Authors: Anne Alexander,Julia VanTine
The Sugar Smart Diet: Stop Cravings and Lose Weight While Still Enjoying the Sweets You Love (8 page)
In the past 30 years, as our sugar consumption skyrocketed, so did rates of obesity, diabetes, lipid problems, high blood pressure, and heart disease—collectively termed metabolic syndrome. Research is starting to show that that’s not a coincidence. Here are the numbers, then and now.
Overweight/obesity.
In 1980, obesity rates—which had held steady in the 20 years prior—rose significantly. Until 1980, just 15 percent of American adults had a BMI above the 85th percentile, suggesting either overweight or obesity. Now, it’s 55 percent.
Type 2 diabetes.
From 1990 through 2010, the annual number of new cases of diagnosed type 2 diabetes almost tripled.
Metabolic syndrome.
In 1990, an estimated 50 million US adults had metabolic syndrome. In 2000, that figure rose to 64 million, a 28 percent jump. A 2010 study revised that figure upward yet again—to 68 million, a further increase of 6 percent.
Heart disease.
While death from cardiovascular disease fell nearly 33 percent from 1999 to 2009, it still accounted for nearly one in three deaths. And projected increases in obesity and type 2 diabetes, among other factors, may slow that positive change in heart health to only 6 percent.
Heart disease is still the number one killer of Americans. Being overweight or having type 2 diabetes raises the risk. Given that previous research links a diet high in sugary soft drinks with obesity and type 2 diabetes, might consuming a steady stream of liquid sugar increase heart disease risk as well?
Yes. In a 2009 study published in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
, Harvard researchers followed the health and habits of 88,520 women enrolled in the famed Nurses’ Health Study for 24 years. Compared to women
who rarely drank sugary beverages, those who drank more than two a day had a 40 percent higher risk of heart attacks or death from heart disease, the study found.
Maybe you think a daily Big Gulp doesn’t matter if you’re at a healthy weight or eat a basically healthy diet. Nope. While eating well and maintaining a healthy weight are both important, neither did much to reduce the heart disease risk associated with sugary beverage consumption, the study found.
Other studies suggest that a high-sugar diet does nasty things to your blood vessels, too. For example, high insulin levels cause the smooth muscle cells around each blood vessel to grow faster than normal. This growth tightens artery walls, promoting high blood pressure and thereby raising the risk of heart attack and stroke.
Added sugars in processed foods may also increase cholesterol. A study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
analyzed 7 years of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, administered annually by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data tracks such things as diet, body mass index, cholesterol level, and blood pressure, as well as behaviors like smoking, exercise, and alcohol consumption.
After excluding people with diabetes and high cholesterol, and those who were excessively overweight, the researchers found that adults consumed an average of 21.4 teaspoons of added sugar a day. Alarmingly, as the number of added-sugar calories increased, the levels of HDL cholesterol went down, and LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels went up. These associations held true even after the researchers controlled for other risk factors for high cholesterol and heart disease. How and why added sugars increase cholesterol aren’t yet clear, but one theory is they cause your liver to secrete more “bad” LDL cholesterol and interfere with the body’s ability to get rid of it.
Pricey firming creams, filler injections, and antiaging facials will always be here. But to have supple, radiant skin in your midthirties and beyond, dermatologists have a tip for you: Lay off the sugar. A lifetime of overdoing it on sugar may accelerate age-related damage.
The culprit: the natural process glycation, in which the sugar in your bloodstream attaches to proteins to form harmful new molecules called advanced glycation end products. (Researchers called them AGEs for short. Too perfect!) The more sugar you eat, the theory goes, the more AGEs you develop. As AGEs build up, they damage the proteins nearby.
Most vulnerable to damage are the protein fibers collagen and elastin, which keep skin firm and elastic. Once they’re damaged, these fibers go from springy and resilient to dry and brittle, leading to wrinkles and sagging. These age-related changes to the skin start at about age 35 and increase rapidly after that, according to a study published in the
British Journal of Dermatology
.
But a high-sugar diet doesn’t just damage collagen. It also affects the
type
of collagen you have, another factor in skin’s resistance to wrinkling. Skin’s most abundant collagens are types I, II, and III, with type III lasting the longest. Glycation can transform desirable type III collagen into the more fragile type I, making it look and feel less supple. To add insult to injury, AGEs also deactivate your body’s natural antioxidant enzymes. That leaves your skin more vulnerable to sun damage, which is still the main cause of skin aging.
You take care of the sunscreen—we’ll help with the eating. The Sugar Smart Diet ferrets out not just obvious Straight-Up Sugars like sweets and soda, but the Secret Sugars and the Sugar Mimics that act like sugar in your body and may show up on your face.
A rat brain ravaged by insulin resistance—significantly punier than a healthy rat brain—is not a pretty sight. And worse, there’s evidence that a steady diet
of sugary, processed foods can mess with insulin in
our
brains, triggering what some experts are calling type 3 diabetes, better known as Alzheimer’s disease.
Suzanne de la Monte, MD, a neuropathologist at Brown University whose team coined the term type 3 diabetes, was among the first to uncover the link between insulin resistance and a high-fat diet in brain cells. In a paper published in
Current Alzheimer Research,
de la Monte reviewed the growing body
of evidence suggesting that Alzheimer’s is fundamentally a metabolic disease in which the brain’s ability to use glucose and produce energy is impaired. The evidence, she writes, suggests that Alzheimer’s has “virtually all of the features of diabetes [mellitus], but is largely confined to the brain.”
