Sugar Has 56 Names: A Shopper's Guide (A Penguin Special from Hudson Street Press)
106
Sugar Has 56 Names: A Shopper's Guide (A Penguin Special from Hudson Street Press)
106eBookDigital original (Digital original)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780698144316 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2013 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 106 |
| Sales rank: | 567,312 |
| File size: | 474 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have so many people to thank for helping me to discover, synthesize, and validate all the information I espouse, and I recognized my extended personal and academic families in Fat Chance. For this e-book, credit goes to Matt Chamberlain, my buddy and computer guru, for helping with the formatting and presentation of the data. But this e-book is purely, solely, and completely the brainchild of my wonderful wife, Julie K. Lustig, RN, MS, CPNP. Julie is a pediatric nurse practitioner, so she lives, eats, and sleeps medicine just like I do, and she’s a parent to our two wonderful (and nutritionally conscious) children, Miriam and Meredith, who spent long hours in several supermarkets taking pictures of labels and helping to collate the data. It truly was a family affair. Julie knows how important it is to get this information out to the public. She is not at all interested in notoriety, she would tell you she did nothing for this, and that this is not even the e-book she had envisioned. But trust me, this is the sum product of four months of every spare moment of her life, in the supermarket no less. A truly heroic effort. If it weren’t for her need to finish what she started, this e-book would never have seen the light of digital day. If and when you see her in the supermarket, a simple “thank you” will do.
—RHL
PART I
How to Shop
CHAPTER 1
The Stealth War
You’re an unwitting combatant. You’ve got a target painted on your back. You’re under siege in your own home. The battlefield seems benign enough: the aisles and shelves of the local supermarket. The stakes are your tastebuds, your money, your well-being and happiness, and, most important, your health. You’re at war with the food industry, whether you like it or not. Their short-term goal is to dip into your pocket and relieve you of your cash, dangling the one thing you need for survival—food. But the food they peddle is the food that costs them the least and pays them the most. What’s good for them is bad for you; what’s good for you is bad for them. There is no middle ground. Your long-term goal is to live a long, happy, and healthy life. Your short-term strategy is to survive the gauntlet of the local Safeway or Giant or Jewel or D’Agostino or Kroger. And woe unto you who trips on the landmine of a 7-Eleven. You need all the help you can get, or you’ll be among the victims, strewn far and wide. My goal is to help you detoxify your food purchases for your better health and happiness. This e-book is your survival guide. Part I is how to shop. Part II is what to shop.
I’m a physician, specifically a pediatrician. Our job is to give every kid a shot, to deliver our charges into adulthood free of chronic disease so that they can be valuable and productive members of society. Well, sadly my profession has been pretty ineffective. In 1980, 5 percent of children were above the ninety-fifth percentile for BMI. Today 20 percent are above the ninety-fifth percentile. In 1980, adolescent type 2 diabetics cases were so rare they were reportable. Today there are forty thousand, and one-third of all adolescents diagnosed with diabetes are now type 2. And in adults, America is up to an obesity prevalence of 30 percent and a diabetes prevalence of 8.3 percent. The data don’t lie, we’re losing the war. We’re up against a very powerful enemy—one that masquerades as our friend. Worse yet, the entire country has been brainwashed. As in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), where Laurence Harvey lost all conscious will whenever he viewed the Queen of Spades, so it is with the rest of us, who get weak at the knees at the sight of a Mrs. Fields cookie.
But here’s the nugget of truth. It’s not about obesity. Twenty percent of obese people are completely metabolically normal. They will live a healthy, productive life, die at a normal age, not cost the taxpayer any extra, not contribute to the demise of Medicare—they’re just fat. Conversely, up to 40 percent of the normal-weight population suffers from the same metabolic diseases as do the obese. Because it’s not about obesity. It never was. That’s what the food industry would have you believe. Because that way, they can point to other perpetrators, such as automobiles, televisions, video games, power mowers, white-collar occupations, and poor urban planning (no sidewalks, fear of crime) as reasons for our paucity of energy expenditure.
