How Refined Sugar Is Killing Us
by
Dickie Paria, Ph.D.
Smashwords Edition
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Copyright 2011 by Dickie Paria, Ph.D.
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents:
What Exactly Is Refined Sugar?
Is There A Simple Sugar-Free Diet Plan?
If you are reading this book, then it is likely that you are fat, have medical issues with heart disease, diabetes, cholesterol, high blood pressure and gum disease or a combination of them. You feel tired and haven’t been sleeping restfully. You have tried diets and exercising but your waist size keeps expanding. You then chanced upon an internet discussion or video or article that discusses how sugar is harming you. Your curiosity is piqued and you decide to do further research. Until a short while ago, I was in the same boat. Here’s my story.
I had just moved to the town of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts and had driven over to the ReadyMed clinic located in the center of the Lakeside Business District to get a prescription for an asthma inhaler. I was 44 years old and had had asthma since I was 25. It was supposed to be routine. However, the nurse doing the preliminary exam gave me a worried look after taking my blood pressure. The doctor walked in and after consultation with the nurse, took my blood pressure again. She muttered that something must be wrong as she took my blood pressure again on the other arm. By now, alarm bells were going off in my mind and I waited with dread to hear the result. She said that it was 180 over something (I didn’t hear the rest) and that I should be on medication right away. I was in shock and never heard anything else. I walked out of the clinic in a daze and drove to the nearest Walgreen to get my blood pressure medication.
During my college years, from 1985 through 1990, I was 170 lbs and in great shape. I worked out regularly and never seemed to get tired from study, work, and partying. After graduation, I went for my PhD and then joined the rat race. I started gaining weight which would send me into bouts of dieting and exercising. I tried various diets and exercises that were trending at that time and did lose weight. However, the weight loss was short term and dieting and exercising got harder and harder as the years went by.
I got married in 1997 and my daughter was born in 2001. Career and family responsibilities took up all my time. My weight gradually ballooned to 245 lbs. I only noticed the weight gain when relatives or friends who hadn’t seen me in years would comment. Or, if I went to buy pants and would have to buy one size larger than usual. I hated looking at photos of myself. I was fat but refused to accept the fact.
Our favorite grocery store was Whole Foods and we bought only organic or all natural foods. We took pride in “eating healthy”. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and diabetes were health problems that happened to others. Outside of my asthma and periodontitis, I did not have any critical health issues. Nonetheless, everything wasn’t all right. I had trouble sleeping at night. I would get sleepy during the day. I felt stressed out which I chalked up to work pressure. I didn’t like doing any physical work. Playing outdoors with my daughter became a chore. And I was always tired. I came to accept this as the norm for being “middle aged”.
The shock of being diagnosed with hypertension was followed by another whammy. Blood taken for testing during the clinic visit showed that I had very high cholesterol level and my LDL or bad cholesterol was off the charts! Furthermore, my blood sugar was on the high side but not yet critical. For weeks I walked around feeling that I would keel over and die at any moment. I felt I would suffer a stroke every time I had an ache or pain. I was sure I would get a heart attack from the stress. And every morning I was taking pills.
My life changing epiphany on the havoc that refined sugar was doing to my body occurred on April 13, 2011 when I stumbled upon Gary Taubes “Is Sugar Toxic?” article in the New York Times. One line in particular resonated with me. “……….sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles – heart disease, hypertension, and many common cancers among them.” I quickly jumped on the computer and Googled for additional information. What I found in my initial research astounded me.
I recalled the food I had eaten over the last few days. I checked the refrigerator and the pantry. I was shocked when I came to the realization that I was eating the equivalent of many spoonfuls of sugar every day. Some meals were almost entirely all sugar! I was poisoning myself and my family without realizing it. I discussed these findings with my wife and we determined to cut or limit sugar from our diet.
Once I cut the sugar from my diet, the changes to my body were dramatic and swift. Within a week, I had lost two pounds and my pants felt loose around my waist. I felt energized at work and couldn’t wait to come home to play with my daughter or to go out with my wife to walk our dog. In a month’s time, I lost 12 lbs effortlessly. My blood pressure and cholesterol were near normal. My asthma had not occurred since I gave up on sugar. My dentist said that my gum disease was showing a lot of improvement. I gave up the pills and slept like a baby at night. Life was good again.
I have a PhD in Economics and read voraciously. Yet, I was surprised at how little I knew about basic food information like calories, food labels, metabolism, insulin, diabetes, obesity, etc. The changes to my body and my research convinced me that ingesting refined sugars in whatever form are the equivalent of taking slow poison.
