"If only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned."
- John Yudkin, MD
How to Get Your Sweet Fix Without Sabotaging Your Health
By Shane Ellison
If you could make one simple change in your diet to help you melt fat, sleep better, and improve your memory... wouldn't you do it? What if that same simple dietary change could increase your energy, conquer depression, save your eyesight, restore your mental alertness, get your bedroom energy rockin', and increase your lifespan?
This may sound too good to be true. But it's not. And you don't have to take drugs. Nor do you have to try some newfangled experimental supplements. Or stop eating. Or even give up the foods you love.
It's as simple as reducing the amount of sugar you eat.
This is not a trick. I said you don't have to give up the foods you love. And that includes sweets. You can actually give up sugar and keep your sweet tooth happy. This is the greatest health secret of all time. And I'm gonna teach you how to incorporate it into your life.
Before I tell you how, I want you to know just why you should give up sugar.
It's not just because of all the aforementioned benefits. It's because sugar can have serious health consequences.
Have you ever been plagued by hard-to-diagnose health problems? You know something is wrong, but your doctor can't seem to figure out what's causing them? You...
- can't lose weight, no matter how hard you exercise or diet
- feel depressed, even though you're typically a happy person
- can't get a solid night's sleep
- feel sluggish at work
- lack mental focus
- have lost your libido
- suffer from rising blood pressure
Well, it's not all in your head. It could be your sugar addiction.
My six-year-old can recite all the dangers of sucrose (table sugar) in a matter of two minutes. She can also warn you of the risks associated with those artificial sweeteners in pretty packets. And because she still likes to get her "sweet fix," she can tell you which natural sweeteners are best to use in tea, cookies, and cake. Not bad, considering that the self-appointed custodians of our health - physicians - are totally clueless about the sweetener epidemic that is sabotaging us.
If a first grader can master the problems with sugar and understand how to choose the right alternatives, you can too.
We all have the need to get a sweet fix. It's part of our biological makeup. When consumed, sweets elicit a chemical cascade of events that lead to the triggering of feel-good receptors within the brain. If this happens repeatedly, an emotional bond between happiness and sugar is formed. We become fully dependent on sweets.
Sugar addiction is best illustrated by children who break down with temper tantrums if not given sugar, women who consume chocolate in times of stress, and men who suck down soda to make it through the "afternoon blues." In a study comparing the addictive properties of sweeteners, saccharin and sucrose proved more addictive than cocaine!
The irony is that your body doesn't actually need any sugar. What you do need is glucose for energy. And you can obtain it from fruit and vegetables.
If left unchecked, an addiction to sweets spikes blood sugar and the fat-storing hormone insulin, disrupts satiety (causing users to overeat), and gives rise to age-accelerating molecules known as AGE products (advanced glycation end products). These aging molecules are responsible for causing wrinkles and age-related blindness, as well as premature heart attacks and stroke.
Over time, "sweetener addiction" leads to the hard-to-diagnose symptoms listed above, and a host of dreaded diseases like insulin resistance, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. To avoid the sabotage, you must understand how to get your sweet fix without becoming addicted.
Years ago, people didn't eat much sugar - as little as 10-15 pounds per year. And their health was much better for it. As time passed and sugar production became easier, people gave into their sweet cravings and began to overindulge. Today, the average consumption of sugar is a whopping 160 pounds! It's suicide in slow motion. Sugar addicts eliminate 11-20 years from their lifespan.
Few people realize how much sugar they are putting into their body. They are simply giving into an addiction while slowly ruining their health. To judge whether or not you are at risk, read your food labels for one day and count how many grams of sugar you are eating. Insert that number into my People's Chemist Death by Sugar Calculator. Watch as the graph calculates how many pounds of sugar you are stuffing into your mouth annually.
But that doesn't mean you should replace sucrose with artificial sweeteners to get your sweet fix. Artificial sweeteners are nothing more than drugs in disguise. Splenda is a perfect example.
Splenda contains the drug sucralose. Invented in a pesticide lab, this chemical is 600 times sweeter than sugar. To make sucralose, chlorine is used. Chlorine has a split personality. It can be harmless or it can be life threatening. In combo with sodium, chlorine forms a harmless ionic bond to yield table salt. When used with carbon, the chlorine atom in sucralose forms a covalent bond. The end result is deadly organochlorine, known simply as RNFOC (a Really Nasty Form of Chlorine). Unlike ionic bonds, covalently bound chlorines are a big no-no for the human body. They yield insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides - not something you want in your sports drink or your child's lunchbox.