So what is it really about? Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease, one of many diseases within the scope of a cluster of diseases called “metabolic syndrome.” These are the diseases that “travel” with obesity. But they are not obesity. Because normal-weight patients get them, too. Metabolic syndrome includes high blood pressure, lipid disorders, heart disease, fatty liver disease, polycystic ovarian disease, cancer, and dementia. That’s what it’s really about—metabolic syndrome. Because these are the diseases people die of. Because this is what’s on the death certificate. Because that’s where the money goes—paying for disease treatment. And everyone is at risk. This is what my book Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease delineated, and offered real science to start the conversation to turn metabolic syndrome around.
All of these diseases are increased in prevalence due to energy overload and poor cellular energy processing. When your mitochondria (the energy-burning factories inside your cells) get overloaded, metabolic syndrome results. Metabolic syndrome is how cells stop working at optimal function, contributing to all of the degenerative diseases normally ascribed to aging. Metabolic syndrome is a mitochondrial disorder. Some call it mitochondrial overload, others call it “mitochondrial constipation.” It can happen to anyone, because any mitochondrion that gets overwhelmed by the plethora of energy it has to metabolize drives this process. And this is brought on by our current food environment. No amount of doctoring, no amount of medicine, can alleviate the scourge of our processed food supply on our mitochondria. Because our food supply has been spiked . . . adulterated . . . tainted. What has happened to our food over the past thirty years? Quite a bit, actually.
There is no question that the food industry has altered the food landscape over these past thirty years. In a December 2012 Mother Jones article, Gary Taubes and Cristin Couzens documented that the percent of our dollars spent on different food categories has markedly shifted.
Well, there you have it. Real food down, processed foods and sweets way, way up. There are many reasons why this change occurred. Single-parent households with no time to cook. A commuter culture needing sustenance on the road. The pursuit of the American ideal all over the world; the less food costs, the more iPads you could afford. The mantra of low fat, which increased the viability of high-carbohydrate and high-sugar snacks. Shift work, requiring twenty-four-hour food availability. In 1982, who would have tolerated the idea of having dinner at a gas station? Now it’s routine. Try to find a real meal on I-5 in California. And the food industry was happy to oblige.
The food industry did this without your consent, but nonetheless they did it with your tacit approval. They proactively hooked you, and they reactively offer you more. And they won’t change until you do. The rule of business is: if you won’t buy it, they won’t sell it.
This e-book is the shopping companion to Fat Chance. My goal is to explain your diet and your food choices so that your goal can be to choose better, and get better.
CHAPTER 2
The (Self-Administered) Weapons of Mass Destruction
To my count, eight changes have occurred to our food supply that have driven the development of these chronic metabolic diseases. And every one of them is something that the food industry has done to our food for its own purposes, not for ours.
First, the three things that are now in short supply:
1. Fiber. Everyone thinks fiber belongs in the wastebasket, that it’s the unwanted by-product of nature. In fact, fiber is the “stealth nutrient,” one of the most valuable items in nature. Fiber is the nutrient you don’t absorb. Fiber does two things that take the edge off your mitochondrial onslaught. First, the combination of soluble fiber (e.g., pectins, what holds jelly together) and insoluble fiber (e.g., cellulose, the stringy stuff in celery) help in your intestine to form a “gel,”—a secondary barrier that limits the rate of absorption of food and gives your liver a chance to metabolize it so your mitochondria don’t get overwhelmed. Think of it this way—suppose you had an extended-release formulation of a medication, say acetaminophen. The medication is trapped in a matrix that releases the medication slowly. Each pill delivers a certain dose over a long period of time. But let’s say the manufacturer forgot to add the matrix. The dose would be the same, but the amount delivered would be faster, so a higher, and potentially dangerous, blood level could be reached. That’s what fiber does—it acts as the matrix so the dose gets delivered slowly to the liver. Second, fiber increases the transit rate of food through the intestine, so the food reaches the end of the intestine faster, and the satiety hormone at the end of your intestine can tell your brain that you’re full, so you won’t eat the second portion. But processed food strips away the fiber, because you can’t freeze fiber. Take an orange, put it in the freezer overnight, set it on the counter the next morning, thaw it, and then try to eat it. See what you get. The orange turned to mush. Because the ice crystals damaged the cell walls of the plant, allowing water to rush in. But if you squeeze it and freeze it, then it lasts forever. This decreases depreciation, so the food industry loses less money. Good for their wallet. Maybe even good for your wallet. Bad for your health.
