Season of Sugar

It is that time of year again: The Season of Sugar.

As the weather turns colder, and the sun dips lower in the sky (except for you south of the equator), the days get darker, and we all get incredible sugar cravings. Our collective lust for sugar is only fueled by the multiple invitations to gather with friends and family and the tendency of office workers around the world to bring plates of tasty treats to share with everyone.

Too many holiday parties, too many advertisers highlighting tasty foods, too little time outside, too many temptations; it is no wonder we all wake these days feeling like we have a hangover and notice that our clothes don’t fit as well as they did the day before.

New Years

New Years is coming quicker than you might think and it is a good time to start thinking about New Year’s Resolution. The best resolution you can choose is a resolution of health and the best thing you can do for your health is to kick sugar and foods that act like sugar out of your life.

Why don’t you join us this January for 30 Sugar Free Days 2010 and give sugar the kick it deserves?

Sugar Harm

The question I always get is: Why kick sugar out of your diet?

The reason is actually pretty simple: Concentrated, pure, processed sugar is not a natural thing to put in your body. Our bodies are simply not meant to handle such a pure and addicting substance.

Take a look at what eating sugar does to you and your health:

• Sugar adds Weight: Added sugar means added weight. This happens because your body has to do something with the extra sugar that enters your blood stream. Maybe you know this, but your body is great at storing sugar as fat. This ability to store fat is unique to sugar and doesn’t happen with non-purified foods. Added weight means you are more likely to live a shorter life, get diabetes, heart disease, stroke and have certain cancers.
• Diabetes: Despite what most medical associations and your doctor might say, there is a connection between sugar and diabetes. Consistently high blood sugar develops into insulin insensitivity and eventually diabetes.
• Toxic: Sugar is toxic to blood vessels in a similar way that cigarette smoke is toxic to lungs. Sugar destroys blood vessels. The results of sugar damage are easy to see in diabetics (who have very high blood sugar) that have a much higher risk for heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, eye disease and other conditions.

Take the 30 Day Challenge

Kicking sugar means that you will not only lose weight (if you want to), but that you are taking the first big step toward living a longer and healthier life. When you kick sugar out of your life, you decrease the chance of getting diabetes, heart disease and even cancer.

Breaking the sugar habit is not easy; at every step you are going to run into your addiction. The effort to stop sugar, however, is well worth the results: you will live a longer, healthier life with sugar out of your diet.

Joining us for the 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge, 2010 is a great step towards your better health. The program is free and provides you with the support you need to succeed. So many weight loss programs are designed to help you shed pounds, but often do nothing to address your health.

Why not have both good health and weight loss? Join us for the adventure!

The Real Deal

In case you haven’t seen this, this is that ad from the High Fructose Corn Syrup lobbying group:

Even Funnier

While you might have found that video funny, here are some even more funny.

This first one is by the guys who did King Corn and they probably could have done it as a advertisement for my book, Sugarettes. If you haven’t checked out their documentary, do! It is great!

The next three are great as well. Some of them need some help with editing/production, but the point is well taken.

You know that sugar is bad for you and your kids, so you take another look at the label. But even that is a nightmare: You know that glucose is a sugar but what about maltodextrin, or dextrose?

All this is enough to make you go crazy! Even if you are successful at steaming the tide of sugar into your house, your kids are often out of your sight and exposed to sugar in their daycare, their schools, or, if they are older… everywhere they can travel.

Sugar Consumption Junction

We consume a lot of sugar. Most adults and children are eating 1/4 to 1/2 of a pound of sugar every day.

Kids are no better:

A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics, found that

• 10 to 15 percent of our children’s total calories are coming from fruit juice or soda (and juice, from a sugar point of view, is no better than soda).
• Children and teens aged six to eighteen, averaged 30 ounces of juice or soda every day (or 20 teaspoons of sugar).
• Younger children were drinking an average of 15.5 ounces of sugary drinks (or 10 teaspoons of sugar a day).

