Sugar drives inflammation and affects virtually every
aspect of your health, from your skin to your joints,
your heart, and even your genitals
Sugar is addictive and carefully woven into processed
foods to keep you eating and buying more
The sugar industry rivals Big Tobacco in its PR
campaigns designed to downplay sugar’s role in chronic
disease
By Dr. Mercola
Instead of eating whole foods — realfoods —
the contemporary American diet typically consists mostly of sugar,
highly processed grains, and a montage of chemicals that are
anything but food.
To some extent, this isn’t your fault. Added sugars hide in 74
percent of processed foods under more than 60 different names,1
and these foods are carefully created in a laboratory with one thing
in mind… profits.
If food manufacturers can create a winning combo of ingredients
that you crave and can’t stop eating, it means you’ll keep coming
back for more. Create they do, and it’s not by accident.
Dr. Howard Moskowitz, a long-time food industry consultant, is
known as “Dr. Bliss.” A Harvard-trained mathematician, Moskowitz
tests people’s reactions and finds the “optimal” amount of sugar for
a product.
Essentially, he helps them find the “Goldilocks” zone of sugar,
unhealthy fat, and salt that gets you to overeat and buy another bag
or box even though you know you shouldn’t. And he’s made the sugar
industry billions.2
Meanwhile, food giant Kellogg’s spent $32 million in 2014 just to
advertise Pop Tarts. If you’ve seen them in the grocery store
recently, you may see such alluring tag lines as “Limited Edition”
and “made with real nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove” (for its seasonal
pumpkin pie flavor).3
The marketing cleverly gets you feeling nostalgic about your
grandma’s pumpkin pie and, lest you miss out on this special
seasonal treat, a box or two wind up in your cart. You might even
rationalize it by focusing on the “real” spices it contains.
But the only thing “real” about a box of Pop Tarts, or virtually
any other sugar-laden processed food on the market, is the fact that
it will slowly but surely desecrate your health.
What Really Happens When You Eat Sugar?
By now most Americans are aware that added sugars aren’t healthy,
but this is a bit of an understatement, especially considering the
vast amounts most Americans are consuming.
The American Heart Association and the World Health Organization
(WHO) recommend limiting your daily added sugar intake to
nine teaspoons (38 grams) for men and six teaspoons (25 grams) for
women.
I strongly recommend limiting your daily fructose intake to 25
grams or less from all sources, including natural sources
such as fruit — regardless of whether you’re male or female. That
equates to just over six teaspoons of total sugar a day.
The average American, however, consumes around 20 teaspoons of
added sugar a day, which is more than three times my recommended
amount.
There’s simply no doubt that this overconsumption of sugar is
fueling the obesity and chronic disease epidemics we’re currently
struggling with, including
type 2 diabetes,
heart disease, and
Alzheimer’s. Take this sampling of sugar research:
A study in mice, published in the journal Neuroscience,
revealed that a high-sugar diet led to changes in gut bacteria
that were in turn related to a significant loss of cognitive
flexibility, which is a measure of your brain’s ability to adapt
to changing situations.4
Impairments in both long-term and short-term memory were also
noted.5
Rats were fed a
fructose solution as drinking water for six weeks then
tested their ability to remember their way out of a maze.6The rats fed fructose syrup showed significant
impairment in their cognitive abilities — they struggled to
remember their way out of the maze.
They were slower, and their brains showed a decline in
synaptic activity. Their brain cells had trouble signaling each
other, disrupting the rats' ability to think clearly and recall
the route they'd learned six weeks earlier.
According to a meta-review, the preponderance of research
clearly shows that once you reach 18 percent of your daily
calories from added sugar, there’s a two-fold increase
in metabolic harm that promotes pre-diabetes and diabetes7
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association (JAMA) concluded that “most US adults consume
more added sugar than is recommended for a healthy diet,” and
there’s “a significant relationship between added sugar
consumption and increased risk for cardiovascular disease
mortality.”
The 15-year-long study, which included data for 31,000
Americans, found those who consumed 25 percent or more of their
daily calories as sugar were more than twice as likely to die
from heart disease as those who got less than 10 percent of
their calories from sugar.8
When you eat refined processed sugars, they trigger
production of your brain's natural opioids – a key ingredient in
the addiction process. Your brain essentially becomes addicted
to stimulating the release of its own opioids as it would to
morphine or heroin.
Rats exposed to sugar water demonstrate all the criteria
necessary to diagnose addiction: binging, withdrawal, craving, and
addiction transfer (or addiction to other substances as well).9
The infographic below, published by Prevention, shows
how sugar also drives inflammation and affects virtually every
aspect of your health, from your skin to your joints, your heart,
and even your genitals.10
How the Sugar Industry Resembles Big Tobacco
There’s no denying the fact that
smoking cigarettes raises your risk of chronic disease, but this
fact wasn’t always so widely accepted. And for decades, Big Tobacco
sold the public on the opposite belief, even touting
cigarettes as “physician tested and approved.”
The sugar industry actually operates in much the same way as the
tobacco industry back in its heydays. For over 30 years, the tobacco
industry knew that nicotine was addictive and caused lung cancer,
and this information was purposefully withheld from the public.
Big Tobacco executives even lied during Congressional testimony,
stating they had no knowledge of adverse health effects. Today, Big
Sugar is being equally evasive about fessing up the truth, despite
overwhelming evidence showing that excessive sugar consumption is a
key driver of obesity, metabolic dysfunction, chronic disease, and
dental cavities.
