Lose weight and fat while protecting your heart....

Today's Post: Thursday, 4-22-2010

It’s becoming well known that eating a lot of sugar or other sweeteners will boost your blood sugar & your insulin levels and make you fat both from that effect and the added calories your body does not need.

Worse, the more you eat or drink of sugared foods or those sweetened with the likely more fattening high fructose corn syrup, the fatter you are likely to be or become if you do it too long.

There are two things, however, that are far less well known that we have already posted about.

They made the online health news rather spectacularly this week.

1. Eating or drinking too much sugar, etc sharply increases your chances of getting severe heart disease.

2. More people in the United States eat far too much sugar than most people realize and as a result are even fatter than we realized.

The more wide-spread article makes both points.:

This version appeared day before yesterday in this Reuter’s story.: (I’ve included the key parts of the article.)

“Added sugar increases heart risks: study

By Julie Steenhuysen Tue Apr 20, 2010 CHICAGO (Reuters)

Eating a lot of sugar not only makes you fat. It may also increase a person's risk for heart disease, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

They said people who ate more added sugar were more likely to have higher risk factors for heart disease, such as higher triglycerides and lower levels of protective high-density lipoprotein or HDL cholesterol.

"Just like eating a high-fat diet can increase your levels of triglycerides and high cholesterol, eating sugar can also affect those same lipids," Dr. Miriam Vos of Emory School of Medicine, who worked on the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said in a statement.”

Here’s the key part of the article.:

“The researchers asked 6,000 adults what they ate and then grouped them by sugar intake and cholesterol levels.

On average, nearly 16 percent of people's daily calories came from added sugar.

The highest-consuming group ate an average of 46 teaspoons of added sugar per day, while the lowest-consuming group ate an average of only about 3 teaspoons daily.

"It would be important for long-term health for people to start looking at how much added sugar they're getting and finding ways to reduce that," Vos said in a statement.

Too much sugar not only contributes to obesity, but also is a key culprit in diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, according to the American Heart Association.

The association warned last August that Americans need to cut back dramatically on sugar consumption, recommending that women eat no more than 100 calories per day of added processed sugar a day, or six teaspoons (25 grams), while men should keep it to just 150 calories of added processed sugar per said or nine teaspoons (37.5 grams).”

This also appeared yesterday.

“More U.S. Women May Be Obese Than Thought HealthDay Reporter by Randy Dotinga WEDNESDAY, April 21, 2010 (HealthDay News)

A new study says federal guidelines on obesity should be revised so more women fit into the category of "obese."

U.S. guidelines determine who is obese based on body-mass index, a measurement of whether a person's height and weight are proportional. The researchers found that about half the women of reproductive age considered obese under World Health Organization guidelines -- which use body-fat analysis instead -- were not obese under federal guidelines.”

Here are my comments starting with the second story first.:

The BMI is usually indicative; but actual body fat is what’s actually important.

But many people, women in particular, actually have MORE fat than their BMI suggests because they have little muscle which is certainly the point to this story.

Similarly, many male athletes in sports focusing on strength have high BMI’s but are NOT fat, just very muscular.

(By the way, the simplest measure of your body fat is to measure your waist at your belly button when you are neither making it looser—or tighter—than usual. If you are a man and you measure 40 inches or more, you are fat enough to be listed as obese. For women, some sources say this dividing point is 35 inches or more and some say 36 inches or more. Clearly 36 inches or more is above that level and less than 35 inches is desirable.)

However, it’s the first story that explains WHY this is happening. The first story also begins to explain why this is causing the heart and related diseases that have caused such severe increases in health care spending.

1. It’s pretty serious when a sane intake of sugar is about equal to 1% of the calories you eat or a bit less and the average American eats SIXTEEN times that much!

Ouch!

That quite literally means that if the average American man weighs 200 pounds and cuts back on sugar to a health supporting amount, they would weigh 170 pounds and all the 30 pound difference is excess fat.

Similarly, if the Average woman weighs 150 pounds and cuts back on sugar to a health supporting amount, they would weigh 128.5 pounds and all the 22.5 30 pound difference is excess fat.

That also means that the half of the people who ingest more sugar than that can and should lose far more fat and would do so if they cut back to a sane and health supporting amount of sugars, etc.

