You Are Sweet Enough!

How many times have you heard: Sugar is bad!  But then you think…how can sugar be bad?…it’s natural!

There’s that word…natural….Arsenic’s natural…so is snake venom…

Is sugar really bad for you? YES!!

Let’s go back to the basic essentials of life.  Back to a time when your body functioned efficiently.  Our genes developed in an environment where one person consumed, at most, 4 pounds of honey/year.

The average American now consumes a whopping 170 pounds of sugar/year!

Our diets have become a mess. 56% of our calories come from 3 sources that were nonexistent as out genes developed.

• refined sugar (cane, beet, corn syrup)
• bleached flour (white bread, white pasta)
• vegetable oils (soy,sunflower, corn, trans fats I.E. hydrogenation)

The sources that make up a majority of your intake contain none of the proteins, vitamins, minerals, omega-3 fatty acids needed for proper body metabolism. These sources also directly fuel the growth of cancer by effecting all of our immune functions. If you drank 3 cans of soda (33 teaspoons of sugar)today, you totally disabled your immune system.  Do that on a consistent basis,, and you are setting yourself up for the ultimate immunity disaster: cancer.

What happens in the body

Sugar you eat gets converted to Glucose in the body. (by the way, the metabolism of malignant tumors is largely dependent on glucose metabolism). Refined sugars, and white flour foods make the glucose levels in your blood rise very fast.  Your body responds by releasing insulin. Insulin allows the glucose to enter the body’s cells to then produce energy.

When insulin is secreted, it is accompanied by IGF (Insulin Growth Factor). IGF stimulates cell growth, enabling cells to grow faster.  Insulin and IGF also promote inflammation.  It is cell growth, and inflammation that activate tumors.  The fact is, insulin peaks and secretions of IGF directly stimulate the growth of cancer cells and their capacity to invade neighboring tissues, or metastasize.

Researchers are now looking for drugs that will reduce insulin peaks and IGF in the bloodstream to fight cancer.

Since you don’t need white flour, pasta  products or refined sugars to survive, you can cut them out completely from your diet. This will drastically reduce the high levels of insulin and IGF in your system, allowing your body to metabolize nutrients the way your body was designed to.*

Dr. Barnet Meltzer, M.D. states, “white refined sugar, or sucrose, drains your liver, imbalances your adrenal glands, over taxes your nerves, and deletes your B vitamins. It contributes to allergies, arthritis, premenstrual syndrome, and abnormal hormonal fluctuations in both women and men. It is the root cause of functional hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). It accelerates the onset of adult diabetes (high blood sugar). Perhaps most commonly, by setting up the body’s energy level to hit a false peak and then crash back down, it causes chronic fatigue and an unstable metabolism” (Meltzer, Barnet. Food Swings: Make the Life-Changing Connection Between the Foods You Eat and Your Emotional Health and Well-Being. Marlow Books (2001) page 42.)

You can’t ignore the proof

In an American study, researchers found that women with early stage breast cancer who had the highest insulin levels were twice as likely to have their tumor metastasize, and three times as likely to die of breast cancer as women with the lowest insulin levels.

In a joint American-Canadian study, in a group of woman under the age of 50, those with the highest IGF levels were seven times more likely to get breast cancer than those with the lowest levels.

In another study, men were nine times more likely to develop prostate cancer with high IGF’s than low.

New studies indicate that this is true with cancer of the pancreas, colon and ovaries as well.

So what about high fructose corn syrup? it’s just corn, right?

Um….no.

It’s a pretty safe bet that if you see an ad on TV telling you that something is “safe”, it’s not only not safe, it’s harmful.  The manufacturers and those that use HFCS in their products got together and bought some air time to let us know that HFCS is just “made from corn” and it’s “just like sugar”. One trip to their web site, and you’ll be singing the HFCS song! (of course the web site is sponsored by the Corn Refiners Association)

high Fructose Corn Syrup has been around since the 1970′s. Although the corn industry claims that HFCS received GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status when it filed for it in 1983, the FDA did not grant GRAS status until 1996 after considerable pressure from the industry, which was becoming nervous with the publication of negative research findings described in the first anti-HFCS articles.  It’s a sweetener that is cheap to produce, and it is mixed with just about every food on the grocery shelves from relish, to hamburger buns.  It makes things “taste better” so we buy more of them.  Again, it’s all about the money.