Think aspartame (Equal, Nutrasweet) is safe? Think again. As an organic chemistry teaching assistant, I taught my students how to identify the active ingredients in soda using a technique known as TLC (Thin Layer Chromatography). The byproducts of sodas containing aspartame are all known poisons (that would slowly kill you): methanol, phenylalanine, and aspartic acid. I never saw my students with a diet soda after that.
Safe alternatives to artificial sweeteners are abundant: erythritol, stevia, agave, xylitol and luo han guo.
Choosing which natural sweetener to use depends on which one tastes best to you. Agave nectar usually wins. It stimulates taste buds exactly the same way sucrose does. But unlike common table sugar, very little of its active ingredient - inulin - is absorbed. Therefore, you are protected from the dangers of sugar addiction.
As a "nectar," agave is a bit harder to bake with. This is where erythritol wins.
All natural sweeteners are known to help control appetite, keep insulin and blood sugar low, and prevent the formation of AGE products. None of them are addicting, nor will they diminish your lifespan.
Getting your sweet fix doesn't have to be deadly. If you learn to gauge your sugar intake with The People's Chemist Death by Sugar Calculator and start using natural sweeteners, you won't be plagued by hard-to-diagnose health problems. And you'll have more years to enjoy life and those you love.
The Language Perfectionist: A Comprise Winner
By Don Hauptman
Among the many misused words in the English language, one of the most common is surely comprise. Consider these examples, found via a quick Internet search:
- "The social theorists who comprise what is today known as the 'Frankfurt School' have exerted an unprecedented influence…"
- "What are the three main notes that comprise [Mariah Carey's] fragrance, M?"
- "Florida is comprised of three main aquifers..."
In the above examples, the meaning of the word is reversed. The whole comprises the parts. The parts constitute (or compose or form or make up) the whole.
Here's how to use comprise and constitute correctly: A baseball team comprises nine players. Nine players constitute a baseball team.
The meaning of the word comprise is contain, include, embrace. If you're not sure you're using comprise correctly, substitute embrace or include to see if the sentence still makes sense.
A similar test works for the passive tense. One would never say "is embraced of." Thus, the frequently used phrase "is comprised of" is always wrong.
Some years ago, I clipped an ad for a book on, ironically, effective writing. The ad claims that the book "covers the big picture of what comprises poor writing." Of course, the word should be constitutes.
[Ed Note: For more than three decades, Don Hauptman was a direct-response copywriter. He is author of the wordplay books Cruel and Unusual Puns and Acronymania, and is writing a new book that also blends language and humor.]
It's Fun to Know: Wisdom Teeth
In the United States, third molars are popularly known as "wisdom teeth." Here is what they are called in other countries:
- 20-year teeth in Turkey
- Mind teeth in Romania
- Love teeth in Korea
- Unknown-to-parent teeth in Japan
(Source: National Geographic)
A "philter" (FIL-tur) is a love potion or charm. It is derived from the Greek for "to love."
Example (as used by Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum): "Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step; like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus."
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These articles appear courtesy of Early to Rise [Issue #2310, 03-22-08], the Internet's most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/.
posted by Oak Stone at 1:55 PM
1 Comments:
Comments herein about aspartame are simply untrue! Aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed in healthy people (see: http://www.officialscienceaspartame.com/?gclid=CJSYo_bnsZcCFQ8QagodL1nKjw). Here are the real facts.
