I am a sugar addict.
It had always been a suspicion of mine that this could be a real addiction and not just something I was building up in my head because I couldn’t remember the last time I went a day without any high-sugar foods or drinks. Then I read an article by the Chairman of the Institute of Medicine, Dr. Mark Hyman, confirming my speculation. He quoted a Harvard study that found foods containing high amounts of sugar trigger the same addiction center of the brain as “conventional addictions, such as gambling or drug abuse,” do. Even after I found that out, I was only mildly concerned that this was a big enough problem to affect my health. After all, I was under the assumption that a calorie is a calorie, and as long as I didn’t take too many in because of sugar, I should be fine. This made me ask two more questions:
“How much is too much?”
According to the American Heart Association, anything over 25 grams of sugar for women and 37.5 grams for men is too much. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had less than that a day. If I had a pack of Skittles, or any candy for that matter, I was over the daily limit. If I went to Jamba Juice, I was over the limit. If I had a can of soda, I was over the limit. I knew while consuming these I was taking in a lot of sugar, but I never thought it was so much that even just one indulgence would send me way over the edge.
“Can this cause more problems than just too many calories?”
This was perhaps the most surprising find. Up until this day of curiosity, I assumed that all that mattered was the calorie count and maybe be careful about fat intake. I was buying non-fat, high-sugar products thinking I was doing myself a favor, until I did some research, and found out that this type of thinking was perhaps even more dangerous.
I was pretty mad at myself for allowing this to happen to me.
I couldn’t believe I allowed myself to become so dependent on a high-sugar diet.
I made the assumption that this sugar problem was my fault and completely in my power to get under control……
So, I decided I was going to make a change. I decided to do a sugar detox for seven to ten days to reboot my system, and with this new non-sugar craving system, I was going to reduce my sugar intake to an almost non-existent level. My plan was full proof.
That is, until I went on a label-checking rampage of my kitchen and found that almost all of my food supply was inedible during this detox. All of my canned soups were out once I saw my Progressive Tomato Soup had 28 grams of sugar. I also wasn’t going to be having any pasta either. The sauce alone was through the roof in sugar, but even if I wanted to eat the noodles plain, that tasteless option was out too. For breakfast, I could forget about a bowl of Cheerios or Honey Bunches of Oats. I couldn’t even have a piece of toast. By the time my kitchen raid was complete, my diet was limited to eggs, cheese, unsweetened soymilk, coffee, popcorn, and the bag of frozen shrimp in my freezer. I was immediately discouraged from doing the detox, but I thought I could make it for 10 days, then add some of the items with lower sugar back, such as the pasta and bread, and rely on natural sugars in fruits to satisfy a newly reduced craving. I thought I had the power and the responsibility to make change my lifestyle.
….But those assumptions are exactly why I failed.
I consider myself as a disciplined person. When I have a goal, I stick to it. I can count on one hand the amount of times I have just outright quit something because it was just too hard in my nearly 20 years of existence. However, my sugar addiction beat me bad on this one. I had given up after only three days. I grew tired of eating the same three foods for every meal. If I had any doubts about whether or not this was truly an addiction, I knew for sure once the withdrawal symptoms started. About 24 hours into the process, the headache started, then I had trouble sleeping, and by the third day, my roommates didn’t want to talk to me at all out of fear of my irritability. I was desperate for my next fix, and that will power I thought was strong was no match for the sugar filled items that were calling my name to rid me of my extreme discomfort.
As you can see, I’m obviously in no place whatsoever to be giving a lecture on making good food choices, so I’m not going to bother. This article is not about convincing you as a person to make cut back on sugar.
This is about convincing you to see another problem of an industry we almost didn’t realize existed and a new set of solutions to the growing public health crisis this added-sugar industry is causing.
How Sugar is Harming Your Body: Big, Small, or Somewhere in the Middle
I know what you’re thinking and believe me when I say I’ve lived under this illusion for most of my life. I’m talking about the myth that you can use exercise as an excuse to eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. You think that as long as you make the trip to the gym a couple times a week to maintain or improve your shape, screw the American Heart Association and their “recommended guidelines.”
You can be one of the average Americans who eat 75 grams of sugar a day because all you have to do is be sure to burn more calories than you take in to be able to say you live a “healthy lifestyle.” Unfortunately, scientific research is starting to tell us otherwise.
I know. I was disappointed too, but here’s how it works:
1. You consume an insanely large amount of sugar on a nearly daily basis.
Don’t worry, there’s no judgment here. Most people have some form of sugar addiction because we are taught from a very young age, like breast-feeding years, that sugar is delicious and wonderful.