2. Omega-3 fatty acids. They are the precursors to the fatty acids EPA and DHA, which stabilize your immune system (anti-inflammatory) and your neurons (anti-dementia). But these are “essential” fatty acids. You must eat them; your body can’t make them. The most notable omega-3 in our diet is called linolenic acid, which is unfortunately in few foods anyway. Omega-3s are found in wild fish, which means that the coasts are more omega-3 replete than the nation’s midsection. Numerous studies show that omega-3 supplementation staves off the ravages of chronic disease. Wild fish don’t make omega-3s; they eat omega-3s. Algae make omega-3s. The wild fish eat the algae; we eat the wild fish. But we’re fishing the seas dry, and wild fish is more expensive. So we farm fish instead, and farmed fish eat corn, which has a paucity of omega-3s. You might as well just eat a steak.
3. Micronutrients. There is some early research that suggests that as we’ve bred bigger and sweeter fruits and produce, that the concentration of micronutrients and antioxidants in the food has declined. Also, many micronutrients hang out in the fiber fraction; for instance, beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency) was first noted in Japanese who ate polished rice; the B1 was in the fiber! Our processed-food diet is notoriously deficient in numerous vitamins, minerals, and cofactors.
Indeed, we have numerous micronutrients that, when deficient, cause disease. Well, we also have nutrient excesses, which cause disease. It’s really not different from any medication overdosage. The five nutrients in excess that can cause disease are:
1. Trans fats. Trans fats are the single most dangerous item in our food supply. Patented in 1902 and introduced into food (Crisco) in 1911, trans fats increase the shelf life of virtually everything to which they are added (thus, the “ten-year-old Twinkie”), because bacteria don’t have the machinery to digest the molecular trans double bond for energy. Unfortunately, our mitochondria are just refurbished bacteria—they even have their own DNA; we can’t metabolize trans fats, either! So, instead of our bodies metabolizing them for energy, they line our arteries and our livers. Trans fats are literally consumable poison. The good news is that their consumption is going down. Yet they are still legal, because the food industry wants them to be, and the FDA and USDA are “captured agencies” by the food and drug industries. More on trans fats later.
2. Omega-6 fatty acids. These lead to the production of arachidonic acid, which is the precursor to prostaglandins (the target of aspirin and other pain-killers), and other inflammatory agents in the body. Now, omega-6s are necessary for your immune system to function to rid yourself of foreign invaders. However, we’re supposed to strike a balance between pro-inflammatory omega-6s and anti-inflammatory omega-3s of about 1:1. Right now, we’re at about 25:1, meaning we are in a decidedly pro-inflammatory state. Omega-6s are found in vegetable oils (like canola and corn oil) and animals fed corn and soy. That means corn-fed steak, chickens fed commercial pellets (combination of corn and soy), and corn-fed farmed fish.