2. This study and the article about it really are as serious indictment of excess sugar as the studies that led to tobacco smoke being a definite cause of cancer.

I’ve known that eating too much sugar and the close to as bad or maybe worse refined grain foods tends to cause increased triglyceride levels and is one of the prime causes of excess inflammation. That already shows adequately that too much sugar increases the risk of heart and related diseases. These foods also increase blood sugar and insulin levels and tend to cause insulin resistance – all of which cause heart and other cardiovascular diseases.

But this study adds much more to that indictment of excess sugar. Here’s why, if in addition to increasing triglycerides, excess sugar also LOWERS your protective HDL levels, this proves that excess sugar intake is a direct cause of heart and cardiovascular disease. This proves that excess sugar causes your blood to have large increases in the small particle LDL that causes heart disease.

This is exactly the same reason that trans fats and the various hydrogenated vegetable oils are on their way to be banned from human consumption.

They do the exact same thing!

(Small particle LDL is literally so tiny it fits into the molecular structure of your blood vessel walls and tends to stay there! To avoid heart disease you want to stop or drastically minimize this from happening.)

There are two things to do about this.

If you eat that much sugar or drink that many regular soft drinks, you can slash your excess fat and heart disease risk by taking both immediate and gradual steps to cut back ending in a massive cutback when you are done.

Here are some workable ideas.:

Our strong recommendation is to simply stop all drinking of soft drinks.

For thirst, cold water, water that’s only carbonated, tea, green tea, and coffee either black or with 1% lowfat milk added work. And, as you may have noticed, for those who get caffeine from soft drinks, coffee and tea also have caffeine, they just don’t make you fat and sick!

(As you’ve seen, you can quench your thirst, get caffeine, or have carbonated water without them.) Throw out any soft drinks now in your kitchen or home. And, refuse to pay any more of YOUR money for soft drinks at stores or eating places.

Sugar is a bit tougher. It clearly DOES make food taste better. It IS a treat and is in comfort foods.

A good way to start is to refuse to voluntarily ingest anything with high fructose corn syrup in it. It has been tested in some research as being slightly more fattening than sugar. Worse, recently 30 % of all foods containing it or slightly more were tested as containing mercury, including many name brand foods.

That alone will remove a surprisingly large amount of foods from your intake. Just read every label and pass on buying or ingesting any food or drink with High Fructose Corn Syrup listed.

Second, begin to step down your intake by cutting it in half. Then once you acclimate to that do it a second time and then a third time.

(That strategy has worked well for me. I love sugar. I used to have 3.5 tablespoons of brown sugar on my cereal seven days a week. It began to dawn on me that this was excessive. I then cut back a bit more than half. I began only having added sugar three days a week and using about two tablespoons per day instead of 3.5. That reduced my intake from 73.5 teaspoons a week to 18.

Now, as part of my current weight and fat loss effort, I’ve cut back to only 3 days every two weeks. That means I still have and enjoy sugar; but I only average 9 teaspoons of it a week. It also helps that I do NOT drink any soft drinks.

Third, many foods with sugar or high fructose corn syrup that might have tempted you before, by realizing that the all of their components are different kinds of heart attack starters, it may be easier for you to pass on having any most of the time.

Today, in my office, I saw a commercially baked chocolate cake in our break room that someone put out for people to eat for free.

I read the label. It had multiple kinds of partially hydrogenated oils; multiple kinds of sugars; and refined grains.

I found it easy to pass on having any even though I do like both sugar and chocolate.

I was very tempted to put a sign by it that said,

“Contains three proven heart attack starters:

hydrogenated oils, sugars, and refined grains.

Eat this only if you are now in good health and entirely at your own risk.

You have been warned!”

If you mentally see that sign or remember these words, you too will find it increasingly easy to pass on such foods.

Remember, research has shown this sign is a set of true and accurate statements.

By the way, the first article ended with the idea that a penny an ounce tax be placed on soft drinks.

Given their effects, I think that tax is far too low. Ten cents an ounce is much closer to what the facts clearly justify.

So, the last thing you can do to protect yourself from excess consumption and to protect your medical care costs from excess consumption in other people is to vote in favor of such taxes and support them when they are proposed.