Yes. Fine. I obsess about food and what’s healthy enough to eat on a regular basis. And maaaybe my list is a little short for a lot of people.
But my diet is a free-for-all compared to that of my friend who basically can’t eat sugar.
I don’t mean she just avoids sweets and alcohol. No. She doesn’t eat wheat, fungus, vinegar, fruit, white rice, glazed meats, beets or sweets and alcohol. In extreme cases she also cuts starches like beans and carrots.
There’s a ton of other stuff but I can never remember it all.
At first, this sounds insane. And granted, she’s not typical and is pretty strict with herself. But she was dealing with symptoms ranging from anxiety to skin issues to breathing trouble to mouth sores.
When we were kids, she thought her trouble (then mainly canker sores) was from acidic things like tomatoes and citrus. Later, she wondered if it was gluten. She finally realized through research and trial and error that sugar was most likely the culprit. Now, when she sticks to the diet she’s built for herself, her symptoms subside significantly.
There’s a lot of focus on cutting fat and salt, which is great. We also talk about cutting sugar, but it turns into either simply avoiding candy and soda or cutting carbs altogether. The thing is that sugar is everywhere, both added and natural. While most of us don’t need to worry about the natural sugars in fruit and grains, we should be conscious of the fact that not all of these sugars are equal and that we get way more of them than our bodies are evolved to handle.
So why sugar again, and why now?
Well, I’m looking in the mirror. I cut out meat, slashed sodium, scaled back dairy, reintroduced seafood and rarely eat sweets (um, pre/post pregnancy). Yet I feel like something is being ignored, because it’s still really easy to eat unhealthfully.
In addition to the fillers, fake flavors and colors, preservatives, etc. in processed food, sugar is lurking under mysterious names like dextrose, evaporated cane juice, maltose, syrup, (high fructose) corn syrup, fruit juice concentrates and more. Even worse, “healthy” vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, raw and organic foods can contain just as much (if not more) sugar than conventional foods.
This is not helping me manage my food OCD.
The problem isn’t fat, salt or even sugar. It’s the huge quantities in which we eat them. I mean, how much added sugar were our early human ancestors eating at the end of the ice age? My guess is that fat and salt outweighed added sugar, and natural sugar certainly wasn’t as readily available without planted orchards and grain fields.
Today, we are addicted to the stuff.
If, like me, you’ve dropped/slashed soda, pastries, candies, flavored yogurt, bread with HFCS, condiments and sauces, fruit juice and refined grains, and then upped veggies and varied whole grains, what else is there to do?
Keep on keepin’ on, and spread the word. The only reason sugar is so pervasive is because the manufacturers perpetuate the cycle because we like sugar because it’s in everything because sweet sells because sweet is attractive because it indicates the food is safe to eat (i.e. not poisonous to primitive peoples).
See that? Evolution wins every time. Problem is, we haven’t evolved to keep up with all that sugar consumption. Never will. So all that sugar is completely unnecessary.
In summary: Read labels, vote with your dollars, don’t get diabetes. Research the Paleo diet and evolutionary medicine.
Perhaps we need a “drug” program about the stuff…?
Preach it, Sister!
🙂