glycogen.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with fructose, which is metabolized in only one place -- the liver. And, because the liver can only handle so much fructose at a time, the extra gets converted into fat. Your liver starts to accumulate fat, which is wildly unhealthy. Even worse, the excess fat spills out into your blood stream, increasing your risk of heart disease and strokes.
In ancient times, before sugar and high fructose corn syrup (which are basically the same) became so cheap to refine and produce, we only got our fructose in small amounts, when fruit fell from the trees.
Nowadays, however, we consume 130 pounds a year -- or roughly 1/3 of a pound every day. Our livers, however, have not evolved to keep pace with the staggering increase. As a result, a sugary drink hits your liver like a tsunami wave, according to Lustig.
There is something else peculiar about fructose: Unlike other sources of calories, it doesn't suppress the hunger hormone, known as ghrelin. So, despite eating lots of it, you don't really feel full.
The result: you keep eating. In addition, fructose targets my favorite area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, also known as the reward center. Turns out fructose gives the nucleus accumbens a little nudge, resulting in someone feeling rewarded, good, even euphoric, and -- you guessed it -- wanting to eat even more.
Lustig and his team wanted to make something very clear in this study.
While many diet studies derive most of their benefit from people simply eating less, it wasn't the case here. While study participants reduced their dietary sugar from 28% to 10%, it was replaced with other complex carbohydrates. Think bagels instead of pastries. The goal was not to lose weight but to isolate the impact of sugar on the body.
So, hide the extra Halloween candy from your kids and yourself. At our home, the Switch Witch will pay a visit within a week after Halloween. She takes the candy and leaves something special in its place. (We still haven't decided what she's leaving this year.)
However you cut back, you now know your body will thank you for it in as little as 10 days.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/03/health/gupta-sugar-study-kids/index.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFyF9px20Y
it's hard to see this information...
Here's a mini-quiz for foodists who pride themselves on their knowledge of obscure consumables: what are diastatic malt, dextran, ethyl maltol, panocha and sorghum syrup? They are all names used on food labels for added sugar. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist who works on childhood obesity, is angry with the food industry and the regulatory capture of western governments by its lobbyists. Added sugar is all around us, disguised under deliberately unfamiliar names, and its sweet molecule – fructose – is, according to Lustig, the prime cause of our ballooning "obesity pandemic".
Lustig explains the biochemistry of metabolism, and the vicious cycle of obesity, with patient clarity and some alarmingly vivid imagery. (You know the way sugar helps to brown meat while cooking? It's browning your insides the same way.) He is sceptical about one-shot solutions (miracle diet pills, antioxidants), since there is a complex interdependence between the actions of hormones and food intake. For example: there is fructose in fruit, so why isn't eating fruit bad? Because the fibre in fruit counteracts the noxious effects of the sugar, which is why it's better to eat your fruit than to drink it. (A glass of orange juice contains more sugar than the equivalent volume of Coke.) The bitter pill of Lustig's philosophy is sweetened by an agreeably cute humour: "Naturally occurring fructose comes from sugarcane, fruits, some vegetables, and honey. The first three have way more fibre than fructose, and the last is protected by bees."
There is no shortage of fad food books blaming one or other "toxin" for all our fleshly dolours. Yet to dismiss every such tract as populist scaremongering would be just as irrational as to believe them all. (The "experts" – whom it is fashionable in some quarters always to dismiss wholesale as a compromised class – did not, after all, turn out to be wrong about the harmful effects of cigarettes.) Recent reports elsewhere, indeed, indicate that there is a growing consensus behind the idea that the fructose factor helps to explain what otherwise looks like a puzzle: why do different diets – Atkins, the Paleo diet, the traditional Japanese or Mediterranean diets – all have notable health benefits? Because, or so this thinking runs, they are all low-sugar and high-fibre regimes.
Fat Chance is a persuasively indignant public-policy manifesto, but it's also a self-help book; curiously, each strain flatly contradicts the other. The crux is whether people can actually change their behaviour. Of course they can, you might retort, citing friends who have successfully slimmed; but Lustig spends most of the book denying that this is even possible, the better to justify government regulation. (He suggests agricultural subsidies for green vegetables instead of for corn and soy, and taxing foods that have added sugar. This latter would be a regressive tax, he admits, but the benefits would also accrue mostly to those on low incomes.)
Lustig denies personal autonomy for laudably humane reasons – because he wants to deconstruct the prejudice that obese people have merely given in to "gluttony and sloth". But his insistence on the complete irrelevance of "personal responsibility" leads him to rely on some ropey metaphysics and oversimplified science. "Biochemistry and hormones drive our behaviour," he writes reductively, assuring us that we are merely slaves to the antic nanoreactions of our neurobiology. And because obesity changes our hormonal balance, "weight loss is next to impossible".
