Simple Huge Health Changes – Part 3: Avoid Sugar!

Refreshing, But What Else is There?

What are the top few simple, but profound ways you can improve your health, right now? In Part 1, we discuss sleep and in Part 2 movement. This third part focuses on the significant removal of sugar in your diet.

Mmm…Sugar!

I believe sugar is the single most desirable food on God’s green earth. Whether it is in cake, pie, donuts, candy, syrups, ice cream, or other sweet confections, all are highly delicious. Simple treats like milk chocolate, a bowl of one of the bazillion ice cream flavors, or a cheap candy bar make life better, right? For most of my life, I surely adhered to this mantra. Sugar makes life better.

When I was in my 40s, I got a wake-up call. Although my dad had been diagnosed with diabetes a few years earlier, I figured I could still eat what I want. I lived by another false mantra: everything in moderation. My ultrasound confirmed a gal bladder destined for the scalpel; what really scared me though was my doctor noting I had a fatty liver. What?! I like a beer as much as the next person, but I wasn’t exactly a lush. How could this happen?

NAFLD

Usually, when your liver is fatty, it is due to excessive alcohol consumption. Another way is through Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD). This was me, and the more I read on the subject, the more scared I became. NAFLD is a precursor to fun things like cirrhosis, liver failure, and diabetes…yay. Furthermore, it gives you a bigger opportunity to get liver cancer. Clearly I was on a very bad path.

How many of you have had buttery, delicious foie gras? No? Me neither, but hang with me. Foie gras is the result of gorging geese or ducks on sugary carbohydrate-rich diets. It makes their liver extremely fatty so it can be harvested for this delicacy. Life expectancy of these geese and ducks is understandably not good. It dawned on me that I was that goose. My liver wasn’t healthy, and I was setting myself up for disaster.

Sugar and Insulin

Bless sugar’s little heart. It gives us a quick energy boost any time we need it. The problem is sugar triggers your pancreas to squirt a dose of insulin into your bloodstream to consume it. The insulin tells your body to use some of it right now, store a bunch of it in your liver, and then the rest gets stored in various places around your body as white fat. All carbohydrates give this reaction, it is just that sugar comes with no fiber or other “stuff” and so it is particularly good at being bad.

If you eat a “moderate” amount of sugar every day, you will have chronically elevated insulin levels. This results in weight gain (always), reduction of your metabolism, eventual failure of your pancreas, and inflammatory reactions throughout your body. Keep this up and your odds of diabetes skyrocket. Bonus: the odds of various cancers (especially liver and pancreatic), heart failure, arterial sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and a smorgasbord of really bad things too numerous to list.

Sugar the Carcinogen

Sugar causes cancer? It isn’t really that simple, of course, but sugar contributes to so many bad things going on in your body that it is, in fact, highly related to the incidence of cancer. In fact, a number of holistic or alternative cancer therapies include the removal of sugar and other starches from your diet. Sugar is excellent food for your cancer. Removing sugar can have a starving effect on cancer. Sugar may not cause the mutation of cancer, but it does seem to feed the cancers within you.

The direct links between sugar intake and cancer have been studied for some time. While it isn’t quite clear that sugar “causes” cancer, its consumption is highly correlated. It is clear that sugar consumption and weight gain are directly related and that obesity and cancer are also tied together. I’m not going to say that sugar is clearly a carcinogen, but the evidence is troubling.

Some Resources

Documentaries can present arguments with a significant amount of bias; however, I’d sure recommend Is Sugar the New Fat as an eye-opening 45 minute story. The director takes you through the many ills associated with our sugar obsession. There is a place in the documentary that gives you a view into a children’s oral surgery theater. This really jerked at my heartstrings, so beware.

In The Obesity Code, Jason Fung, M.D. provides what, for me, is the bible of weight loss. You can’t redux it to something as simple as “eat no more sugar”, but it is quite clear that sugar and other simple carbohydrates are at the root of the problem. The author won’t cheat you on this one. This book lays it all out for you. Nothing is missing, so I’d encourage you to pick this one up, no matter how you decide to handle sugar.

So How Much?

The World Health Organization recently lowered its recommended maximum sugar intake to no more than five percent of you daily caloric intake. For an average adult with a moderate fat percentage, we are talking about 25 grams of sugar. So, what does that look like? That is about a half of a 12-ounce soda. It is just a little less than that found in a Snickers™ bar. Before you run out and have that candy bar, just remember, there should be no other sugar in your life that day. That means no ketchup, bread, milk, crackers, candy or just about anything other than whole foods. Capiche?

This five percent rule is a daily dose. Sure, your body can obviously handle a lot more, but when you think of everything in moderation, do you think half a can of soda would be your daily maximum intake? Even knowing what I do about this, I find it exceptionally hard to keep my sugar intake below 25 grams per day. Thank heaven for a wife who helps me or I would never even come close.

Paleo?

Our Paleolithic ancestors didn’t eat much sugar. They ate what they could find, but at certain times of year, sugar was on the menu. An occasional beehive might represent a rare indulgence, but surely the fruits and berries of late summer and fall were on the menu. This is nature’s way of helping us to fatten for the coming fasts of winter. Like bears readying for hibernation, our ancestors would gorge during times of plenty. Sugar and insulin helped them to build fat stores.

Now that we have supermarkets and refrigeration, we don’t ever really need to fast. Instead, we tend to eat chronically, and especially indulge in tasty sugary foods. Why don’t you try taking all of your sugar in the form of fruit? Just avoid pure sugar or foods with added sugar. This will help you on your way to better health, but it won’t completely get it done. If you over-indulge in even nature’s fruity bounty, you will still spike your insulin and put on weight. Don’t bother to count sugar contained in vegetables. It isn’t enough to worry about and it is typically offset by the fibers contained in veggies.

Simplicity

The idea of this article is to provide you with one of the simplest steps you can take to improve your health. Simple is not always easy, and in this case it isn’t even close. To get to 20 to 30 grams of sugar each day is going to be hard for most folks. You will HAVE to read lables on everything. Mayonnaise, milk, ice cream, candy (obviously), bread, crackers, soup(!), salad dressings, and basically everything that comes in a package with a label. Do it and you will be shocked how much sugar is present and added in the foods we eat.

If you can keep your sugar intake to the recommended levels, I believe there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to binge it up once in a while. By carefully regulating your daily sugar intake, you can embrace that piece of lemon meringue pie, donut, or candy bar perhaps once a week or two or three times per month. Binges aren’t the problem. The problem is chronic sugar intake or multiple binges each week. It is the pounding our body takes from a daily assault of poison that is killing us.

Bringing it Together

So, quality sleep (Part 1), movement (Part 2), and avoidance of sugar (Part 3) I submit are the three simplest and most profoundly effective ways to improve your health right now. Start with sleep. It is fundamental to the way your body works. Splurge on that new bed. Defend your sleep time and take it seriously. If you have difficulties sleeping, address them!

Movement is how we keep our bodies young and mobile for life. Moving every day is key to health and longevity and the enjoyment of life to the fullest. Later you can add more rigorous exercise and resistance training, but just get out and move, stand, walk, squat, and be active.

Finally, there is no nutritional value in sugar. It is dangerous to you in so many ways. Avoid it as much as possible and be sure to keep your daily intake below the WHO standards. Sure, you can live it up and indulge once in a while, but don’t hide behind the whole “everything in moderation” BS. Take this seriously.

These are three SIMPLE steps. You can do them right now. Today. Don’t give yourself any excuses. Sleep like you mean it. Make it important to your life. Move, don’t sit so much. Give your pancreas a chance and drop those unneeded fat stores…avoid sugar!