What is amazing about this study is that it only focused on sugars in drinks and not the cereal, cookies, jam, candies, crackers, ice cream and other foods our children are eating. Clearly, our children are eating a lot of sugar.

The Problem with Sugar

If you have ever wondered if sugar is harmful or not, let me put your mind at unrest: sugar is harmful. While there is not a single established medical association that has yet to speak up, there is mounting evidence that sugar is harming our health and the health of our children.

Sugar has two distinct characteristics that make it harmful.

First, sugar is addictive. Scientists have discovered is that sugar is every bit as addictive as cigarettes, alcohol, and even hard drugs. Rats that have become addicted to sugar act the same and have the same brain chemistry as rats addicted to those other “hard” drugs. So when you try to take sugar away from your children and they go crazy you know that you are experiencing addictive behavior. This is why we as adults also have a hard time staying away from the white stuff. Sugar has a powerful grip on us and seeing sugar as addiction explains a lot of the behavior we see around sugar, including binging, cravings and even yo-yo dieting. If you feel constantly pulled by sugar’s sweet song, you are not alone.

Second, sugar damages the body and it does so through three mechanisms.

• Weight: The standard medical opinion of sugar is that it contains calories, so it may add to our growing obesity epidemic, but only because of the calories it contains. This is true, but sugar does so much more to add to our weight. When our blood sugar is raised to the high levels that occur when we eat sugar (and especially when we drink sugar), our bodies store that extra sugar-energy as fat. This is a unique aspect of sugar that doesn’t occur, say, when you eat a steak.
• Insulin Insensitivity: Consistently high blood sugar leads to insulin insensitivity. When the cells of our body become insensitive to insulin it creates a downward spiral to poor sugar control, including metabolic syndrome and eventually diabetes.
• Toxic: Sugar is toxic in much the same way that cigarette smoke is toxic to the lungs of a smoker; only sugar harms our blood vessels. As sugar enters our blood stream, it damages the very blood vessels that carry sugar throughout the body. We see this damage dramatically in people with very high blood sugar (diabetes) whose eyes, kidneys, hearts, and nerves are all damaged by sugar. The same sugar damage occurs in people who are not diabetic, only at a slower rate.

Sugar is at least partly responsible for the ever growing epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease and it even affects the brains and moods of our children.

How to Survive Sugar Land

For most of us, completely eliminating sugar from our children’s diet is an impossible task. Not only do we have to face our children’s and our own addiction, but our children are out of our sight for much of the day – especially as they grow older.

In the study mentioned above in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that most of the sugar consumption (55-70 percent) occurred in the home, so parents do have a lot of control. Here are some ideas to help you control the amount of sugar your children are consuming:

• Get rid of soda: Removing all soda from the house can dramatically cut down on the amount of sugar that children are eating. Fruit juice should also go, but many parents feel they need some sweet drink in the house and while fruit juice still alters blood sugar, it does contain some nutrients – use with moderation.
• Look for hidden sugars: While you won’t know if everything on a label is sugar, look for the OSE at the end of the ingredient. Examples of sugars include glucose, maltose, fructose, dextrose; this won’t help you find all the sugars, but it will take care of most of them.
• Eat crunchy: Encourage your children to eat something fresh and crunchy with every meal. When we try this in our home, our kids always say potato chips are crunchy and we have to say, no: fresh and crunchy. Good crunchy foods are carrots, celery, apples, pears, peaches… and really most fruit.
• Eat Fruit: For the most part, fruits, eaten in whole-form, are much better and don’t cause a rise in blood sugar the way that juices made from the same fruits do. Try mixed berries with a little whipped cream as an afternoon snack (whipped cream makes anything fun).
• Stay away from artificial sugars: While the subject of artificial sweeteners is an article (or a book) in itself, let me say that these chemical sweeteners are harmful enough to recommend eating sugar over them. Artificial sweeteners are chemicals that shouldn’t be in our bodies and we are just beginning to see the damage that they cause.
• Sugar substitutes: The best natural sugars are Stevia and xylitol. Stevia is an herb that is super-sweet but has no calories, and it actually helps with blood sugar control. It takes some effort to learn how to cook with it, but it usually satisfies that sweet tooth. Xylitol is a sugar that has some benefits including not increasing blood sugar dramatically and it has also been shown to be an anti-cavity sugar.

