Authors: Anne Alexander,Julia VanTine
The Sugar Smart Diet: Stop Cravings and Lose Weight While Still Enjoying the Sweets You Love (4 page)
All green plants are sugar factories. Using the sun’s energy and the green pigment in plants called chlorophyll (in a process called photosynthesis), plants convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and glucose, a type of sugar and one of the building blocks of carbohydrates. Glucose is the fuel your body runs on, too. (Sorry, Dunkin’ Donuts.)
NASA has even discovered sugar in space. Sugar is
life
.
We need to see sugar for what it is and what it’s not. Ditto for carbohydrates, sugar’s “packaging.” The “good carbs, bad carbs” trope obscures a simple truth: Not all simple carbs (sugars) are bad, and not all complex carbs (starches) are good. Yet somehow, the idea that carbohydrates are the Snidely Whiplash of nutrition, tying us to the train tracks of obesity and disease, persists.
That characterization is too easy. And there’s nothing simple about sugar or its role in our psychology, our diets, and our health.
When you use the word
sugar
, context is key. There’s the sugar your body, and most life-forms, use for energy. There’s the naturally occurring sugar in the plants we eat. And there are the refined sugars that food companies add to
their products, often in entirely insane amounts. You need to know about all of these sugars because that’s the only way you’ll know how to deal with any of them.
Any discussion about dietary sugar (whether it’s from plants or Big Gulps) begins with carbohydrates, which are known in chemistry labs as saccharides. Sugars are the building blocks of all carbs, whether you’re talking ice cream or quinoa. To get a handle on the chemical structure of sugar, let’s employ a visual: those colorful Snap-Lock Beads babies play with.
In your mind, hold one green bead. That’s glucose, found naturally in honey, maple syrup, and other naturally occurring foods. Glucose is the primary form of energy for the muscles and the brain.
Pick up a pink bead. That’s fructose, the sugar found naturally in fruit.
There’s one more sugar, galactose, found only in milk. Make that one a blue bead.
Glucose, fructose, and galactose are monosaccharides, consisting of one molecule of sugar. Eventually, any type of sugar or starch that passes your lips, whether you’re savoring chocolate truffles or wild ones, ends up as a monosaccharide in your body. As you’ll learn, glucose and fructose are the ones that have the greatest impact on your weight and health.
Now, pop two of those beads together. Bingo—you’ve made a disaccharide, a sugar comprised of two molecules of sugar.
Snap the green and pink beads together. One molecule of glucose plus one molecule of fructose adds up to sucrose—plain old white table sugar, derived from sugar beets or sugarcane.
Join the green and blue beads (glucose plus galactose), and you’ve got lactose, the sugar in milk.
Connect two green beads together, and you get maltose, the sugar that results from the fermentation of the starch in grains (such as in making bread or brewing beer).
That’s where the bead game ends. You don’t have the time, or beads, to
model the sugars in complex carbs, which are long chains of hundreds or even thousands of glucose molecules. These polysaccharides put the
complex
in complex carbohydrates. There are two basic types of polysaccharides in plant foods: starch and fiber. Starch is found in corn, legumes such as peas and beans, grains, and tubers like potatoes. Fiber, found in varying amounts in plant foods, passes through our stomach and intestines largely undigested. But don’t think it’s useless—fiber helps you feel full, slows the breakdown of sugars and starches, and helps feed the trillions of friendly bacteria that promote a healthy gut, which itself plays a key role in your mood, energy level, and perhaps even your weight.
And there you have it. In general, simple carbohydrates = simple sugars, whether derived from fruit salad, carrots, Skittles, or frozen entrées. Complex carbohydrates from starchy veggies and whole grains = complex chains of glucose molecules “packaged” in fiber, nutrients, and health-promoting plant chemicals.
T
his little trip back to chemistry class will come in handy as you read through the next chapters. Mostly, it helps you understand what your choices are—and you do have them. The Sugar Smart Diet gives you choices. Choices are power.
You are about to make a change that will have a real impact on how you feel and look and that will add years to your life (and ensure those years are infused with strength and vitality). You can outsmart the food industry’s tricks that are fattening America while you reclaim the role of sugar in your life—as a source of delightful, rewarding pleasure—in ways that make you healthier, more energized, and fueled to be your best self. Let me show you what I mean.
6.6
POUNDS LOST
AGE:
51
ALL-OVER INCHES LOST:
9
SUGAR SMART WISDOM
“Skip the commercial salad dressings that are loaded with sugar and make your own. My favorite is a little bit of olive oil and Dr. Bragg’s apple cider vinegar.”
LISA ALWAYS KNEW SHE HAD A SWEET TOOTH.
In fact, she made it a point to add something sweet to every meal. “I’d have juice or pastries with breakfast, chocolate after lunch, and when I was making dinner, I was already thinking about dessert,” she says. But until she started the Sugar Smart Diet, she didn’t realize just how much sugar she was getting in a day—more than three times the recommended level—or where exactly it was coming from. “I started reading food labels. I couldn’t believe the foods I thought were healthy—like whole grain cereals, instant oatmeal, and fruit-flavored yogurt—contained so much sugar!” she says. “I also didn’t know that pretzels and other white-flour foods acted like sugar in your body. My whole diet was packed with terrible carbs!”
Once she got all the “crap” out of her body and reset her taste buds, she began to appreciate the natural flavors of food in a whole new way. “Veggies are so delicious. I just use a little drizzle of olive oil and vinegar. It’s like eating them for the first time.” The one sugary treat that Lisa allows herself is hazelnut creamer in her coffee. “I could give up desserts, chocolate, soda. The creamer was what I chose to bring back, but now I’m satisfied with just one tablespoon compared to three. It’s my little bit of heaven for the day.”