2. This constant consumption makes it difficult for your liver to process the fructose and so it has to store it as fat.
But it’s not this fat:
It’s visceral fat that builds up around your liver that is significantly more difficult impossible to detect from looking in the mirror.
This means a person me at a “healthy” weight:
And a person who looks like this:
Can have the same amount of visceral fat around the liver and not even know it.
3. This visceral fat around the liver causes insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance sound like a familiar term to you? Yeah it should, because it tends to hang around other words like “type II diabetes” and “heart disease.”
4. The insulin resistance that you just got from your fructose-consumption-causing-impossible-to-detect fatty liver is going to open a door to a new problem: Metabolic Syndrome.
This problem is why insulin resistance is associated with diabetes and heart disease. The common link is metabolic syndrome. And yes, just like the fatty liver, whether you’re 100 pounds, 700 pounds, or somewhere in between, you can have metabolic syndrome. However, a large midsection is a much bigger tip off than visceral fat buildup in the liver and insulin resistance, which is why obese and overweight people tend to get diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, as well as diabetes and heart disease, more often.
The point is, there are more dangers to consuming sugar than it being nothing but empty calories. Big or small, consuming too much sugar can lead to dangerous health complications such as diabetes and heart disease.
So we’ve got a problem on our hands
And it’s affecting most Americans.
We’ve gotta do something about it, and the big push so far has been a simple message: Make better food choices. Eat less. Exercise More. This is a problem your addiction has created so it’s your personal responsibility to fix it. All it takes it a little will power.
Well if my epic failure to cut back wasn’t proof enough, I encourage you to try the “will power” method yourself, so you can see just how unrealistic this is.
In order for something to be considered personal responsibility, the person has to have knowledge, accessibility, and affordability to fix the problem.
Knowledge:
You need to be able to read a label and recognize which ingredients are added-sugars:
- Dextrin
- Ethyl Maltol
- Glyceral Stearate
- Turbinado
- Elaeis Guineenis
Can you tell which ingredients are names for added-sugars and which are not?
Yeah, neither can the average consumer. In fact, added-sugars have over 50 different names . Some sugars are easier to spot, like things ending in “-ose” or having “syrup” in the name, but those are only a few. It is unrealistic to think the average consumer or shopper can read the ingredient list and pick out all the names for added-sugars.
And as if remembering all those complicated names wasn’t hard enough, companies also have come up with this clever way of preventing you from understanding how much of the product really is sugar. Most everyone knows that the ingredients that make up the most of a food product are listed first. Even though a food product might actually be mostly sugar, companies use a handful of the many different forms of sugar to sweeten the food, so that no one additive appears to high on the list, making it nearly impossible for you to understand how much sugar is in your food relative to the other ingredients.
Accessibility:
For a person to be personally responsible for the health effects caused by added-sugars, the person has to actually have access to foods without them. It is possible, but is it realistic? I’ve made the personal choice to eat right, except making better food choices requires me to limit my food selection down to 20% of food products in America because 80% of the 600,000 products offered contain added-sugars. Do you think I’m going to want to stick to this diet?
This is an unrealistic expectation to put on a person. There are but a small few who can make such great sacrifices.
Imagine UH cutting 80% of their class offerings. Do you think it would still be okay for the university to expect the entire student body to make good choices when registering for the appropriate courses in order to graduate in four years? Nope.
Giving up candy and soda is one thing, but to be expected to give eliminate products like juice, yogurt, pasta sauce, and bread is another. AND, even if everyone decided to cut back on added-sugars to the recommended dose, the food industry giants, whose primary source of income is through processed, sugar-filled garbage, would collapse financially. Essentially eliminating 80% of the food choices is not realistic for the industry, and it definitely does not constitute accessibility for the consumer to no-added-sugar food to assume personal responsibility.
Affordability:
You have to be able to actually afford the limited supply of non-added-sugar-filled-food. As stated previously, it is possible, though difficult, to live a low-sugar lifestyle. It requires more time researching and reading before grocery shopping and more money. The products without added sugars don’t come cheap.
The market is so flooded with processed foods, it is nearly impossible for fresh fruits and other sugar free options to offer a competitive price. The government can’t blame the person for choosing the strawberry flavored gummies over the fresh strawberries when there’s a significant price difference between the two.
So What Are We Going to Do?
We can’t solve a health crisis that affects the majority of America and chalk it up to personal responsibility. It’s an unrealistic expectation to say “Cut back on sugar and just get moving!” and then Bam! The crisis is solved. This is about instituting a mass change in the dominating food industry.