Earlier this year, a report in PLOS Medicine revealed,
for instance, that the sugar industry knew as early as 1950 that
sugar damaged teeth.11
They therefore adopted a strategy to deflect attention from this
fact, and instead of encouraging reduced sugar consumption focused
attention on how to reduce the
harms of consuming sugar and downplay its health effects.
Andy Briscoe, the head of the Sugar Association, has even written
to the scientific advisory committee making recommendations for the
2015 US dietary guidelines.
The committee recommended Americans consume no more than 10 percent
of their daily calories in the form of added sugars, citing “strong
and consistent evidence” that sugar is associated with obesity and
other health risks.
Briscoe went so far as to say “there was no ‘proof of cause
and effect’” linking ‘added sugars’ intake with serious disease,’
nor any ‘significant scientific agreement’ to justify telling the
American public sugar is ‘a causal factor in a serious disease
outcome.’”12
This pattern of denial, used heavily by Big Tobacco, continued
from there. As The Washington Post reported,
Briscoe also went on record with the following, quite ludicrous,
statements:13
“‘Obesity is a serious concern in America, but sugar is
not the culprit,’ he wrote in the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel…
‘Sugar has been used safely by our grandmothers and their
grandmothers for centuries,’ he wrote in the Orlando
Sentinel… ‘Sugar is not part of the problem,’ he told
Reuters.
‘All-natural sugar is currently being scapegoated for all
kinds of health problems, despite the fact that Americans
consume less of it now,’ he wrote in the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette ‘Every major, comprehensive review of the total
body of scientific literature continues to exonerate sugars
intake as the causative factor in any lifestyle disease,’ he
told the American Sugar Alliance.”
US Government Subsidizes the Wrong Foods…
Adding to the complexity of why Americans are eating more sugar
than ever before are government agricultural subsidies. US nutrition
guidelines recommend Americans fill their plates half full with
fruits and vegetables. Yet, less than half a percent of agricultural
subsidies went to growing such healthy foods. These “specialty
crops” are grown on less than 5 percent of US cropland, while more
than 50 percent goes to growing soybeans and corn, much of which is
refined into sugar (or used to feed animals).14The Atlantic reported:15
“‘If you go into a supermarket, you see that most of
what’s lined up there is to sell sugar,’ [Yale neurobiology
professor Gordon] Shepherd noted. Some of that we pay for
directly, and some of it we pay for in taxes that subsidize its
production.”
By subsidizing these, particularly corn and soy, the US
government is actively supporting a diet that consists of these
processed grains, namely
high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), soybean oil, and grain-fed
cattle – all of which are now well-known contributors to obesity and
chronic disease. The Farm Bill essentially creates a negative
feedback loop that perpetuates the highly profitable but
health-harming processed food diet that the United States has become
infamous for.
The US government is actively promoting obesity and chronic
disease through these subsidies, while simultaneously creating
flawed and ineffective anti-obesity campaigns and programs to combat
the very problems rooted in its agricultural policies. According to
a 2011 report by the non-profit U.S. PIRG called “Apples to
Twinkies,” each year, your tax dollars (in the form of agricultural
subsidies) would allow you to buy 19 Twinkies but less than
one-quarter of one red delicious apple!16
Watch What Happens When One Man Gives Up Sugar…
If you’re wondering what might happen to your health if
you give up sugar, check out the video above. This man gave up sugar
for one month, and while initially he was struck by cravings and
irritability, after a week or so the cravings went away. He was
awestruck when he finally woke up one morning and had no desire to
eat something sweet. What’s more, his health measures, including
weight and blood sugar, improved, as did his energy and fitness
levels.
How to Kick Sugar to the Curb
If you currently eat sugar, there's a good chance you're
struggling with
sugar addiction. So I highly recommend trying an energy
psychology technique called Turbo Tapping, which has helped many
"soda addicts" kick their sweet habit, and it should work for any
type of sweet craving you may have. Remember that in order to
minimize your sugar intake, you need to avoid most processed foods,
as most contain added sugar.
If you’re insulin/leptin resistant, have
diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, or are overweight,
you’d be wise to limit your total sugar/fructose intake to 15 grams
per day until your insulin/leptin resistance has resolved. For all
others, I recommend limiting your daily
fructose consumption to 25 grams or less. Please refer to my
free
nutrition plan for a step-by-step guide to making positive
changes in your diet. You simply cannot achieve optimal health on a
diet of processed foods and sugar. A couple of other tricks to try
to kick your sugar cravings:
Exercise: Anyone who exercises intensely on
a regular basis will know that significant amounts of
cardiovascular exercise is one of the best "cures" for food
cravings. It always amazes me how my appetite, especially for
sweets, dramatically decreases after a good workout. I believe
the mechanism is related to the dramatic reduction in insulin
levels that occurs after exercise. Additionally, if you do eat
sugars or fruits around the time of the exercise, your sugar
levels will not rise as it will metabolized for fuel
Organic, black coffee: Coffee is a potent
opioid receptor antagonist, and contains compounds such as
cafestrol – found plentifully in both caffeinated and
decaffeinated coffee – which can bind to your opioid receptors,
occupy them and essentially block your addiction to other
opioid-releasing food.17,18
This may profoundly reduce the addictive power of other
substances, such as sugar.
Sour taste, such as that from cultured
vegetables, helps to reduce sweet cravings, too. This is doubly
beneficial, as
fermented vegetables also promote gut health. You can also
try adding lemon or lime juice to your water.