What to do if you can’t stay away from sugars:

• Know what keeps blood sugar low: If you cannot get sugar out of your life, you need to understand how to keep you and your children’s blood sugar low. The nutrients that keep blood sugar low are: protein, fats and fiber. So the best way to eat a sugar is to eat it in a meal where protein, fats and fiber are present. This means giving children their desert right after dinner, or having them include other foods (that contain a protein, fat or fiber) with their snack. So don’t pass out the cookies without, say, a hot dog. Don’t give a juice box without, say, peanut butter. Peanut butter (especially the non-added sugar kind) makes everything taste good: put it on apples, carrots, celery… whatever they will eat.

Sugar Challenge

You are in for a challenge when you try to keep sugar away from kids; doing the right thing is hard. Every step you make to remove sugar is a step in the right direction. Sugar is a powerful foe, but you can lessen the damage with a few simple changes in what you are offering your children. If you are really brave, you can check out the 30 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge.

Good luck and good eating!

While medical doctors scoff at the idea that Candida can cause illness, many people swear by anti-Candida diets and claim that they feel much better when they eliminate sugar and other foods that might contribute to the growing of these yeasts.

There is a big gulf between what most natural medicine practitioners and medical doctors think about Candida. To confuse you even further, I’m going to suggest to you a completely different way of looking at Candida that dispels some of the myths around this one-celled creature, but also helps you to understand why the anti-Candida diets do work and how important that might be to your health.

Not Just Candida

The problem with Candida is that it doesn’t travel alone To understand this, you have to understand a concept called dysbiosis.

Perhaps it is just human nature to simplify things, but the story of Candida is much more complex than one simple yeast causing your pain and discomfort. Dysbiosis is described as an imbalance of the bacterial ecosystem in your gut. The ecosystem in your gut  (also called gut flora) is a big deal and when you are eating sugar and foods that act like sugar, you are changing the ecosystem in your gut (and not in a good way).

There are both good and bad bacteria throughout your digestive system. The health of your digestive system relies heavily on having a balance between the good and bad bacteria that inhabit your gut. Unfortunately, many of the things we do every day destroy that balance: Poor food choices, stress, and exposure to chemicals in our environment, all tilt the balance in the favor of bad bacteria. When bad bacteria thrive, we don’t.

Bad bacteria are bad because when they grow, they produce all sorts of toxins that are harmful to our bodies. Candida itself produces toxins that some people seem to be extremely sensitive to. Imbalances in our digestive flora are tied to all sorts of diseases, from heart disease, arthritis, autoimmune diseases and more.

The first thing to remember is this: Candida is not alone, there are other critters such as bacteria that can harm you just as much as Candida does. It is not just Candida, but a general shift from health gut bugs to unhealthy gut bugs.

Can Candida Make me Crave Sugar?

This is a bit tougher to answer than you might think: The answer to this question is yes and no.

Most people think that Candida causes them to crave sugar as if the small one-celled organism can collectively take over your mind and cause you to crave more sugar. As far as we know, Candida doesn’t have that kind of mind control powers.

But what does happen when you eat a large amount of sugar and foods that act like sugar is that you grow gut flora that also like sugar.

Here is what happens: Imagine you have a garden full of food that rabbits love. When you have a garden like that, you are more likely to have rabbits eating the food in your garden, the same is true of your gut: If you are constantly eating foods high in sugar, then you grow a bacterial colonies that also thrive on sugar.

