There was a time when we ate for survival and beyond survival, to thrive. Richard Wrangham, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University, describes, in his book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, how the foods we ate altered our anatomy and biology to not only survive but to thrive.
Yet it seems that the foods our biology tells us to choose, soft and sweet items, no longer help us survive and thrive. Over the millennia when we evolved to choose these foods, they were not as easily available, and we had to move our bodies vigorously to get them. As hunter-gatherers, someone hunted, not always successfully, and someone gathered, an equally rigorous job. Cooking, that made food soft and reduced chewing time to free us for other activities, also required physical labor. Other than honey, sweetness was available only through fibrous packages of real food.
Today, however, 7 in 10 American adults is overweight or obese. This excess weight correlates to many other diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, arthritis, Alzheimers and some forms of cancer. We have a new syndrome called “Metabolic Disorder,” referring to the diseases associated with the physical degeneration associated with excess sugar coursing through our systems.
Indeed, these diseases, characteristic of people eating the Standard American Diet, now a diet eaten in developed countries worldwide, place a tremendous burden on public health systems. Some, including Michael Pollan, point out that this will be the first generation in history to die younger and sicker than their parents.
Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Director, Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health (WATCH) Program at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, points directly to sugar as the toxin and fiber and exercise as the antidotes.
The discovery of cooking, which changed our world in so many ways as well as our anatomy and biology, was a revolutionary discovery, critical to human development. It reduced chewing time from an average five hours per day to mere minutes. And it made the energy (calories) in food more available.
So if cooking was good, well, we did more of it, and millennia later we had processed foods which, even if they didn’t have added sugars under 30 or 40 different names to camouflage them, would shoot up blood sugar in ways the real foods, from which they came, don’t. Why? When we remove the fiber from food as part of processing it, the natural fruit and vegetable sugars go straight to our bloodstream with nothing to reduce their impact — well nothing, that is, except for fats, but that’s another story.
When the food industry understood our predisposition to choose sweet foods, they developed products to attract us. Their purpose was to sell their products and make money. To do that, they manipulated our biological predisposition, and in doing that, they changed us to prefer ever sweeter foods.
The USDAs Economic Research Service data suggest that average daily calorie intake increased by 24.5 percent, or about 530 calories, between 1970 and 2000. America’s sweet tooth increased 39 percent between 1950–59 and 2000 as use of corn sweeteners octupled, with total average consumption going from 109.6 pounds per capita to 152.4 pounds per capita.
To visualize your sugar consumption, just imagine 30 or more five-pound bags of sugar sitting on your counter. That’s what you eat in a year if you’re an average American. There’s no fiber associated with that sugar, and you don’t have to work at all to get it. No wonder obesity is an epidemic.
Your return to good health and a vibrant life require some retraining. It takes work since our eating habits continue to change our metabolism, but you can reverse that. Following are Five Tips to Kick the Sugar Habit.
As you experience the results of getting sugar out of your life, including finding new and fresh flavors in real foods, you’ll want to stay with these practices:
- A critical first step is to create a safe space for relearning how to eat. Remove all processed foods and all sweeteners, including artificial sweeteners, from your environment. Studies show that artificial sweeteners do not contribute to weight loss or management. In fact, they are more likely to cause the opposite, weight gain. Researchers don’t know why but theorize it is because these sweeteners don’t actually retrain taste buds and therefore don’t reduce cravings.
- Replace the foods (and sweeteners) you remove with real food items, fiber-rich plant products, vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts and seeds.
- Create an eating pattern that you can rely on, and don’t wait until you’re starving to eat. A fiber rich meal can provide satisfaction for a long time, but have nutritious, fiber rich, no sugar added snacks ready to eat in case you start to feel hungry.
- Don’t drink juices. These are simply denatured fruits. Devoid of their fiber, they have high sugar content even if they have no added sugar. Instead eat fruit and drink water.
- Be rigorous about these rules for 2-3 weeks. Your craving for sugar is likely to go away, and if you happen to have blood work after following these tips, you are likely to find your cholesterol dropping significantly along with your blood glucose.
For help getting on track and staying on track toward better health and your best self and to regain the energy you’ve lost, please contact me.
Teri
Latest posts by Teri (see all)
- Sleep Is a Necessary Part of Wellness - February 1, 2018
- Nutrition on the go - January 25, 2018
- Home Workouts: Lower Body - January 18, 2018
