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Sickly sweet

Experts blame obesity, disease on too much sugar

It’s in mayonnaise, bread and bacon. It’s in cupcakes, ice cream and soda. It lurks in everything we eat.

It’s sugar and it’s killing us.

The latest research says Americans eat about 100 pounds of sugar a year, or two-thirds of a cup a day. It also says sugar is now the single most pervasive evil in our diet, accounting for lethal diseases way beyond diabetes, encompassing everything from dementia to heart disease to liver dysfunction.

“Sugar causes weight gain, it causes energy depletion, it harms the immune system and it leads to cancer,” said local naturopath Jess Kelley. “It’s bad for you, and you should get it out of your diet totally.”

She’s not the only one saying sweet-happy Americans should ditch the sugar. No less an august body than the World Health Organization just cut its recommended daily consumption of added sugar and other sweeteners in half, to 5 percent of total calories.

For those following a 1,500 calorie-a-day diet, that’s 19 grams or five teaspoons; for those on a 2,000 calorie-a-day regime, that’s 25 grams or 6 teaspoons. (For a reference, two Oreo cookies contain 17 grams of sugar; a 12 ounce Coke, 39.)

And by sugar we’re talking about added sugar, not the sugar in fruit or dairy or vegetables. (An ear of corn clocks in at 5 grams.) Added sugar includes a lot of substances you might not recognize as sugar, but your body does – agave nectar, high-fructose corn syrup, fructose, dextrose, evaporated cane juice, glucose, lactose, maltose, malt syrup, molasses and sucrose, to name a few.

Want to know the top two sources of calories in the American diet? No. 1 is sodas and sweetened drinks like juices, bottled teas, coffees and sports drinks. No. 2 is sweets.

So should we throw ourselves off the nearest fourteener – after all, what is life without birthday cake, Christmas cookies and crème brulee? What is an evening out without a shared spoon of tiramisu or a taste of your dining partner’s raspberry sorbet? What is the world coming to if the only healthy foods on the planet are vegetables and proteins?

“We need to stop saying no to entire food groups,” said local naturopath Nicola St. Mary. “It’s not realistic.”

She recommends raw honey as a low-glycemic form of the sweet stuff, as well as allowing for the occasional dessert in a patient’s diet. Giving up sugar altogether is an almost impossible feat, she said, but switching to healthier forms of it, say, from cookies to fruit, is doable.

But still, you have to ask, why is sugar suddenly such a villain? What happened to the fears about salt, that heart-attack inducing miscreant that could kill you before your retirement birthday? What about fat, the noxious substance of the 1990s? We’ve gone on happily eating our ice cream cones and brownies, our chocolate chip cookies and frosted doughnuts, and we’ve lived to tell the tale. How can this worldwide staple of holidays and happy occasions be the source of so many life-shortening conditions?

One answer is because it goes hand-in-hand with processed foods, inserted without our knowledge into everything from coleslaw to bologna to canned salmon. Another answer is because medical evidence has grown over the past two decades showing that sugar does indeed cause our bodies to malfunction in a myriad of ways.

Heart disease, cancer, chronic pain, endocrine problems, to say nothing of diabetes and hypoglycemia – you name it, sugar is responsible for it, said Dr. Michelle Hemingway, who practices both traditional and integrated medicine, which helps the body to heal itself.

“When sugar is high, sugar molecules attach to tissues and harden them,” she said, causing life-giving body parts like arteries to stop functioning properly. “They don’t un-attach until the cells die.”

Particularly grievous is a sugar rush, like when you swig down 16 ounces of system-shocking soda or sports drink and your body jolts into action to process it. You feel a whoosh of energy at first, but before too long, tired from the effort, your body slows down and you feel fatigued. If you eat enough sugar often enough, you can become diabetic.

And you don’t have to be overweight or out of shape to suffer from the consequences of a sugar-laden diet, Hemingway says. She recommends her patients eradicate sweets – whether a bottled mocha or a slice of cake – with the goal being to turn them into an occasional treat rather than an everyday thing.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. Separating some folks from their frappucinos and morning cinnamon buns could be a perilous undertaking. Naturopath Nancy Utter suggests easing oneself into it by substituting a lower-sugar item for a high-sugar item, trading down, so to speak. Instead of milk chocolate, try dark chocolate. Instead of a sticky bun, have cinnamon toast. Rather than an afternoon brownie, bring a piece of your favorite fruit to work. And to help your system metabolize a sweet, try to pair it with a handful of nuts or nut butter because the fats and protein buffer the effects of sugar.