All the misguided concern about aspartame has been wrongfully created by a combination of purely scientific errors that started with the original Searle work, were perpetuated by a misguided aspartame internet conspiracy theory, and supported by two badly designed 2006 and 2007 and all other European studies. Early FDA evaluators of the original Searle work had tumor concerns, which the internet conspiracy theorists have kept this fable alive for twenty years. But those original results were simply false positives stemming from an error that nobody, even FDA, caught until I reported it this year. The Searle work and everything since (including both highly quoted Soffritti et al (Ramazzini studies) 2006 and 2007 rat studies (suggesting lymphoma and leukemia), and even the internet “myaspartameexperiment.com” rat experiment used a simple, yet wrong experimental design, not to speak of a badly conducted protocol. First I’ll discuss the experimental design error. They used control rats (fed no aspartame) and treated rats (fed different, graded doses of aspartame to get a dose response). While normally this design is adequate, for aspartame this design is improperly balanced and invalid. Even a high school science fair student can recognize this fact once it is explained. Methanol from aspartame degradation is converted to formaldehyde and formic acid. Formaldehyde and formate have long been known to react with and at high doses like those in these experiments deplete a portion of the vitamin folate in exposed rats. That uncontrolled high dose folate degradation would be resolved, if folate were added to diets (daily and microgram sustenance supplements; that is why folate is needed in small doses daily). But, as these experiments have been performed, this degradation of folate only happens in the treated animals, because only they get the aspartame source of the methanol. The consequence is that only the rats receiving the aspartame will show a dose-dependent (high dose, the more the deficiency) increase, not in tumors arising from aspartame, but from folate deficiency induced tumors. Proper design would involve feeding folate supplements to both control and treated animals; it would best have used three groups, control rats, aspartame treated rats, and folate supplemented, aspartame treated rats. This design would not have given rise to tumors, because the rats would not have been depleted of folate. FYI, folate deficiency causes exactly those tumor types reported in the 2006 and 2007 lifetime exposure experiments and literally dozens upon dozens of different cancers. Second, I’ll mention their experimental errors; their use of Sprague-Dawley rats, which are known to become folate deficient as they age, is the most serious in all their two to three year studies. Because of its technical nature I cannot establish to you in this writing that their rats were deficient in folate even before beginning their experiment. However, various factors suggest that this is highly likely. The other European studies are all invalid, but for a different reason. They all failed to consider the serious impact of homocysteine, a substance which increases in the absence of folate. This substance explains all their errant work. (Information detailing the fatal error in all rat aspartame research is new this year. It was presented in March, 2008 at the national Society of Toxicology meeting in Seattle and in April, 2008 at the Agriculture & Food Chemistry section of the national American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans).
Second, all the matter above deals with the rat experimental studies, but there is another totally separate issue, human safety. That issue only exists because of the false claims that aspartame causes problems including tumors in humans stemming from the badly done rat work. In a corollary of the third line above, the fact of the matter is that many people in this country are not healthy; they are intrinsically susceptible to this natural cause of tumors that internet conspirators have wrongly attributed to aspartame. Many people, particularly women, are deficient in this vitamin (folate) and some are seriously deficient in it. Folate was added to grain products to quell a serious incidence of birth defects in children of deficient mothers. That worked to a large extent. But the “health weight” trend not to eat sweet rolls, doughnuts and other grain products that have been fortified with folate since 1998 only worsens the underlying problem. Still others have biochemical issues with their folate processing enzymes (called polymorphisms) that raise the requirement for folate and only raise their susceptibility to folate deficiency. Widespread folate deficiency, not aspartame, is the real problem causing much of the tumors and cancers epidemic in America today. Folate is also a major factor in breast cancer too, see http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/27/3/517. FYI: this paper suggests that folate sufficiency is more important at breast cancer prevention than the genetic risk factor BRCA. And alcohol abuse by women is a major factor in increased folate deficiency and contributes greatly to the incidence of breast cancer today. The concentrations of alcohols (methanol from aspartame or ethanol from low use) are just insufficient to cause any problem in people without other underlying folate issues.
Some might argue, well we should just avoid any risk factor such as aspartame. But they just don’t understand that methanol and its oxidation products formaldehyde and formate are required for the normal production of methyl groups by the folate biochemical system and many other processes. It is this methylation of DNA, as one example, that actually functions to prevent cancer by preventing weak and breakable DNA. So at least for methanol this argument is fallacious. For ethanol, however, it may be a different matter.
There have recently been calls for a second round of grain product fortification to again help to overcome these folate deficiency problems. But the only real solution to the many folate deficiency linked tumors and birth defects, etc. is use of folate supplements. Folate is made not by us, but by bacteria in our gut; given even a folate precursor rich diet (“healthy living”), we simply cannot make sufficient folate to prevent the widespread occurrence of disease associated with folate deficiency. Then, many dietary substances including antibiotics, abusive levels of ethanol, and many commonly used pharmaceuticals (antiepileptic and others) adversely affect either folate or the bugs that generate the folate; they only make us more deficient. This is why continuous consumption of folate supplements is essential.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
(FYI, I have absolutely no financial or biasing connection with the aspartame, the soft drink or their related industries. However, I am just tired of the antiaspartame extremists, who have no understanding of the sciences of pharmacology and toxicology, trying to pass judgment and create widely believed but false hearsay on something that they know nothing about.)
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