The Bitter Truth About Sugar by Dr. Mercola

    This is a great time to be reading this article which is posted on Dr. Mercola's site because most of us are making New Year's resolutions to eat better.  This is added encouragement to stop the sugar consumption.  But don't be fooled into thinking that using a sugar substitute is a good alternative because it is even worse than sugar.  See earlier blogposts on Jan. 21, 30 and Nov. 11, 2013 on aspartame and Dec. 13, 2013 on Splenda for information on their effects on your body.  The solution is to stop consuming sugar (and white flour which is turned into sugar) so that our bodies can recover.

The Bitter Truth About Sugar

December 31, 2014 | 

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By Dr. Mercola

Dr. Robert Lustig, a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at UC San Francisco, has been on the forefront of the movement to educate people about the health hazards of sugar and fructose in particular, for a number of years now.

In the video above, he discusses how low-fat recommendations have led to a dramatic increase in sugar consumption, and it is in fact sugar, not fat, that drives heart disease.

Excess sugar is also a primary factor in countless other chronic disease states. This is a topic he delves into in-depth in his new book, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease.

The excessive amount of “stealth” sugar in processed foods has quite literally become the backbone that supports America’s disease care business.

According to the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s 2013 study1 “Sugar: Consumption at a Crossroads,” up to 40 percent of US healthcare expenditures are for diseases directly related to the overconsumption of sugar! 

Sugar Masquerading as Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner...

A major problem with processed food is that when you look at the label, you have no way of knowing how much of the sugar is natural to the food itself, versus the sugar that was added.  

Even foods that are typically considered “healthy” can contain shocking amounts of added sugar or fructose, typically in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Clinical trials have shown that those who consume HFCS tend to develop higher risk factors for cardiovascular disease within as little as two weeks, so if I had to pick out the worst culprit among sugars, it would be fructose.

According to Dr. Lustig, it’s important to distinguish between natural food-based sugars versus added sugar.

For example, he notes that a small serving cup of plain yogurt has about seven grams of sugar in the form of lactose, a natural sugar found in dairy, which does not cause any major harm.

A fruit flavored yogurt on the other hand, contains about 19 grams of sugar, 12 grams of which is added sugar. This equates to eating a small cup of plain yoghurt with a bowl of Frosted Corn Flakes.

According to Dr. Lustig, we “abdicated rational nutrition when we went to processed foods.” The low-fat craze has been particularly harmful, because when the food industry removed the fat, they had to put lots of sugar in. Without either fat or sugar, the food is unpalatable and no one would buy it.

We now know that good nutrition includes healthy fat, and quite a bit of it, and that sugar is a primary driver of chronic inflammation and related health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

In short, by removing fat and adding sugar, the processed food industry has created a smorgasbord of made to order disease... Besides enormous amounts of sugar, processed foods are also loaded with ingredients that have been banned in other countries, such as trans fats, artificial sweeteners, genetically engineered ingredients, and glyphosate.

Soda Companies’ Secret Business-Building Strategy—Soda Increases Thirst!    

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