The most difficult part is recognizing just how trying it is to move away from a typical American diet when any time of day is appropriate for a sweet drink or snack. She counsels doing your best and giving yourself a break if you sneak in that sugar-high of a protein bar.

“I don’t eat much sugar myself, but I have a sweet tooth, and when I want some I have it,” she said. “Then I get to move on and not keep worrying about it.”

Another challenge for those seriously trying to move sweeteners out of their life is the pervasiveness of sugar in almost every processed food known to man. We all know that coffee cake is sugar-filled, but who ever thought our lunch meat was? We all recognize that sodas are stuffed with sweeteners, but who ever imagined that so are our breakfast cereals, from oat-hearty granola to instant cream of wheat?

If you open a package, you can almost be guaranteed there’s sugar of some form in it. It doesn’t matter if it says healthy or organic or natural or even reduced sugar. Processed foods pack a major sugar punch, even foods we believe are good for us, like yogurt. Some fruited yogurts contain as much as 30 grams of sugar. Commercial applesauce holds 22 grams, granola can hide up to 25 grams in a quarter cup, premium bottled spaghetti sauce has up to 15 grams per serving. A single tablespoon of some low-fat salad dressings have a teaspoon of sugar, a third of their contents.

Who knew the evils that skulked in the kitchen pantry? If you didn’t, you should, health-care givers say. So get out those magnifying glasses for the next time you’re in the grocery store and start checking labels, not just for fat and calories (actually, nutritionists say forget about those) and concentrate on sugar grams instead.

Do your best – after all, cutting out any amount of sugar means you’re eating less than before – then get on with your life.

“I just can’t imagine a life without sugar,” said Mirra Dickson who bakes homemade sweets to sell at the Durango Farmers Market. “I bet if you banned it in your house, you couldn’t wait to go somewhere else to have it.”

phasterok@durangoherald.com

Confessions of a sugar addict

How does a bake-aholic with a two-cookie-a-day habit kick sugar?

With a shrink. OK, not really, but the true answer is no better.

I came out of the womb addicted to sugar, and it only got worse. One of my first memories is rolling pie crust with my mother, an excellent cook and baker, and making one-bowl brownies solo before I was out of kindergarten. By college, I was the go-to girl for birthday cakes and holiday cookies; by the time I rented my first apartment I had moved on to éclairs and baked Alaska.

You get the picture.

I was 20 when the symptoms started – headaches, irritability, sleepiness and finally, fainting – hypoglycemia, an inherited low-blood sugar condition. I learned to eat small meals more often throughout the day, snack on protein and avoid high-sugar juices.

But I never gave up sweets. Cookies, cakes and the all-time favorite doughnut, to say nothing of breakfast muffins, juice bars and chocolate almonds, were a steady part of my diet.

Then one day, I decided to stop. I’d had enough migraines, enough mood swings, enough hours spent pinned to the sofa like a butterfly to the cork board. With the conviction of an addict with a newly turned leaf, I gave up sugar altogether. (That’s added sugar, the substances in any baked good or drink to make it sweet.)

How? By consuming unlimited amounts of fruit and lower-sugar juices – not exactly the doctor-recommended path. For three months, I simply traded one source of sugar for another. My cravings were no less, but I had more energy and spent fewer hours out of commission. At six months, the yearnings started to taper off and I was able to stop drinking juice and eat less fruit.

The good news was I lost 20 pounds. The bad news was my body reacted just as strongly to foods with natural sugars as it did to sweets. White foods – those bugaboos of every nutritionist in town – sent me to the sofa with as much force as a piece of chocolate cake ever did.

Suddenly, I had to limit not just Snickers bars and cream puffs, but rice and bread. I had to abandon corn products (the surest trip to a nap known to man) and cut back on my all-time favorite food other than sweets, potatoes. Getting rid of high-glycemic starches was almost as hard as getting rid of high-glycemic sweets, but it yielded the same happy results – less time lying down.

Nearly three years on, I’m still almost sugar-free. I allow myself to share dessert after a nice meal with friends or my husband. To deal with the remaining yearnings, I made a deal with myself. I must wait at least a day. If I still want it – a chocolate-chip cookie, crème brulee, salted caramel, whatever – I have to make it myself. I get two and give the rest away. And I’ll bake for others at the drop of a hat – friends’ birthdays, nonprofit events, office parties. It works for me.

Now, if I could just stop dreaming about french fries.

phasterok@durangoherald.com



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