A hundred years ago, Americans consumed an average of ten pounds of sugar a year. Today they consume an average of one hundred and ten pounds, or 50 kilograms, of sugar a year. That is close to 100% of the healthy weight of a a woman of average height, and provides about one third of the calories required to meet the needs of most North American adults.
What is the result of making sugar the largest single component of the diet? An epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and general disability, including a lack of both physical fitness and mental sharpness. Yes, it's a fact, diabetes lowers your IQ. Rome it has been suggested fell because of lead in the water. The Western World is surely headed for demise because of surfeit of sugar.
Cutting sugar from your diet is not easy. First, because sugar is addictive. Second, because sugar is added to almost every kind of processed food you can buy, which makes it difficult to eliminate from your diet even if you try. There are two compelling reasons why sugar is in almost every processed food item: because, first, as an addictive substance, it tends to hook you on whatever branded product to which it is added; and second, it is one of the cheapest food commodities there is, and thus ideal for bulking up more expensive ingredients.
Combating a sugar addiction is hard, perhaps harder than quitting cigarettes. In part, this is because the ex-smoker will usually find an illicit cigarette results in some slight nausea due to the physiological de-adaptation to nicotine that has occurred since quitting as a regular smoker. To the ex-sugar fiend, however, sugar tastes as good or better than when it was a regular part of their diet. Moreover, nearly all foods, even without added sugar, contains some sugar of natural origin. Thus unless you join an Innuit band living exclusively on raw seal flesh and blubber, you will likely never rid your diet of sugar altogether.
In addition to identifying and eliminating from your diet items high in sugar, tomato ketchup, for instance, or canned soup and a thousand other things to which you might never have imagined anyone would add sugar, you have to formulate a whole new diet including only those items that are low in sugar.
A further complication, when reviewing the acceptability of processed food, is the need to take account not only of the amount of sugar that they contain, but the type of sugar.
Generally, the amount of sugar contained in a processed food product is not specified on the package, although ingredients are usually stated in order of abundance. Thus, unless sugar appears low on the list, there is almost certainly too much of it. Moreover, many processed food products contain more than one form of sugar, each form appearing separately in the list of ingredients. Thus while the sugars you recognize may appear low on the list of ingredients, added together they may account for a large proportion of the product.
Even identifying what among the listed ingredients of a product are sugars is not a simple matter unless you have a good education in chemistry, for there are many forms of sugar each of which may be listed under a variety of names, including sucrose (the same as the regular granulated form of sugar), corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, fruit juice concentrates, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup, invert sugar, lactose, maltose, malt syrup, raw sugar, sugar syrup, cane crystals, cane sugar, crystalline fructose, evaporated cane juice, corn syrup solids, and malt syrup.
The main encouragement I can offer to those contemplating a low-sugar diet is that after three of four months of good compliance, you will find spoonfuls of sugar make tea and coffee disgustingly sweet, and high sugar deserts, cookies and even tomato ketchup will also seem much too sweet. In addition, by switching from masses of processed food to a diet high in basic commodities such as cabbage and cauliflower, carrots and celery, plus meat and potatoes, you will likely find that your cost of living has decreased, your fitness increased and your weight shown signs of coming under control. Oh, and your mind will be sharper.
Good luck.
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