Now, if you have a gut full of sugar-loving organisms, what happens when you stop eating so much sugar? The bacteria, yeast, and other critters in your gut munch most of the sugars that you are eating (even if you are eating very few). The end result? You (your body) is not getting many of these sugars (because the bugs get to them first). This is one of the reasons why you crave sugars so much when you go on a low-sugar diet: the bugs are eating any sugars that pass their way (after all, they are hungry too).

Stopping Sugar

An anti-Candida diet helps you to feel better because it restores the balance of good bacteria and bad bacteria in your gut. It also is another good reason to kick sugar.

Understanding dysbiosis also helps you to understand why your cravings for sugar to increase when you kick sugar foods: There are so many bacteria and other critters clambering for food that you don’t get as much.

The best way to deal with dysbiosis is to take herbs that make it hard for them to thrive. My favorites are the berberine-containing herbs (such as Oregon Grape, Barberry and Goldenseal). Look for supplements that contain these when you are looking for an anti-Candida diet.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you understand what is really going on when you go on an anti-Candida diet, the results are the same: You feel better. More importantly, you are increasing your health.

FDA approves Stevia

You have probably heard that Stevia has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and were wondering if it was safe.

Let me clear up the first part: the FDA approved extracts of Stevia and not Stevia itself:

The FDA approved:

Cargill Inc’s: Truvia zero-calories sweetener

Whole Earth Sweetener Co: PrueVia

Truvia contains:

• Erythritol: is a very low calorie natural sweetener (similar to xylitol)
• Rebiana: is a trade name for rebaudioside A (Reb-A) a steviol glycoside that is thought to be responsible for the sweet taste of Stevia

PrueVia contains:

• Stevia extract (97% Pure Reb A)

How Safe is it?

While there were a few studies that showed that rebaudioside and other glycosides in Stevia had the potential to cause cancers, these studies have mostly be debunked. Most toxicology tests show that it causes no harm in laboratory testing.

Stevia itself has been shown to actually help improve insulin sensitivity, thereby having the potential to prevent conditions such as diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that an extract of an herb is not the herb itself. While it might be safe to take an herb, it may not be safe to take a concentrated form of only one part of the herb (such as using rebaudioside A). The truth is that we won’t know until a lot of people start taking it, and thanks to Coke and Pepsi who will be putting Truvia and PrueVia into products soon, we will get a chance to see just how safe taking large amounts of these extracts is.

My thought is that since these sweeteners are naturally based and Stevia has been used for hundreds of years, it is probably safe to use these new sweeteners as long as you are not overdoing it.

Dieters, Sugar Addicts, Diabetics & Hypoglycemics To Be Helped By Great Worldwide Sugar-Out Challenge on Jan. 16

Sugar Experts Connie Bennett, and Dr. Scott Olson Invite People Around the Globe to Face Up to the Sour Sugar Facts

PRESS RELEASE:

NEW YORK AND DENVER-On Friday, Jan. 16, a group of concerned health and wellness experts are holding the first annual Great Worldwide Sugar-Out Challenge to draw attention to the many health hazards from over-consuming sugar and refined carbohydrates, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer and heart disease.

This is the first time that a worldwide event has been held to draw attention to the massive amounts of sugar that the typical person consumes (around 150 pounds a year or one cup a day for the average person).

Dr. Nancy Appleton, author of Lick the Sugar Habit; Dr. Ann Louise Gittleman, author of Get the Sugar Out; Dr. Larry McCleary, author of The Brain Trust Program; integrative medicine practitioner Steven J. Bock, M.D.; and Sugar-Out coordinators Dr. Scott Olson, author of Sugarettes, and Connie Bennett, author of SUGAR SHOCK!, are among the prominent health authors, who invite people worldwide to learn more about sugar’s dangers, cut back on it or remove it entirely from their diets for one day.

