Want to learn how to break a sweet tooth addiction? That is easy. Well it is easy to say (but actually very hard to do). If you have ever tried to stop eating sugar then you know just how hard it is and new research is showing us exactly why it is so hard to kick the white death out of our diets. While you might have wrestled with your sweet tooth in the past, let me show you how you can knock it down and finally triumph over this pesky troublemaker.

Why is it so Hard to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction?

Do you want to know why it is hard to break your sweet tooth action? The answer is simple: Because it is a real addiction. Research has shown that sugar addiction is every bit as powerful and hard to kick as addiction to alcohol, smoking, and even hard drugs.

So while you might be kicking yourself for not being strong enough to fight your sweet tooth, you should cut yourself some slack because sugar addiction ranks high on the hard-things-to-kick list.

How You Can Break Your Sweet Tooth Addiction

If you want to break your sweet tooth addiction, the first thing you have to do is stop thinking it is going to be easy. No one tells an alcoholic (or a drug addict) that they can get rid of their addiction easily. Fighting against your sweet tooth will take time and effort and you will be constantly tested in ways that other addictions are not. For example: how many cigarette ads do you see on the television? And how many of your friends think you are crazy to stop eating sugar? We are bombarded with sugar advertisements daily and most people who stop eating sugar feel alone in a world of sugar junkies. So, take your addiction seriously and understand it is going to be hard.

The second way to succeed in kicking your sugar addiction is find some support. There are many ways to find the support that you need. The best support comes from friends or family members who want to go on a sugar-free holiday with you, but there are also groups on Facebook or other web-based sites that can help you as well.

I have a 30 Day Program called the 30 Sugar Free Days that helps people get off of sugar. Check it out here: 30 Sugar Free Days. You can break your sweet tooth addiction, but it will take time. Breaking your sugar addiction is well worth the effort as you will likely lose weight and feel much better.

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How do you feel these days? If you feel a bit sluggish, tired, bloated, fuzzy in the head, have headaches, belly aches, or just don’t feel right then it may be time for a sugar detox. Sugar is everywhere (even in foods you don’t suspect, see: Hidden Sugars) and it is hard work doing a sugar detox and avoiding the white stuff all together. But a sugar detox is well worth the effort if you want to lose a few pounds and get back to feeling like your old self again.

Why is Sugar a Problem?

Oh sugar, you cause so many problems, let me count the ways:

1. Addictive: As you might have guessed, sugar is addictive. But what you may not have guessed is just how addictive sugar can be. When scientists test rats addicted to sugar they find that the addiction to sugar is just as strong as other addictions (like cigarettes, alcohol and even hard drugs). If you doubt this, try staying away from all sugar for just one day and you will see what a powerful hold that white stuff has over you. When you do a sugar detox you have to battle your addictions.
2. Health Problems: While many people in the medical community think that eating even large amounts of sugar is no problem, research is now showing that sugar is at least partially responsible for diabetes, heart disease, obesity and maybe even some cancers.
3. Weight Gain: The more sugar you eat, the more you are going weigh. The reason for this is that your body doesn’t want to waste the energy that you eat. Your body only needs so much fuel and when you eat too much sugar it is going to store all that extra energy as fat. Most people who go on a sugar detox lose a lot of weight.
4. Hurts Your Brain: Sugar is responsible for that fuzzy thinking you get in the middle of the day and can lead to headaches, problems focusing and maybe even depression. (see: What Sugar Does to Your Brain)

How to do a Sugar Detox

Going on a sugar detox is easy, right? All you have to do is stop eating all sugar. Well… it is easy to say you should do a sugar detox but much harder to actually do.

There are two obstacles that you have to overcome when you do a sugar detox.

• The first is the addictive nature of sugar. The bad news about a sugar detox is that the cravings that come when you stop eating sugar are incredibly powerful. But here is the good news: it gets easier. It really gets easier if you have support from friends and family. Most people who go through a sugar detox find that the first few days are hard and then they feel better than they have in a while.