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/25/fat-chance-robert-lustig-review
Because our bodies use glucose as the preferred energy source, it is easily metabolized and used just about everywhere and the extra is stored in our muscles or liver as glycogen.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with fructose, which is metabolized in only one place -- the liver. And, because the liver can only handle so much fructose at a time, the extra gets converted into fat. Your liver starts to accumulate fat, which is wildly unhealthy. Even worse, the excess fat spills out into your blood stream, increasing your risk of heart disease and strokes.
In ancient times, before sugar and high fructose corn syrup (which are basically the same) became so cheap to refine and produce, we only got our fructose in small amounts, when fruit fell from the trees.
Nowadays, however, we consume 130 pounds a year -- or roughly 1/3 of a pound every day. Our livers, however, have not evolved to keep pace with the staggering increase. As a result, a sugary drink hits your liver like a tsunami wave, according to Lustig.
There is something else peculiar about fructose: Unlike other sources of calories, it doesn't suppress the hunger hormone, known as ghrelin. So, despite eating lots of it, you don't really feel full.
The result: you keep eating. In addition, fructose targets my favorite area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, also known as the reward center. Turns out fructose gives the nucleus accumbens a little nudge, resulting in someone feeling rewarded, good, even euphoric, and -- you guessed it -- wanting to eat even more.
Lustig and his team wanted to make something very clear in this study.
While many diet studies derive most of their benefit from people simply eating less, it wasn't the case here. While study participants reduced their dietary sugar from 28% to 10%, it was replaced with other complex carbohydrates. Think bagels instead of pastries. The goal was not to lose weight but to isolate the impact of sugar on the body.
So, hide the extra Halloween candy from your kids and yourself. At our home, the Switch Witch will pay a visit within a week after Halloween. She takes the candy and leaves something special in its place. (We still haven't decided what she's leaving this year.)
However you cut back, you now know your body will thank you for it in as little as 10 days.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/03/health/gupta-sugar-study-kids/index.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFyF9px20Y
it's hard to see this information...
Here's a mini-quiz for foodists who pride themselves on their knowledge of obscure consumables: what are diastatic malt, dextran, ethyl maltol, panocha and sorghum syrup? They are all names used on food labels for added sugar. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist who works on childhood obesity, is angry with the food industry and the regulatory capture of western governments by its lobbyists. Added sugar is all around us, disguised under deliberately unfamiliar names, and its sweet molecule – fructose – is, according to Lustig, the prime cause of our ballooning "obesity pandemic".
Lustig explains the biochemistry of metabolism, and the vicious cycle of obesity, with patient clarity and some alarmingly vivid imagery. (You know the way sugar helps to brown meat while cooking? It's browning your insides the same way.) He is sceptical about one-shot solutions (miracle diet pills, antioxidants), since there is a complex interdependence between the actions of hormones and food intake. For example: there is fructose in fruit, so why isn't eating fruit bad? Because the fibre in fruit counteracts the noxious effects of the sugar, which is why it's better to eat your fruit than to drink it. (A glass of orange juice contains more sugar than the equivalent volume of Coke.) The bitter pill of Lustig's philosophy is sweetened by an agreeably cute humour: "Naturally occurring fructose comes from sugarcane, fruits, some vegetables, and honey. The first three have way more fibre than fructose, and the last is protected by bees."
There is no shortage of fad food books blaming one or other "toxin" for all our fleshly dolours. Yet to dismiss every such tract as populist scaremongering would be just as irrational as to believe them all. (The "experts" – whom it is fashionable in some quarters always to dismiss wholesale as a compromised class – did not, after all, turn out to be wrong about the harmful effects of cigarettes.) Recent reports elsewhere, indeed, indicate that there is a growing consensus behind the idea that the fructose factor helps to explain what otherwise looks like a puzzle: why do different diets – Atkins, the Paleo diet, the traditional Japanese or Mediterranean diets – all have notable health benefits? Because, or so this thinking runs, they are all low-sugar and high-fibre regimes.
Fat Chance is a persuasively indignant public-policy manifesto, but it's also a self-help book; curiously, each strain flatly contradicts the other. The crux is whether people can actually change their behaviour. Of course they can, you might retort, citing friends who have successfully slimmed; but Lustig spends most of the book denying that this is even possible, the better to justify government regulation. (He suggests agricultural subsidies for green vegetables instead of for corn and soy, and taxing foods that have added sugar. This latter would be a regressive tax, he admits, but the benefits would also accrue mostly to those on low incomes.)
Lustig denies personal autonomy for laudably humane reasons – because he wants to deconstruct the prejudice that obese people have merely given in to "gluttony and sloth". But his insistence on the complete irrelevance of "personal responsibility" leads him to rely on some ropey metaphysics and oversimplified science. "Biochemistry and hormones drive our behaviour," he writes reductively, assuring us that we are merely slaves to the antic nanoreactions of our neurobiology. And because obesity changes our hormonal balance, "weight loss is next to impossible".
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