In one study, de la Monte and her team disrupted the way rats’ brains respond to insulin. The rats developed all the brain damage seen in Alzheimer’s disease. For example, areas of the brain associated with memory got clotted with toxic protein fragments called beta-amyloid plaques. The rats were unable to learn their way through a maze. In other experiments where insulin resistance was induced, they developed many of the features of Alzheimer’s disease.
People with type 2 diabetes are significantly more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. While the disease doesn’t necessarily
cause
Alzheimer’s, researchers believe that both diseases may share the same root: insulin resistance, which can be caused by eating too much sugary, fatty junk food. When researchers fed healthy men and women a high-saturated-fat diet loaded with refined grains and sugary foods for a month, their insulin levels rose—and the levels of beta-amyloid in their spinal fluid rose significantly, an
Archives of Neurology
study reported. A control group on a low-saturated-fat/healthier-carb diet showed reductions in both. Dr. de la Monte’s research is ongoing, but the implications are clearly pointing toward an adverse connection between sugar consumption and Alzheimer’s. Remember that the next time you’re tempted to swap a snack of almonds and a piece of fruit for a blueberry muffin as big as your fist slathered with jam. Your brain’s counting on you to make the healthier choice.
It’s easy to be hooked on sweet flavors thanks to so much fructose hiding in processed foods. But once you reset your taste buds, you’ll find that whole, natural foods deliver just the right amount of sweetness. There’s nothing like enjoying a slice of sun-warmed cantaloupe or forking up some tender beets, knowing that you’re savoring the true taste of sweet. You’ll discover all this when you begin the Sugar Smart Diet. First, though, there’s just one more aspect of sugar I want you to understand: why we’re so drawn to it.
16.2
POUNDS LOST
AGE:
56
ALL-OVER INCHES LOST:
10.75
SUGAR SMART WISDOM
“You can break that soda habit! Try drinking orange-vanilla seltzer instead. It tastes like a creamsicle.”
“THIS HAS BEEN A MIRACLE DIET FOR ME,”
says Nora, who has been battling her weight for 45 years and was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes 7 years ago. “I’ve never lost weight this quickly with so little pain or effort.”
Previously, Nora had focused mainly on increasing exercise. “I walk every day and do a race on most weekends,” she says. “I realized that I was doing 5-Ks but eating for marathons—and I wasn’t paying attention to the quality of the calories I was eating,” she says. “On this plan, it became clear to me that when I avoided sugar and refined carbohydrates and ate good carbs, lean protein, and healthy fats instead, I was able to have smaller portions without feeling hungry.”
Nora discovered many new favorite dishes while on the Sugar Smart Diet meal plans. “I love, love, love the Fiesta Egg Salad and when I had my first Banana-Coconut Roll, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!” she says. However, she wasn’t completely comfortable in the kitchen at first. “All the planning, shopping, cooking, and cleaning up were cutting into my exercise time,” she says. As she became more familiar with the dishes and created a system for meal prep, it got easier. Now on Sundays, Nora plans her meals for the week, shops, and cooks ahead, broiling chicken breasts, cooking bulgur, and hard-cooking eggs.
On top of losing more than 16 pounds and almost 11 inches (2½ of them from her waist) during the 32-day plan, Nora lowered her borderline high blood pressure a total of 26 points and cut her triglycerides 66 points. She also improved her fasting glucose level by 13 points, getting her down to a healthy level.
Nora’s decided that Phase 2 of the Sugar Smart Diet is what she wants to follow for life. “I feel like I’ve literally been freed from an addiction,” says Nora, an alcoholic who’s been sober for 25 years. “Just like I can’t have one beer, I learned on this plan that I can’t have one piece of cake. I don’t have to think about if I want it or should I have it. It’s just no, that’s not good for me. For the first time, I’m hopeful that I will get down to a healthy weight.”
UNDERSTANDING THE ATTRACTION
C
ravings are like itches—often they don’t stop until you scratch. Yet you probably know someone who, when they crave a brownie or Frappuccino, can easily sidestep it or can enjoy the treat and go on with their lives. Why do so many others—maybe even you—seem locked in sugar’s subtle but powerful grip? It happens when the hardwiring of the brain intersects with your life’s experiences with sugar.
In the late ’60s, quite by accident, a graduate student in upstate New York discovered that the lab rats in his care went nuts for Froot Loops. So powerful was their lust for the sugary cereal, it drove them into the center of their roomy, brightly lit cages.
Any researcher who works with rats knows that rats prefer cramped, dark surroundings.
The Froot Loop epiphany was one budding psychologist’s bread crumb on a trail that will someday lead to a full understanding of what happens in the brain to trigger the compulsion to use substances that snare the body and the brain. Those substances include alcohol, nicotine, street drugs—and food.
In certain areas of the brain, the pursuit of pleasure merges with the drive to survive. This is the hedonic pathway, the brain’s reward system. Give it natural rewards, like food and sex, and it activates, reacting like a slot machine releasing its jackpot. It’s also activated by artificial rewards such as addictive drugs. To paraphrase the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, the hedonic pathway knows just three words: more, now, again.
The hedonic pathway is composed of two brain areas: the VTA and the NA (the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens, respectively). This pathway to pleasure is attuned to two brain chemicals, opiates and dopamine. It’s important to understand that foods or activities we associate with bliss—say, ice cream or sex—aren’t inherently blissful. The real cause of the delight is those pleasure chemicals flooding our brains. The more important of these chemicals is dopamine.
Working in tandem, the VTA and the NA—which is dubbed the brain’s reward center—release dopamine, resulting in what researchers call a “feeling of reward” and we call pleasure. That fluttery anticipation you feel just before you bite into a brownie? Thank your dopamine supply for hot-wiring your hedonic pathway.