• The second is that kicking sugar alone is not enough, you also have to stop eating the foods that act like sugar. The reason for this is that many foods you eat raise your blood sugar more than eating table sugar; so to truly detox from sugar you have to avoid the foods that act like sugar to (see: Foods that act Like Sugar).

I have created a program called the 30 Sugar Free Days Program that will help you with your sugar detox. The program includes daily e-mails and has a group on Facebook for the support that you need. The program is designed to help you stay away from both sugar and the foods that act like sugar.

Yes, a sugar detox is not easy, but it is well worth the effort and you will feel better than you have in a while once you given sugar a kick out the door.

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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!

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You open a can of soda and pour that sugary drink into your mouth. The sugar travels down your throat and into your stomach and then has a very short trip from your stomach into your blood stream. As that sugar starts to move its way through your body, it eventually makes its way to your brain. You brain is happy with this shot of sugar you just gave it, because, while it only makes up only two percent of the body weight, your brain uses one-half of all the sugar energy in the body.¹

But, is there such a thing as too much sugar for your brain? And that soda you just drank will cause your blood sugar to skyrocket and eventually drop; what happens to your brain then? And what about other sugar-brain questions: doesn’t sugar make you or your kids hyperactive, and doesn’t sugar change your mood?

The short answer to these all these questions is: we don’t know. Scientific studies on the effects of sugar on the brain are sparse at best and most medical professionals and organizations will say that sugar has nothing to do with mood or hyperactivity. If you are surprised by that stance, you are not alone.

Most parents have witnessed firsthand the effect of sugar on little kid’s brains. Most adults will tell you that they have experienced a sort of mental fog from eating too much sugar, not to mention the sugar high and the sugar crash. But none of these experiences mean anything to researchers who report that there are no such thing as a sugar high or that hyperactivity could be caused by too much sugar.

But just because there isn’t much research on how sugar and foods that act like sugar and how they affect mental function doesn’t mean there isn’t any. This article will piece together the bits of information out there on sugar and brain function to get a better understanding of what sugar is doing to our brains. As usual, I will be including not only sugar, but foods that act like sugar in the discussion.

Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor

Let’s start with a brain chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is the key to understanding what happens when sugar hits our brain.

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor is responsible for the development of new brain tissue. If you didn’t have this chemical in your brain, your brain wouldn’t develop properly and you would die very soon after birth. The key to BDNF is to understand what it does: it helps to create new neurons (nerve tissue), and, therefore new memories.

You want as much BDNF around as possible if you want to learn, grow, and have normal brain functioning.

Research has shown that high sugar diets (along with high fat diets and lack of essential fatty acids) decrease a BDNF.² In fact, the relationship between BDNF and sugar gets even more interesting: low amounts of BDNF actually leads to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and even diabetes.³ This means that high sugar in the blood leads to low BDNF, and then low BDNF leads to a worsening of blood sugar control, which leads to high blood sugar, which leads to worse blood sugar control… and the cycle continues.

In an interesting study on rats, it was discovered that the animals that had the best ability to learn spatial and memory tasks also had the highest amount of BDNF. It took only two months on a high sugar and high fat diet to significantly reduce BDNF in the brains of the experimental animals and for the reduction to have an effect on the animal’s ability to perform spatial and memory tasks.⁴

Low BDNF is no small thing as it has also been associated with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, Huntington’s disease, Rett syndrome, and schizophrenia.

But there is much more to the sugar-brain story than BDNF, let’s take a look.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is one of the best places to start when discussing how sugar affects our brains. There are quite a few clinical studies that link the consumption of grains (foods that act like sugar) with schizophrenia.⁵ It has long been thought that people who are schizophrenic may have a problem with the protein found in many grains (gluten) and there is a strong association between schizophrenia and Celiac disease.⁶

Interestingly, there is also a close association with poor blood sugar control (metabolic syndrome) and the severity of schizophrenia:

It appears that the same dietary factors which are associated with the metabolic syndrome, including high saturated fat, high glycemic load, and low omega-3 (PUFA), may also be detrimental to the symptoms of schizophrenia.⁷

These researcher show that once again, a diet low in essential fatty acids (omega-3) and high in fat and sugar will decrease BDNF and it makes me wonder if sugar and foods that act like sugar may be the “smoking gun” in schizophrenia.