This is a short book. Unlike other books on diets and nutrients, which have a few pages of useful information followed by pages of recipes, this book gives you concise information on the how we become fat, how to read food labels to avoid refined sugars, a simple method for determining the sugars we consume, the dangers to our bodies from ingesting refined sugars, and an easy diet plan. There are no recipes in this book to fill the pages. No elaborate plan to count the calories. Eat as much as you want, whenever you want. Simply follow the easy diet suggestions and you will lose weight rapidly and effortlessly. The side effect of losing the fat is that you will lower your bad cholesterol, lower your blood pressure, reduce or eliminate your diabetes, gain energy, and otherwise live a very healthful life.
[Note: In this book, I have used the term “sugar” and “refined sugar” interchangeably. As you will realize by the end of this book, there are good sugars and bad sugars. The good sugars are found in fruits and vegetables when eaten in their naturally occurring state. Refined sugars (or man-made sugars) are the bad sugars and they are found in processed foods.]
Entire books have been written on how the body utilizes the foods we eat. We are only interested in the sugars that we ingest since excess sugar will lead to fat and set us on the road to ill health. How we get fat can be explained quite simply. The food that you eat can be broken up into proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Proteins (generally, found in naturally occurring meats, fish, eggs, and tofu) help build your muscles. Fats (generally found in all foods except for certain fruits and vegetables) protect your vital organs, build your cell structure, and help carry vitamins and other chemicals throughout your body. The nutrient that is relevant to us is carbohydrates (generally found in all foods except naturally occurring meats, fish, and eggs). Carbohydrates have essentially one basic function and that is to supply our body with energy. The body does this by breaking down all carbohydrates into a sugar molecule called glucose. Glucose, flowing through your bloodstream (also called blood sugar), is the fuel that is used by the muscles and central nervous system for energy. Even the fats and proteins that you eat are, indirectly, broken down into glucose. Quite simply, the body uses the glucose for everyday activity. What it cannot use, it converts into a molecule called glycogen that is stored around the body. It is this excess that is converted to fat in your body. The more sugar we eat, the more we are likely to get fat which in turn will lead to obesity, diabetes, high bad cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other diseases.
So, how many calories should we consume to insure that we cut the sugar in our diet? The average adult needs about 2000 calories a day. This translates to a ham, egg, and cheese bagel, with a fruit/yogurt parfait, and a pulp-free orange juice for breakfast (approximately 900 calories in total); a Caesar salad with grilled chicken for lunch (300 calories); a beef jerky for an afternoon snack (80 calories); and an entire sausage and pepperoni pizza (560 calories) for dinner. Hah! That’s a decent day’s worth of food and we haven’t crossed 2000 calories in total. So, all those dangerous theories on cutting calories by drinking juices or eating only one kind of nutrient that we have been fed for years can be thrown out of the window. All they did was help sell books or juicer machines.
The normal human does not get fat from overeating. We eat until we feel satiated and then we stop eating. You may binge if you hit the all-you-can-eat buffet or when you visit your mother and gorge on mom’s home cooked meals. But, these are rare occasions.
Perhaps you get fat because you don’t exercise enough. If you are like me, you work from 8:30am through 5pm, commute about two hours, go for a short walk with the dog, and then collapse in front of the television. Exercising has many benefits but weight loss is the least among them. Only a very small portion of your total weight loss can be attributed to exercise. Actually, the more energy you expend exercising, the hungrier you are likely to get. You can safely throw out all those books that advocate ab crunches, and spinning exercises, and hot yoga and claim that you will lose weight if you burn off more calories than you consume. No need to go through life on a treadmill.
So, if we don’t overeat and we don’t exercise, then what makes us fat? As explained in an earlier paragraph, it is quite simply the foods we eat. Specifically, it is the carbohydrates that you consume which determine how fat you get. We expend a tremendous amount of energy simply from the act of breathing. Whether waking or sleeping, cell metabolism in our bodies use up almost all the energy generated from the food we eat. The carbohydrates break down into glucose (a sugar), which is then utilized by the cells. Any excess sugar that is not utilized then gets converted into fat. To reverse weight loss, eliminate the sugars you can control and your body will burn the glucose in your body for energy without converting any sugars to fat. If you are obese, and you eliminate the sugars in your diet, then your body will work in reverse by burning up the stored fat for energy. That will cause you to lose weight rapidly. You will never gain that weight back unless you reintroduce refined sugars in your diet.