I know, it seems almost as unrealistic as leaving it up to will power, but a tyrant, private industry in the U.S. has been stopped before. There were huge marketing restrictions placed on the tobacco industry to prevent misleading advertisements and protect public health. There has even been successful regulation and change in the food industry before when the FDA finally cracked down on labeling and put limits on trans fat, forcing food companies to make big changes to their food content. It is clear that changes in the sugar industry are not only possible, but also well within the realm of reasonable expectations.
The Most Important Changes
Advertising:
The most amazing delicious substance for your breakfast toast, Nutella, is advertised as “an example of a tasty, yet balanced, breakfast.” From this and the commercials, it seems like Nutella is supposed to be a substitute for things like jam, butter, and peanut butter. However, it’s more accurately a substitute for Betty Crocker’s Fudge Icing. Actually, it’s an even more unhealthy option than the fudge icing.
The icing actually has less sugar than Nutella. It also beats Nutella out in terms of total calories and total fat per serving. You would never consider putting a cake topping onto your toast for breakfast in the morning healthy, but you might justify Nutella because of the misleading message it advertises to you.
And when things like this are acceptable:
We know it’s time for a change. These companies, who are allowed to run wild onto our TVs and computers, need stricter rules and regulations, so children can’t be misled into thinking that a bowl of Lucky Charms or Cocoa Puffs are actually “better for you” breakfast options.
Some advertisers believe it would be impossible to market their products successfully with strict guidelines. If the food is unsellable through honest advertising, then that’s a sign the food itself needs to be changed and modified to actually reflect these “healthy option” standards companies are claiming.
Subsidizing:
Subsidizing is a really great way for the government to play favorites. The things that get the most money, like sugar and corn (which is just contributes more sugar), are treated like the child prodigies that got straight As in high school and got accepted to an ivy league school; except they’ve actually been cheating off their far superior, honest, hard-working, brother, who no one cares about: fresh fruit and vegetables. And now the unsung heroes get nothing but the leftovers from the government subsidies.
The corn industry is one of these cheating child prodigies. Between 1994 and 2004 the USDA dished out $41.8 billion of its $113.6 billion subsidy budget to the corn industry alone. It’s the foundation of our food industry, playing some part of the process in almost everything we eat, going almost unnoticed in most areas.
So to be completely fair, not all of the corn produced gets processed as an added-sugar, BUT it is a big enough amount that corn-based sugars, like the most famous villain: high-fructose corn syrup, are the most common additives in our favorite foods. The only other fruit or vegetable to get any money from that $113.6 billion was apples, receiving less than 2% of what corn got. So I’m not saying take away all the corn money, but the corn can step down and share the wealth with some other fruits and vegetables, that can contribute to the public in a healthier way on sustainable, diverse farms.
Think I’m being too harsh on the corn industry and those other phony prodigies?
I suppose that’s fair. I won’t bother with the argument that the government should invest in the natural food industry for the sole reason that the affordable food should be the food that’s the healthiest, because the whole putting public health over private wealth concept isn’t as popular as I would hope. Money makes the world go round, and it is a scarce resource so the government has to be selective when handing it out. So I’ll just ask a few questions: Do you think the government should subsidize the industries that produce the largest quantity of food for the least amount of money? How about the industry that can provide the most jobs for the American people?
Can you guess what industry that is? I’ll even give you a hint: it’s not the one that makes Gushers fruit gummies cheaper than grapes at Safeway. The natural food industry can actually produce more food per acre and use more jobs than large-scale factory farms producing corn. They also can employ more people.
If I were an investor, I would want to invest in a company that produces the most goods and helps the most people for the least amount of money. Subsidizing makes the government the investors. It’s time we tell them where they should be investing because the industry that gets the most money can offer lower prices.
So I’ve said a lot.
I’ve given a lot of information from why sugar is a problem to what we can do to make a big change to see the big results that everyone wants. Let me also be clear in what I’m NOT saying:
I’m NOT saying that maintaining a healthy lifestyle is completely out of your control. You do have the responsibility of keeping a fairly active lifestyle in order to get exercise.
I’m also NOT saying that just because the foods without added sugars are few and far between and expensive, it gives you the excuse to live off Frappuccinos and ice cream forever. There are still obvious places where you can make cuts in your sugar intake.
BUT HOPEFULLY, now you are a little more informed about how big of a part sugar plays in your health and everyday life. Hopefully, you’ll look a little closer at your food labels. Hopefully, you’ll speak a little louder against these food industry tyrants and demand a big change so we can see some big results.
If you want to get more information on this please feel free to take a look at the sites and studies I’ve consulted, and go see this movie, Fed Up, coming out on May 9! Also, a special thank you to Dr. Anne Shovic, Associate Professor in the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Food Science and Human Nutrition department for her input!
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