Sweets and fat loss....

Today's post: Tuesday, 3-3-2009

The evidence is in. The studies have been done. Sweet foods and tastes tend to fatten those who eat them. And it now looks like many kinds of sweet foods and tastes cause disease directly.

But we’re all descended from famine survivors who loved sweets. So never eating any sweets deprives you of one of life’s pleasures and lowers your quality of life.

So, the question is how to enjoy sweets without being harmed by them.

There are several answers that work.

Here are ten for starters.

1. Have other things you enjoy eating that support your health and eat sweets much less often than most people in the United States now do. This means a few times a week or less instead of several times a day or more.

2. Have smaller servings of extremely good sweet things instead of large amounts of pretty good but not great sweet things.

3. Eat fruit, sugar, and use natural sugar substitutes only with some real sugar.

4. Do NOT use or ingest other sweeteners at all. (We say why later in this post.)

5. Eat sweets along with foods that have a low glycemic index because they contain protein, fat, or fiber. (Raisins and pecans eaten together taste great and their combination is much lower in glycemic index than raisins alone for example. Ice cream and chocolate candy are lower in glycemic index than most sweets for this reason.)

6. Never eat sweets that have any health damaging ingredients.

7. Be sure to do both strength training and interval cardio each week. This increases your body’s ability to digest and process the sugar you do eat. It’s simple, if you value your health and don’t exercise, eat NO sweets.

8. Take the chromium polynicotinate supplement that and consider taking the supplement alpha lipoic acid. These also help your body process the sugar you do eat.

9. If you are fat or begin getting closer to obese than just a bit overweight, cut the amount of sweets you eat a week in half. (Some people will need to cut that in half again.) And be sure to exercise each week.

10. Get your fasting glucose and HBA1C blood sugar readings done. If your fasting glucose is 100 or more or your HBA1C is 5.8 or more, do ALL of the above.

For related info with ideas on OK ways to enjoy sweets, see our post, Health OK Desserts & Snacks.... posted on Tuesday, 1-27-2009.

But since so many people now are fat and sick because they eat harmful sweets or used to do so, the rest of this post is about why to avoid those.

Here’s why to follow these 3 steps above.:

3. Eat fruit, sugar, and use natural sugar substitutes only with some real sugar.

4. Do NOT use or ingest other sweeteners at all.

6. Never eat sweets that have any health damaging ingredients.

A. Eat fruit, sugar, and use natural sugar substitutes only with some real sugar.

Our bodies have evolved to eat some fruit and occasionally eat things with sugar. That works Ok when the foods with sugar are infrequent and the people eating it get lots of exercise. That’s how we evolved for our bodies to work. So eating fruit and some real sugar is OK if you exercise right each week.

But you may want to eat sweets more often or need to cut back on sugar more. To get the sweetness of sugar without the glycemic impact you can substitute natural sweeteners with much lower glycemic indexes and or calories.

But even those, I think, should be substituted for half or 60 percent of the sugar rather than all of it. Here’s why.:

Artificial zero calorie sweeteners wind up giving people the same problems with overweight and diseases as the regular sweeteners do. The studies find this consistently. Artificial zero calorie sweeteners aren’t good for you directly is likely part of it. But most of it is because your body’s processing is thrown off by getting the sweet taste but not the sugar and most of that is reflected by sharply increasing your appetite for real sugar to compensate.

I think natural sweeteners with much lower glycemic indexes and or calories do this too.

So one way to avoid it is to get half the sweetness from sugar and half from sweeteners with much lower glycemic indexes and or calories. The hope is your body gets enough sugar that you avoid the rebound effect of giving it the sweet taste with no sugar. But you cut the sugar in half.

Parade Magazine for this past Sunday, March 1, 2009 had an article titled The Scoop on Sugar Substitutes by Joy Bauer.