The Great Worldwide Sugar-Out Challenge will take place on the Internet:

• Through a radio show/podcast on Jan. 16 from 12 noon to 1 p.m. Eastern on Connie Bennett’s Gab With the Gurus Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio featuring the above-named experts, plus other health-minded guests. You can listen live or later at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/GabWithTheGurus/2009/01/16/Sugar-Addicts-Carb-Lovers-Unite-Take-the-Great-Worldwide-Sugar-Out-Challenge)

• Through a 24-hour-long hour TwitAsYouQuit campaign (from Jan. 16 at 12 p.m. to Jan. 17 at 11:59 p.m. on Twitter), where dieters, sugar addicts, diabetics and hypoglycemic will rely on each other, as well as from Sugar-Out coordinators Bennett and Olson for supportive, motivating, helpful tweets throughout the day.

Sugar Harm

“Most people don’t realize that they’re eating or drinking huge doses of sugar over the course of a day whenever they have packaged or processed foods,” says Sugar Liberator and co-Sugar-Out Challenge coordinator Connie Bennett, C.H.H.C., author of SUGAR SHOCK!, a certified health counselor, life coach and journalist, who used to “need” frequent sugar “fixes” to meet article deadlines.

Of course, you’re getting sugar and other sweeteners from candy bars, soda and cookies, but you’re also getting a lot from less obvious sources like yogurt, whole grain cereal, peanut butter, salad dressings and mayonnaise.

Co-Sugar-Out Challenge planner Scott Olson, N.D., a Colorado-based naturopath, who used to be overly attached to much-like-sugar carbohydrates like breads, crackers and chips, notes that “People assume that diseases are a normal part of aging, but the reality is that many illnesses are caused by the sugary foods and drinks and refined carbohydrates that we put into our mouths.”

“Our mission is to get people and medical authorities to admit to the reality that sugar is harmful,” adds Dr. Olson, author of the book Sugarettes.

The goal of the challenge is threefold:

• To wake up to the truth about the huge amounts of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, other sweeteners and simple carbs that they consume-often without knowing it
• To learn about the many dangers of sugar overloading, which could lead to more than 100 health problems, including obesity, heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, polycystic ovary syndrome, infertility, sexual dysfunction, Alzheimer’s disease, failing memory, mood swings, depression, anxiety, severe PMS, heart palpitations, acne and premature aging.
• To motivate challenge takers to either kick sugar and other sweeteners entirely on Jan. 16 or to begin phasing out that day so that they can lose weight, feel and look more youthful, boost their energy, diminish depression, concentrate better, rev up their sex drive and improve their general health overall.

People of all ages and sexes – even if they don’t think they have a sugar problem — are invited to find a buddy and take the Great Worldwide Sugar-Out Challenge.

During the Great Worldwide Sugar-Out Challenge on the Gab With the Gurus Radio Show, you may hear differing points of view from the sugar experts about how, why or how long you should quit sugar, but you’ll get ample information to allow you to make a decision that works for you. For instance, you’ll get opposing views as to whether you should kick cold turkey or gradually. All experts do, however, agree that that too much sugar — which is typically consumed by the average American or typical person in other “civilized” countries around the world — can wreak dangers galore, from heart disease to type 2 diabetes.

To join the Great Worldwide Sugar-Out Challenge, just visit www.GabWithTheGurusBlog.com and join the conversation.

To follow inspirational kick-sugar tweets, go to www.Twitter.com/TwitAsYouQuit

I got this idea from Angie Jones, who has a great web site: www.fitbusinesswoman.com , she was wondering just how much sugar was not being consumed as a result of the 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge.

Here are the Numbers:

Most people eat around 1/4 to 1/2 a pound of sugar every day. If you find that number to be high, check out this YouTube video I did to show how easy it is to eat that much sugar. And remember, this is just added sugar and doesn’t include the foods that act like sugar in your body.

So, to calculate how much sugar we are keeping off the streets, we will use the lower end of the calculation: 1/4 pound times 400 people = 100 pounds of sugar every day, or 3,100 pounds for the month of January. Three thousand pounds is the weight of a car, or a small elephant. That is a lot of sugar!

I have a dream of keeping a running tally of how much sugar we have all kept off the streets on my blog, sort of like the old McDonald’s sign that would proclaim how many hamburgers they sold.