Depression and Anxiety

As a hint that how we live and what we eat have some effect on our moods, it has long been known that coronary heart disease and diabetes all are common in people with depression.⁸ This means that the same dietary conditions that create heart disease and diabetes also can lead to depression. Interesting…

Sugar consumption in population studies have been shown to have a close link with major depression.⁹Researchers suggest that the sugar and brain association may be due to the oxidative stress that sugar can cause or the change in beta-endorphins (brain chemicals that make us feel good) that comes about because of sugar use.

Anxiety, too, has been closely linked with sugar use in a number of studies.¹⁰

Children

Perhaps the biggest questions arise when discussing children, mood, behavior and sugar. While any parent would tell you that sugar can dramatically change the behavior of a child, the medical community is silent. There have been a few studies that show an association between high blood sugars and problem behaviors, but these studies have mostly been performed in children who already have blood sugar problems (such as diabetes).¹¹¹² More studies need to be done and need to be done in children with normal blood sugar.

Autism is an interesting exception to the lack of research. A review by the prestigious Cochrane review admitted that many of the studies linking foods that act like sugar (grains) and gluten to autism have been of poor quality, but they do point to one study that does show a relationship between a gluten-free diet and improvement in the symptoms of autism.¹³ While far from conclusive, these studies open the possibility of a solution for the growing epidemic of autism.

Brain Plan

Okay, let’s say you actually want to take care of your brain. What is the best way to go?

• Avoid grains and sugars: Read my book Sugarettes or take the 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge, and get yourself off sugar and foods that act like sugar.
• Exercise: It has been shown that exercise is great for your brain, and it increases BDNF.¹⁴
• Supplement: Your brain thrives on vitamins, especially the B vitamins and make sure you are taking some form of omega 3 oils (fish oils).

We can take care of our brains much better than we do and knowing that the foods that we put into our mouths can dramatically how we think, how we feel and act, and which diseases we get means that your brain and how well it functions is in your hands. You have a choice and what you eat and drink can make dramatic differences in how you think, feel and behave.

Take the plunge and try the 30 sugar free days challenge:

Citations:

1. Fehm HL, Kern W, Peters A. The selfish brain: competition for energy resources. Prog Brain Res. 2006;153:129-40.
2. Molteni R, Barnard RJ, Ying Z, et al. A high-fat, refined sugar diet reduces hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor, neuronal plasticity, and learning. Neuroscience. 2002;112(4):803-14.
3. Krabbe KS, Nielsen AR, Krogh-Madsen R, et al. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and type 2 diabetes. Diabetologia. 2007 Feb;50(2):431-8. Epub 2006 Dec 7.
4. Molteni R, Barnard RJ, Ying Z, Roberts CK, Gómez-Pinilla F. A high-fat, refined sugar diet reduces hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor, neuronal plasticity, and learning. Neuroscience. 2002;112(4):803-14.
5. Peet M. International variations in the outcome of schizophrenia and the prevalence of depression in relation to national dietary practices: an ecological analysis. Br J Psychiatry. 2004 May;184:404-8.
6. Kalaydjian AE, Eaton W, Cascella N, Fasano A. The gluten connection: the association between schizophrenia and celiac disease. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2006 Feb;113(2):82-90.
7. Peet M. Nutrition and schizophrenia: beyond omega-3 fatty acids. Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 2004 Apr;70(4):417-22.
8. Peet M. International variations in the outcome of schizophrenia and the prevalence of depression in relation to national dietary practices: an ecological analysis. Br J Psychiatry. 2004 May;184:404-8.
9. Westover AN, Marangell LB. A cross-national relationship between sugar consumption and major depression? Depress Anxiety. 2002;16(3):118-20
10. Yannakoulia M, Panagiotakos DB, Pitsavos C, et al. Eating habits in relations to anxiety symptoms among apparently healthy adults. A pattern analysis from the ATTICA Study. Appetite. 2008 Nov;51(3):519-25.
11. Valdovinos MG, Weyand D. Blood glucose levels and problem behavior. Res Dev Disabil. 2006 Mar-Apr;27(2):227-31.
12. McDonnell CM, Northam EA, Donath SM, et al. Hyperglycemia and externalizing behavior in children with type 1 diabetes. Diabetes Care. 2007 Sep;30(9):2211-5.
13. Millward C, Ferriter M, Calver S, Connell-Jones G. Gluten- and casein-free diets for autistic spectrum disorder. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2004;(2):CD003498.
14. Exercise: Ang ET, Gomez-Pinilla F. Potential therapeutic effects of exercise to the brain. Curr Med Chem. 2007;14(24):2564-71.