True, HFCS is extracted from corn, but the fructose is mixed with glucose.  Alone, the body would metabolize these two elements normally, but when combined, it does not react to the insulin that the body produces and therefore becomes toxic.

The proponents of HFCS state that the body produces insulin when you eat HFCS the same way that it does when you eat sugar.  True,  however, the insulin cannot react with the HFCS and so, it does not enter the cell for natural cell metabolism.

Our bodies cannot tolerate the overload of refined sugar and starch as it is.  Now with this mass of extra sugar, our systems become overwhelmed.

Because we have been eating foods containing HFCS for the past 40 years, we have lost our ability to know what “real” food is supposed to taste like.  We have been programmed to crave the sweetness, so we buy foods that give our taste buds what they want.

But I have a sweet tooth!!

OK, ok…there are better options than refined sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup!

• pure maple syrup (sorry, Mrs Butterworths) which now has been found to be beneficial to your health in many ways comes from tree sap and is minimally processed.
• agave nectar–once only in health food stores, you can usually find this in the major grocery chains. There is some bad press recently about agave nectar. The Cliff notes version: it is a sugar, it is not processed with chemicals like refined cane sugar or beet sugar (but it is heat processed like high fructose corn syrup), diabetics can’t use it like artificial sweeteners, like anything you put in your mouth, if you have a reaction to it, don’t use it. (like peanut allergies etc) but used in moderation, it can be a good alternative to refined sweeteners for most.  I personally don’t use it a lot because maple syrup really fills all my sugar needs.
• Stevia is a plant that originated in the rainforests of Paraguay. It is up to 300 times sweeter than sugar, does not impact blood sugar and has zero calories. The leaves have been used for over 1,500 years by the Guarini Indians of Paraguay. It was discovered and introduced to Europe by M. S. Bertoni in 1899. While Stevia has since become a very popular sweetener because it is “natural,” the FDA has yet to approve it as a food source – it remains classified as a dietary supplement.  With any substance, use in moderation.  On a personal note, I had to stop using Stevia because it gave me heart palpitations.  I’m sure once the major manufacturers get their paws on it, it will be bad for you…
• honey…made from bees, this is the ultimate “natural” sweetener. But alas, this too can be processed and the health benefits can be stripped. Read this great article about honey, and buy locally and raw when possible and remember that infants should NEVER consume honey due their immature digestive system and their inability to handle certain bacteria present in honey.  If you’re learning about going vegan, you need to cross honey off your list of allowed foods as it is technically an “animal product”.
• fruit juice: there are concentrated fruit juice products that can be used in baking etc. I have never used these products myself, but it seems like a great way to sweeten without harm.
• rice syrup  produced from brown rice, once again this is a form of sugar, but the sweetness comes from the brown rice starch converting to sugar. It is thick, but not for diabetics.

In almost every site I searched for all the named sweeteners, the High Fructose Corn Syrup site (disguised as “healthy factual sweetener sites”) kept popping up.  The Corn Refiners Association must have hundreds of bloggers out there writing the lie that HFCS is great.

 

So here’s what I do:

• limit my use of blatent sugar sources: candy, store bought baked goods, desserts
• totally avoid HFCS–you will not find it in my house.  Read the labels! You will be surprised where it is lurking!
• sweeten cereal, yogurt, shakes, with fruit: raisins, dates, peaches, cherries etc.
• never ever consume artificial sweeteners: aspartame, splenda, sacharin, etc. no matter what they tell you about how “natural”  the ingredients are, they are all processed chemicals that our bodies are not made to consume.
• even the “natural” sweeteners are sugar, so I limit my use of all sweeteners.  The one I use the most: fruit (dried cherries without added sugar or sulfites sweeten lots!)

  We spend more time thinking about what to wear than what we are putting into our bodies. Keep making small changes, and in time, big changes will occur.  Thanks for reading and I welcome your thoughts!

You can see a great tasty recipe for sugar-free, gluten free no-bake brownies here 

 * All facts up to this point taken from a seminar given by Penny Daugherty RN, BSN, ONC on Suppliments and Herbs for the Cancer Patient March 2010 at St Jospeh Hospital in Atlanta (click here for background on Penny scroll to “This Issue’s Featured Member”)