The many ways to cut back on sugar....

Today's Post: Friday, 10-15-2010

The average American adult today has two characteristics.

1. They are on the borderline between being a bit too fat and obese, definitely too fat.

2. According to a study reported by the American Heart Association, they take in by eating or drinking 22 teaspoons of sugar a day.

(In case that doesn’t sound like much since teaspoons are pretty small but 3 teaspoons equals a tablespoon. That means the average American takes in a bit over SEVEN TABLESPOONS of sugar a day. That’s 50 Tablespoons of sugar a week!)

Unfortunately, there is some evidence that the high sugar intake is one of the primary causes of how fat Americans are.

AND, sugar DOES taste good. I’ve always liked it myself.

But this is quite a national and individual health problem!

Here’s why.

It’s been clear for quite awhile that taking in that much sugar makes people fat and helps many people get type 2 diabetes who would have escaped it otherwise.

And, being that much too fat tends to ruin your sex life and trigger high blood pressure or make it worse.

Unfortunately that’s not all. A recent study found that taking in this much sugar and/or similar amounts of refined grain foods also lowers HDL and increases triglycerides. Oops !! We have learned that that means that ingesting too much sugar or eating lots of refined grains or both is a definite cause of heart disease, strokes, and heart attacks.

So, there you have it.

Sugar tastes good but is dramatically worse for you when you take in so much than most people even BEGIN to imagine.

What if you like sweet things and sugar and foods sweetened with it and refuse to give up sugar and such foods entirely but you’d also like to avoid these horrible problems?

If so, you have company. That describes me too!

But, I’ve found that cutting back enough to get massive leverage on how much sugar you eat and drink to prevent these problems is actually doable!

First, artificial sweeteners (and I suspect natural sweeteners with virtually no calories too) are NOT a solution! They cause your body to crave the real sugar effect their taste promised but did not deliver. In practice that means they almost always cause people to eat more real sugar than they otherwise would have.

Here are some ways to cut back on sugar I’ve found to work.

Some may work well for you and some may not. But the more you use, the better your health will be and the less excess fat you’ll wear.

1. Cut back the frequency!

The number of sugary things a day it takes to AVERAGE over 7 tablespoons full of sugar is quite a bit.

There was a book called, French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano that came out in 2007. It seems the French also eat sweet treats. But the French people eating in the traditional way who didn’t get fat did two things right.

They tended not to drink any soft drinks. AND, instead of eating three or four treats a day, they ate one or two a WEEK.

If you can cut back that much on how often you eat sugar, it will make a dramatic difference.

You don’t need to do it in one pass though that’s the best solution if you can do it.

Here’s what I did and am doing to cut back in steps.

Early in my life, I began eating oatmeal every morning with about 3 and a half Tablespoons of brown sugar each time.

Before I found out how bad that much sugar was for me, I decided it was likely too much. So I stopped adding sugar all seven days a week and only added fruit four days a week. I still had the sugar 3 days a week.

Then as I began to hear how bad sugar was, I cut back to having just 1 or 2 Tablespoons of sugar on the 3 days I still had it. I also added lots of cinnamon on two of those days for both the added taste and the effect the cinnamon has on the sugar NOT spiking my blood sugar from the sugar I still was eating. And, for taste also, on one of the days I had sugar and cinnamon I also added a good bit of powdered ginger for a gingerbread sweet taste.

More recently, about 10 months ago when I decided to lose the 15 pounds I’ve since lost, I decided to have a boiled egg and some cooked lentils on half my breakfasts every other day instead of having oatmeal at all. This cut my sugar intake in half. Now instead of eating sugar with my oatmeal six times every two weeks, I only eat sugar with my oatmeal three times every two weeks.

My next step will be to cut the amount of sugar each time in half without cutting back how sweet the food tastes. My hope is that this strategy will give me the same taste and NOT trigger the sugar craving I’d get from using a no calorie, no sugar sweetener. Since agave nectar tastes three times as sweet as sugar but has a bit less of an effect on your blood sugar than the same amount of sugar, if I use a fourth of the amount of sugar I’ve been using, I’ll get a three fourths of the sweet taste. And, unlike stevia and artificial sweeteners that have an off taste as an undertone agave nectar avoids this problem. Then if I still use a quarter as much of real sugar which has a quarter of the sweet taste, the three quarters of sweet taste from the agave plus the quarter from the real sugar will give me the sweet taste I’m used to. But I’ll eat half as many calories or a bit less and get half as much boost to my blood sugar or a bit less.

However you do it, if you cut back from lots of sugar every day to a good bit less sugar on only some days each month, it will take pounds of fat off your body and improve your health and health protection.

2. Drink no soft drinks at all.

Something like half the sugar many people ingest comes from regular soft drinks. But what they may not realize is that the total sugar each week is so high. And, they also likely don’t know that all those calories do NOT make them less hungry. In fact, when their blood sugar crashes later, they get hungrier – and for sugary foods! So not drinking regular soft drinks at all cuts back more than half the sugar in one pass.

Diet soft drinks have virtually no calories but have something like triple the appetite increasing drug effects of regular soft drinks. So, no longer drinking any of those will enable most people to cut back their sugar intake by over half too.

As I’ve posted before, virtually every aspect of why people drink soft drinks can be gotten from drinks that have no sugar and many even have health BENEFITS!

And, it’s worth it to eliminate soft drinks. One study found that people were reliably 15 pounds heavier with excess fat for every single soft drink they averaged a day. That means that someone who keeps drinking 4 a day as so many people do, will eventually have 60 pounds of extra fat they could have easily avoided. Yikes!

3. Always read labels and if you see ANY high fructose corn syrup, which soon may be listed as “corn sugar,” do NOT buy or eat the food.

This helps you cut back on sugar and the effects of ingesting sugar and protects your health in another way as well.

a) Since so many foods that do not need sweetening or that do but you can do without most of the time contain high fructose corn syrup still, you’ll eat versions without any sugar or with real sugar or pass entirely. That will help you eat less sugar in two of the three cases.

b) High fructose corn syrup IS more fattening than sugar if you eat 7 Tablespoons a day of it as so many people do. The email I got this morning from Dr Al Sears had studies proving just that listed. Here’s one reason I think that happens. To be sure the most common kind of high fructose corn syrup only has about 5% more fructose than regular sugar. But when you eat or drink something like eleven times too much, that 5% that looks harmless turns into an excess of 55% of fructose.
And, separate studies of free fructose NOT included inside fruit and its fiber have found it to be more fattening and health harmful than regular sugar.

c) But there’s more. Because of the way about 30% of high fructose corn syrup is made, it carries with it a measurable amount of mercury. Mercury is a neurotoxin that you do NOT want to ingest if you want to keep healthy nerves and all your brain function! And, it’s even more critical NOT to feed it to your kids!

4. Use enjoyable and rewarding foods that have no added sugar.

Berries, nuts, and unsweetened cocoa all work.

Really good savory foods work too.

5. As we posted earlier this week, it also helps to have ways that make you feel better or relieve stress that do NOT involve eating anything, let alone eating or drinking something with sugar in it.
These are all strategies that work.

Add any you find that weren’t here and use these strategies to the best of your ability. You’ll find you CAN cut way back on sugar.

When you do, you’ll like the results!