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It makes me wonder why not a single medical association will take a stance against sugar and the harm that sugar does?

The following video is for my book Sugarettes that will show you just how addictive and harmful sugar really is.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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A new study in the journal, Pediatrics, looked into sugar consumption from just soda and fruit juice. Here is what they found:

• Children are consuming somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of their calories from soda and fruit juice alone
• Children aged 6 to 19 consumed an average of 30 oz of soda or fruit juice every day
• 2 to 5 year-olds consumed an average of 15.5 oz of juice or soda a day
• The average serving size of the drinks they are drinking has increased 46 percent (almost doubled) since 1972

What you have to understand about the above statistics is that they are saying that 10 to 15 percent of the calories our children are eating are coming from just soda or fruit juice. These numbers don’t include sugar such as breakfast cereals, cookies, candies, ice cream and all the hidden sugars such as those found in peanut butter, crackers, chips and other fast foods. For those who have read my book or this blog often, you know that those statistics don’t include foods that act like sugar in our bodies such as many grains and starchy vegetables.

It is clear that our children are overdosing on sugar.

Are You Sure? One-Half a Pound a day?

Every time I write that we eat 1/4 to 1/2 of a pound of sugar a day, I always get questions. So let’s see how easy it is to make it to that 1/2 pound every day. Remember that 1/4 pound of sugar equals 30 teaspoons of sugar. You can get 30 teaspoons of sugar very easily, for example:

• A 12oz soda contains 8 teaspoons of sugar, a 16oz soda contains 10.5 teaspoons
• Typical breakfast cereals contain 4 to 6 teaspoons of sugar
• A donut contains 8 to 30 teaspoons of sugar
• A typical cookie contains 2 to 4 teaspoons of sugar for each cookie
• For a more complete list, look here: Percentage Of Sugar In Common Foods

As you can see, it isn’t all that hard to make it to 60 teaspoons (or 1/2 pound of sugar a day).

Parents, Most of this is Happening on Your Watch

The study in the journal, Pediatrics, showed something surprising: that most of this soda drinking was happening at home. Around 55 to 70 percent of sugar sweetened beverages are consumed in the home, while 7 to 15 percent in schools. These numbers were slightly higher from very young children who attended day care or preschool where fruit juice is a common treat for the kids.

This means that parents are largely responsible for the incredible amount of sugar their children eat every day.

Halloween is One Thing, but…

Kids are going to eat a lot of candy on Halloween, but parents should focus more on their children’s day-to-day consumption of sugar. There are long-term health effects that can result from eating so much sugar: Obesity and diabetes are epidemic in children and only getting worse.

We can do a lot to determine the health of our children by helping them make better choices about sugar. Since most of the sugar consumption is happening at home, simply not buying soda, fruit juice and other sugary snacks can go a long way to eliminating sugar consumption in our children.

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Cigarettes

Everybody knows that cigarettes are bad, but that wasn’t always the case. It took years before people actually understood that cigarettes caused damage to our bodies. Part of the reason for this is that humans are very good at picking out immediate dangers, but have a much more difficult time when dangers come slowly. After all, smoking one cigarette does no harm; in fact it makes you feel calmer, alert and gives you a boost of energy. The damage that happens from cigarettes is not that noticeable until you wake up one morning with a cough.