3. Branched-chain amino acids. These are the amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine. They are essential amino acids (components of protein, and only available by eating them) that account for >20 percent of the amino acids in the typical “Western diet.” This is what is in the “protein powders” that body builders love to consume. And if you are body building—that is, actively building muscle—then branched-chain amino acids are necessary, because you can’t make muscle without them. But if you are not actively building muscle (which is the majority of America), then these branched-chain amino acids go to the liver, where they are metabolized for energy. And guess where? Yup, the mitochondria. These amino acids can easily overwhelm the mitochondria’s capacity, and they will also be turned into liver fat. Studies show that branched-chain amino acid levels in the blood correlate with metabolic syndrome. And where do you find them? Any animal that eats corn—again, corn-fed beef, chicken, farmed fish. For instance, examine the “marbling” in the fat between corn-fed and grass-fed beef. The corn-fed beef is way more marbled. That’s muscle insulin resistance! It used to take eighteen months to bring a cow from birth to slaughter; now it takes six weeks. That cow has the same chronic metabolic disease we do; we just slaughter it before it gets sick. Between the omega-6s driving inflammation and the branched-chain amino acids, these animals become enormous very rapidly. You may never again look at a piece of meat the same way.
4. Alcohol. Alcohol is a little more complicated. A little seems to raise HDL levels and keep the liver on guard and prepared to metabolize other environmental toxins more rapidly, keeping you on metabolic alert, which can be beneficial. A little seems to improve insulin sensitivity. However, a lot does the exact opposite, by causing liver fat accumulation. A lot (more than two drinks per day) drives mitochondrial overload, so mitochondria have no choice but to turn that excess energy into liver fat; ergo the development of metabolic syndrome. In high and chronic dosage, alcohol fries your liver, leading to alcoholic cirrhosis and fibrosis. However, alcohol does not explain why children and Muslims around the world are getting metabolic syndrome as well.
5. Sugar (those compounds containing the sweet molecule fructose). Lots of sugar. Over-the-top sugar. The science shows that sugar is addictive. We have causative studies in animals and correlative studies in humans. Kind of like alcohol. Weakly so, and not in everyone, but addictive nonetheless in a percentage of the population. And habituating (sugar as a taste preference) in the rest. So spiking the food supply with all this excess sugar keeps the addiction going, because you can’t go “cold turkey.” New imaging data shows that fructose lights up the parts of the brain. Weakly so, like alcohol, and not in everyone. But it doesn’t matter. Because the food industry knows, when they add it . . . you buy more. And more. Sugar sells. But sugar kills, because sugar is metabolized by the liver mitochondria to liver fat. So why does sugar kill? If it’s not about obesity, what is it about? It’s about metabolic syndrome. Sugar overloads liver mitochondria, the excess gets turned into liver fat, and that drives metabolic syndrome. My colleagues and I have shown that sugar is the proximate cause of diabetes worldwide. Preventing diabetes means less liver fat. Surviving our toxic food environment means cutting back on sugar consumption. The American Heart Association says Americans currently consume twenty-two teaspoons of sugar per day, and we are remanded to reduce this to nine teaspoons per day for adult men and six teaspoons per day for adult women. The problem is, how can you do this when half of the added sugar you consume is in foods that you didn’t know even had sugar—for instance, yogurt, tomato sauce, salad dressing, barbecue sauce, hamburger buns, even bratwurst! Yes, it’s 1 gram per sausage in several brands, but nonetheless—sugar in your brats?
And it doesn’t matter what kind of sugar we’re talking about. Everyone pins the obesity epidemic on the advent of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which first appeared in our food around 1975. The obesity epidemic started in earnest in 1980. So it’s not surprising that HFCS takes the rap. But here’s the problem—HFCS is only available in the United States, Canada, and Japan, with limited exposure in part of Europe. The rest of the world just has sucrose—table sugar, cane sugar, beet sugar; you know, the white stuff you put in your coffee. And they have every bit as much diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. Just take a look at Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Malaysia. They have the highest rates of diabetes on the planet. Why them? No alcohol . . . but they consume soft drinks like they’re going out of style. Because it’s hot; because their water supply is a big question mark; and because . . . no alcohol! Soft drinks are their reward! And they need their reward.
Alcohol is self-limiting (drinking yourself under the table); soft drinks are not. Combine the sugar with another addictive substance—caffeine—and you have a truly toxic and addictive brew called “soda” (or “pop” or “tonic, ” depending on where you live).
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