Vegetables and creamer aren’t the only things Lisa is reconsidering. “I tended to wear loose-fitting clothes because of my belly and muffin top.” But after losing almost 4 inches from her waistline and firming up her arms and legs, she’s ready for a new, show-off-her-figure wardrobe. “We spent the day at the beach recently. Before, I’d stay covered up. Now, I didn’t even hesitate to slip into my bathing suit. I’m looking forward to going shopping for the first time in years. I want more form-fitting, sexy outfits. This plan gave me the body and the confidence to pull them off!”
THE THREE FACES OF SUGAR
R
emember that brilliant surprise ending to the 1999 film
The Sixth Sense
, starring Bruce Willis? Of
course
Willis was a ghost. How could we have missed it? The clues were right there in front of our noses.
We’re at a similar forehead-slapping moment in science: Sugar is everywhere we look, haunting the health of this country, trying to turn us into sugar-crazed zombies. Sugar is bliss, but we are drowning in sugar overload—and food manufacturers aren’t helping. What are the roots of our potentially fatal attraction? There are three main factors that affect our intake:
- Our bodies’ normal, natural attraction to sugar, which is a part of our human circuitry, as well as the emotional connection to sugar that some people experience
- The sugars added to processed foods, both obvious and hidden
- The
foods that don’t taste sweet but act like sugar in the body, fueling cravings for sugar and other refined carbs
Let’s examine these factors one by one.
As our ancestors roamed the open grasslands of east Africa, where humans most likely originated, they could never have imagined deep-fried Oreos. Yet even five million years ago, they preferred plants that tasted sweet.
Some things never change. Our preference for sweet is part of our human hardware, an evolutionary thing. For most of us, sweet is the most alluring of the four common tastes, which also include sour, salty, and bitter. It’s the one that gooses our 10,000 taste buds, minuscule collections of cells that connect to nerves running straight to the brain.
The sweet tooth played a key role in human evolution. It’s thought that our ancestors associated a sweet taste with energy-dense plant foods like the fruit plucked from trees. With their entire existence centered on getting enough to eat—an arduous task, with unpredictable results—every calorie counted, and sweetness meant “food” and “safe.” (They associated a strong bitter taste with potentially poisonous plants, but our taste buds have evolved to accept foods with a mild bitterness, from coffee and beer to kale and Brussels sprouts.)
For a while, calorie-dense fruit and honey were virtually all we knew of sweet. In the Paleolithic era, a period of half a million years that ended around 10,000 years ago, fruits and veggies made up an estimated 65 percent of humans’ diet. Fred Flintstone’s brontosaurus burgers would have been a treat, and a fig or a dollop of honey the caveman’s version of Hershey’s Kisses.
Things started to change with the birth of agriculture. Humans began to rely on cereal grains, and fruit and veggie consumption dropped to 20 percent or less. And sugar—derived from sugarcane and cultivated in tiny amounts at first—began its delicious, relentless seduction. Our bodies were designed to
crave sugar, store it easily, and use it fast. But we live in high-tech times, and while we’re still hardwired to seek sugar, we store more than we use. And we’re not climbing trees to pluck fruit, either. We’re hitting drive-thrus and calling for free delivery. Never fear. The Sugar Smart Diet is full of strategies to work with your body’s natural attraction to sugar and its healthy nutritional needs. As you’ll discover, something as simple as eating breakfast—and packing it with protein—helps rein in your appetite during the day and reduces snacking on high-sugar foods at night.
As we’ve established, gorging on high-calorie foods was a wise strategy for Stone Age humans who didn’t know when they’d eat again. But today, foods packed with Straight-Up and Secret Sugars are available 24/7—and these sugars may be stoking our desire for sugary, high-fat, high-calorie fare.
In a study of how the brain responds to food cues and how that increases hunger and desire for certain foods, researchers at the University of Southern California found that young women who looked at pictures of cupcakes and other tempting edibles experienced cravings, especially if they drank a sugary beverage at the same time.
In this study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers measured the brain responses of 13 young women as they looked at pictures of both high-calorie and low-calorie foods. The women’s brains were scanned twice as they viewed images of cookies, cakes, burgers, and fruits and vegetables. After seeing all the images, they were asked to rate their hunger as well as their desire for sweet or savory foods.
Halfway through the scans, the women drank 50 grams of glucose, which is similar to drinking a can of sugary soda. In a separate instance, they drank 50 grams of fructose.
The researchers had hypothesized that the reward areas in the women’s brains would be activated as they looked at the pictures of the high-calorie foods—and they were right. “What we didn’t expect was that consuming the glucose and fructose would increase their hunger and desire for savory foods,” said the study’s principal investigator, Kathleen Page, MD. And fructose resulted in more intense cravings and hunger among the women than glucose. “This stimulation of the brain’s reward areas may contribute to overeating and obesity, and has important public health implications,” she said.
As you’ll learn, research is pointing to fructose, in particular, as a real dietary menace and appetite-gooser. In a study of 20 healthy people published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, Yale researchers looked for appetite-related changes in bloodflow in the hypothalamic region of their brains after they ingested either glucose or fructose. The study’s findings suggested that glucose may reduce blood flow in parts of the brain that govern appetite, which may help inhibit the desire to eat. That wasn’t so for fructose, according to the findings.
We love sweets. Our taste buds, our eyes, our emotions crave the delightful reward of sugar. We love the taste, the way it makes us feel, and the emotional connection that sweets provide: comforting warm fuzzies at the end of a long day. From time to time, we all succumb to sugar’s sweet but empty promise: relief. Horrendous day at the office? Ice cream. Crushing worries about your aging mom or slacker teen? Ice cream. Feeling fat and friendless? You get the idea.