In it she describes erythritol, a very sweet and natural sugar alcohol that does NOT make you gassy like its cousins sorbitol and xylitol. ZSweet is the commercial version sold at Whole Foods. She also describes new sweeteners that contain just the sweet part of the natural plant stevia. (I’ve not tasted them to know if that means they have edited out the horrible poor quality marshmallow taste of whole stevia; but I strongly suspect they have.) PureVia and Truvia have that stevia component. This stevia component is much sweeter than erythritol but does not have the physical properties of sugar for cooking so those two products also contain erythritol. Agave nectar does not have zero calories or zero glycemic effect. But people like the taste and it has a MUCH lower glycemic index than sugar.

The other thing you can do is use forms of sugar that is both sweet and has a distinctive taste. 100 % real maple syrup, honey, brown sugar, and dark molasses all have this characteristic.

Using those instead of white sugar may enable you to use less sugar or get more enjoyment out of the sugar you do eat.

In some recipes you can also use cinnamon which reduces the glycemic effect of the sugar.

B. Do NOT use or ingest other sweeteners at all.

The Center for Science in the public interest is quoted as noting studies that show that saccharin and aspartame increase the risk of cancer. (These are known as Sweet’n Low, and as Equal or Nutrasweet.)

Sucralose, known as Splenda, is made with a chlorinated version of sugar. This provides the taste of sugar with no calories. But other chlorinated hydrocarbons include pesticides, herbicides, and poison gases. My strong suspicion is that Sucralose will eventually prove to have very serious health issues even though they’ve not been found yet. I have very strong reservations about its use for people to eat.

And, as we already said, people who use these sweeteners as complete sugar substitutes seem to wind up getting the same fat gain and diseases as people who eat that much sugar.

But the real horror story in sweeteners to totally avoid is high fructose corn syrup. Part of why it is more fattening and harmful to health is because it is cheaper and tastes sweeter than sugar so people wind up eating a good bit more of it. Since 95 % of Americans should eat far less sugar, that’s already a serious problem.

But there is more. Just today, Reuters health news had a report of a study with these key statements that I put in bold about high fructose corn syrup.:

“A sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup has been widely used in sodas and processed foods since the 1980s, and some researchers have blamed this trend at least in part for the concurrent rise in obesity and diabetes.

The authors of the current report, in the journal Cell Metabolism, explain that some studies have shown that fructose is metabolized differently than glucose is, being more readily converted into fat.

Other studies have linked diets heavy in high-fructose corn syrup to elevated risks of high triglycerides (a type of blood fat), fat buildup in the liver, and insulin resistance, note Dr. Gerald Shulman and colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine.”

Oops! These studies mean that ingesting high fructose corn syrup, particularly in any larger amounts, leads to obesity, type II diabetes, & heart disease. (We now know that increasing triglycerides increases the amount of the small particle LDL that causes heart disease.) Ouch!

That means that no one who wants to stay healthy or avoid being fat should eat or ingest ANY high fructose corn syrup or anything containing it.

Since zero calorie soft drinks seem to have the same negative health and fat gaining results, that means that enjoying sweets without hurting your health or getting fat unnecessarily means drinking absolutely NO soft drinks.

The only good news is that avoiding foods that have high fructose corn syrup makes it a lot easier to eat less sugar. Almost every prepared food sold in stores that used to have sugar, now has high fructose corn syrup instead. We strongly recommend you avoid them ALL.

C. Never eat sweets that have any health damaging ingredients.

In addition to high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners, refined grain foods, and hydrogenated fats are proven to be fattening and harmful to your health to eat. (Refined grain foods are often higher in glycemic index than sugar; and hydrogenated fats also increase the amount of the small particle LDL that causes heart disease.)

Virtually all packaged snacks or commercially prepared sweets have one of more of these ingredients.

So, very only eat small amounts of home-made treats or those sold in stores like Whole Foods.

Right now, this problem is so bad, the only good news is that it gives you extra incentives to eat fewer sweets. This is because it limits the amount of them that are at all safe to eat as much as it does.