Cigarettes do cause harm, though, and they are linked not only to lung cancer, but also heart disease, stroke and a number of other diseases. If we use world-wide figures, the deaths from cigarettes amount to around 5 million deaths a year.

Now, let’s see how sugar stacks up.

Sugar

Could sugar be the same as cigarettes? Could the damage done by sugar happen so slow that no one notices it? The answer to that question is yes.

While you won’t find medical doctors admitting that sugar causes harm, there is a growing number of research studies that are demonstrating that there is a connection between the amount of sugar we eat and obesity. How many world-wide deaths are attributable to obesity? The number is 17 million deaths a year. No one dies from being obese, though. Being overweight increases the risks for other diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and even some cancers. Sugar has also been shown to directly cause diabetes and heart disease, even in someone with normal weight.

What are the world-wide deaths from these conditions? Let’s add them up:

Obesity:         17 million deaths

Heart disease: 17 million deaths

Diabetes:          4 million deaths

Total:         38 million deaths

Now, some of these figures overlap (some obesity deaths may also be due to heart disease or diabetes), so let’s conservatively cut that number in half and use a number of 15 million deaths every year from sugar-related causes. This means that sugar is most likely responsible for three times the number of deaths that cigarettes are, and, yet, we let our children eat the stuff every day.

Don’t be a Frog

Many of you know the science experiment where you try and place a frog in very hot water and it jumps out, but if you slowly heat the pot the frog is in, it will kill the frog because he never notices the increasing heat.

Sugar is like that, you don’t notice the damage it does because it happens slowly over time. So, don’t be a frog. Notice now that what you are eating every day has an impact on your health when you are older.My book, Sugarettes can show you how to break the cycle of sugar addiciton.

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Sugar and humans are not supposed to mix. Yes, you are drawn to sugar. Yes, it calls your name out from the pantry. Yes, you are possessed by the thoughts of sugar plums dancing in your head (especially when you are on a diet). But the truth is, we were never meant to put such a purified food into our bodies, at least not in the large amounts we find ourselves doing daily.

Here are the five reasons why you want to avoid sugar:

1. It doesn’t exist in nature: Sugar is a highly concentrated food. If you pick up a bag of sugar and read the ingredients, you will discover that it is 99 percent pure sucrose. That bag of sugar is extremely unique; nothing else we put in our mouths (outside of some super-high proof alcohols) is that pure. Heck, heroin addicts would kill for a drug as pure as sugar. Your body is designed to get its sugars slowly from the complex foods we eat; it is not designed to handle the high amount of sugar that enters it every time you gulp down a soda.
   
2. Sugar destroys blood sugar regulation: You are not going to read this anywhere else, so I’ll let you know here. Sugar and foods that act like sugar in your body are the root cause of diabetes. If you search other areas of the Web and find articles from the Sugar Organization, or the American Diabetes Association, or even the World Health Organization, they will all tell you that sugar has nothing to do with diabetes. Don’t believe them! As your body adjusts to high blood sugar levels that can happen every time you eat something sweet, your body makes choices. These choices are what lead to diabetes. How this exactly happens is a long discussion and is covered in my book Sugarettes, but for now, just know that high blood sugar will create insulin insensitivity and eventually diabetes.
   
3. Sugar is addicting: Most people agree: they are addicted to sugar. What most people don’t know is just how serious that addiction is. When scientists study animals that are addicted to sugar, they find that their brains look very similar to other addicts (such as smokers, alcoholics and even heavy drug users). People crave sugar just as addicts crave their drugs. We also binge on sugar, use sugar to change our moods, and many other addictive responses.
   
4. Weight Gain: Once again, you won’t find too many medical associations agreeing with me, but sugar will cause you to gain weight. And this is not only because sugar contains calories, but because sugar is unique and your body handles it differently than other foods. This is especially true of the most harmful sugar of all: High Fructose Corn Syrup. Your body will turn the fructose in High Fructose Corn Syrup into fat much easier than any other food.
   