The Adventure Continues

I have had so many requests for starting the 30 Sugar Free Days program later in the month or later in the year that I have created a personalized coaching system that you can sign up to anytime. Once signed up, you will receive a series of e-mails that will guide you through the whole 30 Sugar Free Days and will start whenever you want it to start.

Let’s take a look at both natural and artificial sweeteners and see what they do for our health for a complete guide to sugars.

What is a sugar?

The first thing you need to know is what makes a food a sugar. While my book, Sugarettes, has a much more complete description, I will briefly describe what sugars are here.

Sugars are carbohydrates and are the simplest form of carbohydrates; you can think of the sugars as building blocks on which all other carbohydrates are built. Sugars are generally either monosaccharides (mono meaning “one” and saccharide meaning “sugar”) or disaccharides (di meaning “two”) and consist of either one or two molecules stuck together. You have probably heard of many of these sugars: fructose, glucose, maltose, sucrose… From the point of view of your body, these sugars all do the same thing: raise your blood sugar. Your body has a preference for glucose and will convert all the other sugars into glucose so that the cells of the body can use the energy stored in the glucose molecule.

Guide to Sugars

I’m going to break the sugars into two different categories: processed and natural. In truth, all sugars are processed because they don’t appear in nature in such a concentrated form (except for honey – which is processed by bees). You will, however, see many manufactures use the so-called natural sugars as a selling point for their products, so I thought it would be helpful to separate them for you.

PROCESSED SUGARS

• Glucose: when we talk about blood sugar, this is what we are measuring. While it would be nice to be able to measure all sugars in the blood stream, this is all we can currently measure. Glucose is easily taken up by the cells of the body and used as a fuel source for all energy production.
• Fructose: Fructose is the twin brother to glucose and is the so-called “fruit sugar” because it is found in many fruits. The chemical structure of fructose is identical to glucose, it just has a different shape. That small difference is actually a big deal. Fructose tastes much sweeter that glucose and is used by the body differently.
• Sucrose: Sucrose is white table sugar and is a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule stuck together to form a disaccharide.
• Maltose: is two glucose molecules stuck together. It usually forms in the gut when starches are digested and is an important step in the creation of alcohol. Manufactures do use maltose in foods, but it is about 1/3 as sweet as sucrose.
• Lactose: Lactose is the sugar found in milk and milk products.
• High fructose corn syrup: High fructose corn syrup is the sweetener of choice for many food manufactures. It is cheap and tastes sweeter than sucrose. There are many scientists who are starting to question the health hazards of high fructose corn syrup.
• Maltodextrin: Maltodextrin is a polysaccharide (larger than a disaccharide) that is easily broken down into glucose on digestion. It is generally used as a sort of “glue” when food manufactures are looking to hold a product together.
• Dextrose: This is the same as glucose.
• Dextrin: Dextrins are larger chains of glucose molecules stuck together, an example is maltodextrin.
• Brown Sugar: Brown sugar is either slightly unrefined white sugar or white sugar that has molasses added back into it.

NATURAL SUGARS

• Turbinado sugar:  Turbinado sugar is made by pressing sugar cane and then evaporating the water from the juice.
• Raw Sugar: There are many forms of raw sugar (including Turbinado) and they are all mostly the same: made from sugar cane and then evaporated.
• Honey:  Honey is the original processed sugar it is about 1/2 fructose and 1/2 glucose.
• Agave: Agave come from same plant that gives us tequila. It is said to not raise blood sugar, but what they mean is it does not raise blood glucose because agave is mostly fructose.
• Maple Syrup: Made from tree sap and is not a significant source of nutrients besides iron and zinc.
• Molasses: Molasses is byproduct of sugar manufacturing. It does contain iron in significant amounts, but much better to get iron from other sources.
• Evaporated Cane Sugar: The same as raw sugar or Turbinado sugar.
• Fruit juice concentrate: This sugar is mostly fructose made by concentrating different juices (usually grape).
• Xylitol: Xylitol is almost a fiber as it is derived from the fibrous portion of corn husks and peanuts. It is less sweet than sugar and can actually inhibit cavities. It shows up in a lot of natural chewing gums.