5. Harmful to blood vessels: Sugar destroys blood vessels. You can see the evidence for this in diabetics where blood vessel damage is responsible for all the common diseases that diabetics have, including heart disease, stroke, loss of vision, numbness and tingling of the legs, and the sometimes need for amputation. While you might think you are safe if you don’t already have diabetes, research now suggests that over 30 percent of people will get diabetes some time in their lives. And research suggests that your chances of either having diabetes or metabolic syndrome (a pre-diabetic state) are around 50 percent. Even if you escape one of those diseases, sugar still harms blood vessels. This means if you don’t die from an accident, your chances of dying from the result of sugar’s destruction is high. Remember that heart disease is the number one killer in the United States.
   

Over time, sugar has gone from an occasional food to being consumed with every meal. At the same time, we have seen diseases such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and even cancer skyrocket. If you want to be healthy, you should avoid sugar in your diet.

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You would expect medical associations, those groups who are supposed to help us understand what is healthy and what is not, to have a stance on sugar. They actually do have a stance on sugar, but you are going to be surprised by what that stance is.

Before we get to medical associations, let’s stop by the sugar industry’s website (www.sugar.org) and see what they have to say about sugar:

Starting with its 1986 review of 1000 scientific papers, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Sugars Task Force in their report on “Evaluation of Health Aspects of Sugars contained in Carbohydrate Sweeteners” reported that “with the exception of dental caries, the scientific evidence clears sugars of links with other diseases including diabetes, hypertension, behavior and obesity.” <read more>

Do you believe that? According to the report cited by the Sugar Industry, sugar is not responsible for diabetes, high blood pressure, changes in behavior such as a “sugar high” or “sugar crash” and, sugar is not responsible for our growing obesity problem.

What is amazing is that many medical associations agree with the sugar industry. Look how the sugar industry quotes the American Diabetes Association:

According to the American Diabetes Association, sugar does not cause diabetes. Not only does sugar not cause diabetes but individuals with diabetes do not have to strictly avoid eating sugar according to the American Diabetes Association. <read more>

The reason why the sugar industry can quote medical associations is that they completely agree.

Let’s Look at the What the Medical Associations have to Say:

The American Dietetic Association, the association that trains and supports nutritional professionals and whose website is called www.eatright.org has this to say about sugar:

Although the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans don’t set a specific cap on sugar, if you consume foods in the proportions recommended for your particular calorie level, it’s tough to take in too much sugar… <read more>

Hmm… Tough to take in too much sugar?  Maybe another association has better advice.

The American Diabetes Association, the association that should be telling diabetics how to eat, has this to say about sugar:

In the past, people with diabetes were warned to completely avoid sugar. Experts thought that eating sugar would rapidly increase blood glucose, resulting in levels that were too high. Some people even thought that eating sugar caused diabetes, an idea that we now know isn’t true. Research has shown that the total amount of carbohydrate affects blood glucose levels the most. But, the type of carbohydrate (e.g. sugar vs. starch) can also affect blood glucose levels. Learn more about the types of carbohydrate and the glycemic index. Now experts agree you can eat foods with sugar as long as you work them into your meal plan as you would any other carb-containing food. The same guidelines apply to other sweeteners with calories, including brown sugar, honey, and molasses… <read more>

These associations are way off when it comes to what they are suggesting we should eat. When asked about if sugar is an addiction, they would shrug this notion off as if you were crazy. But, many people know sugar is an addiction for them.

What you might be surprised to learn is that there is medical research that supports the fact that sugar is addictive and harmful, but for some reason the American Dietetic Association and the American Diabetes Association and even the World Health Organization all seem to think there is not problem with the amount of sugar we eat.

Why these organizations haven’t recognized that sugar is a problem is a bit of a mystery, one I hope to unravel. Stay tuned and I will show you just how harmful sugar can be and what you can do about it.

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