Which Should you be Eating?

Looking over all of the sugars above, which do you want to put into your diet? The answer is that, no matter the name, no matter the source, no matter if they are “natural” or not, they all behave the same in your body. So while food manufactures get a lot of mileage off of stating that they are using natural sugars, there is no health benefits to honey, Turbinado or other sugars.

If you are looking to avoid sugars, none of the above will work for you. If you are looking for a substitute, I suggest Stevia.  Stevia, an herb, and has actually been shown to improve insulin sensitivity.

There you go: a complete guide to sugars. I’m guessing that I have missed a few, feel free to add them to the comment section below.

Health News:

HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (HRT): HRT and the risks of breast cancer were reviewed in a recent symposium. It appears that even using HRT for a short time increased the risk of breast cancer. Which begs the question: why use HRT? The risks are not a small increase, but for some women constitute a doubling of their risk for breast cancer.

Dr. Scott’s Comments: Hormones are powerful and can create huge problems in our bodies. Estrogen, in particular, is a problem for women because of the risk of breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancers. Part of the problem lies in the fact that most HRT are synthetic hormones that are not natural to humans. Other problems have to do with the fact that many chemicals in our environment act like estrogens (including plastics, pesticides, and a host of other chemicals). The final question has to be should we be putting hormones in an aging person at all?

HRT is a travesty because there are many natural substitutes that work just as well, without the side effects.

original article

CANCER MUCH WORSE FOR DIABETICS: Cancer is currently the number two killer worldwide and is rapidly approaching number one. People with diabetes are more than 40 percent likely to die in the years right after a cancer diagnosis than people who are not diabetic.

Dr Scott’s Comments: There are no well-established links between sugar consumption and cancer — at least not yet. This new study sheds light on another horrible aspect of diabetes: it makes surviving a cancer diagnosis harder. For me, this adds to the destruction wrought by sugar. Not only is sugar toxic to our blood vessels (witness the kidney, eye and heart damage in diabetics), but it also leads to obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Clearly we have to start avoiding the sugar and foods that act like sugar in our diets.

original article

LOW GLYCEMIC DIET FOR DIABETICS: The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association has published an article showing that diabetics eating foods that are low on the glycemic index had better sugar control than those that didn’t.

Dr Scott’s Comments: I’m going to borrow a word from my 10 year-old-daughter to describe the finding of this study: DUH! Medical science has come a long way, but they have yet to make any connection between what we eat and the diseases that we get. Maybe this study will change their minds. Yes, diabetes has something to do with the sugar and foods that act like sugar that we eat every day. I think that people eating Eating Below the Glycemic Index would fare even better… maybe even reverse their diabetes.

original article

STRESS INCREASES HEART DAMAGE: People who reported a high amount of stress in their lives increased the risk of a cardiovascular event by as much as 50 percent when compared to people who have a low amount of stress. The increase in disease was evident by the number of heart attacks, bypass surgeries, and strokes that high-stress people suffered from.

Dr. Scott’s Comments: This study shows the strong connection between our minds and our bodies. Stress is a big killer, but is often hard to define or understand. I personally feel the best treatment for stress is exercise. Whenever the world starts weighing too much on my shoulders, I know I have to get out for a run, or hop on my bike, or even just take a walk outside. It also helps to listen to other people’s worries: When you hear someone describe what they are worried about, you realize that many of their fears are ungrounded, maybe yours are too?

original article

The newest study in rats on sugar addiction paints a complete picture of sugar addiction, from binging, craving to alterations in brain chemistry seen in other addictions.

Read the whole article here: Study Suggests Sugar May Be Addictive.

Remember that we are starting a 30 Sugar Free Days challenge in January and we invite you to join us!

Sugarettes, the book about sugar addiction is availble on Amazon.