Sugar – Are you singing the sugar blues?

sugar cool math

Let’s be honest, maintaining healthy weight with all the sugar options available is much harder to do today than it was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago. It just seems a bit unfair, but we are humans and we adapt. Sometimes we just don’t adapt fast enough.

Back when we had to hunt and forage for food, our brains were perfectly suited to seeking out calorie dense foods which was a good thing because we never knew when the next meal was coming and we had to expend a lot of energy to get a meal, so it needed to be a good one.

Now we live with food on every corner, donuts in meetings, and candy bowls on desks. And sugar comes in so much more variety. Honey was about the only option in our foraging days, not we’ve got sugar combined with fat and salt; think of all the different ways we do chocolate, salted caramel, cookies, cakes, pies, pastries. I mean it just goes on and on!

Unfortunately for us, our brains haven’t quite adapted to our abundance of food. It’s still in the pattern of seeking out calorie dense and highly rewarding food and when the brain sees death by chocolate cake, it’s eyes get big and does a touch down dance; SCORE! Think about it; lots of yummy, satisfying calories and it didn’t involve any effort except that of you moving a fork from the plate to your mouth.

So, yes, it’s harder for us today, but not impossible. Here are some strategies to help retrain your brain:

  • If you don’t buy it, you can’t eat it – the first thing you can do is keep your money in your wallet. It’s much easier to talk yourself out of buying a decadent treat than it is to stop yourself from eating it. Call someone if you need to.
  • You don’t have to eat the whole thing – if your money does come out of the wallet, take up to 4 bites and leave the rest. It will satisfy your cravings without sabotaging your goals. You can also share.
  • Eat it with a meal – making dessert part of a meal allows the fat, protein, and fiber from the meal to help slow the release of sugar into the bloodstream so you don’t end up with roller coaster blood sugar where it goes high and then comes crashing down, leaving you with more cravings for sugar.
  • Get your sugar fix with healthier options – try berries and whipped cream, a kids size scoop of ice cream with cinnamon, frozen grapes, frozen bananas dipped in dark chocolate (at least 70% cacao), or apples stir fried in butter with cinnamon and ginger. You’ll get some nutrients with these treats and they will help cut cravings for more extreme desserts.
  • Create barriers – if you want a treat, make it yourself instead of buying it premade. This helps you expend a few extra calories in obtaining it and allows you to control the ingredients so you can use healthier fats, reduce the sugar and use more nutritive sweeteners. Plus, if you have to make it, you might just decide to do without. Another barrier you can set up is cost. Get more nutritive sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, molasses, coconut sugar, and date sugar. These are more expensive than white sugar which can help to cut down on the amount of sweets you eat.

Note: If you’re looking to make a change with a fresh start then check out this other Family Health Advocacy article on cleansing in just 21 days.

If you just can’t resist the sweet treats, examine your diet. You might not be getting enough salt and fat. It might take some practice and a few strategies, but you can get the upper hand when it comes to sugar.  Be careful with artificial sweeteners as well.  You may think that you’ve found a healthy alternative but all sweeteners are not created equal and many come with some serious health risks.

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What is a Meal Replacement Shake and Why are they Pushed on the Elderly?

What is a Meal Replacement Shake?

You’ve seen them advertised on tv. Boost. Ensure. Those meal replacements in a bottle, with elderly ladies jumping on a trampoline or elderly men finishing what looks to have been a marathon, who are just overjoyed with happiness, radiant health and physical activity.

Cut to…. having these shakes be recommended by doctors for patients who are suffering the effects of chemotherapy, and are not hungry due to the poisons being pumped into them, who have no energy to exist, due to the poisons being pumped into them (a topic explored in another blog here!), or for those people living in a nursing home who maybe struggle to eat properly due to denture issues, decreased appetite or various other health issues.

First of all, what is in those meal replacement shakes? Can it even be called food?

It is definitely not food. It is a chemical concoction of food-like substances created in the lab with a whole lot of sugar added to it. They are marketed (very well) to medical doctors, nurses and health aids to recommend to their patients, but it seems the ingredient list is lost in translation.

Here, we break it down. Can you even recognize any of these ingredients as real food?

Ensure Plus® Milk Chocolate

Water, Corn Maltodextrin, Sugar, Blend of Vegetable Oils (Canola, Corn), Milk Protein Concentrate, Soy Protein Isolate, Cocoa Powder (Processed with Alkali).

Less than 0.5% of: Nonfat Milk, Magnesium Phosphate, Sodium Citrate, Soy Lecithin, Natural & Artificial Flavor, Calcium Phosphate, Potassium Chloride, Cellulose Gum, Potassium Citrate, Choline Chloride, Ascorbic Acid, Cellulose Gel, Carrageenan, Salt, Ferric Phosphate, dl-Alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate, Zinc Sulfate, Niacinamide, Manganese Sulfate, Calcium Pantothenate, Copper Sulfate, Thiamine Chloride Hydrochloride, Vitamin A Palmitate, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Riboflavin, Folic Acid, Biotin, Chromium Chloride, Sodium Molybdate, Sodium Selenate, Potassium Iodide, Vitamin B12, Phylloquinone, and Vitamin D3.

There are 22 grams of processed sugar in one 250mL bottle.
Processed sugar FEEDS cancer cells. Yet they are highly recommended to everyone who has chosen to take chemotherapy because they HAVE CANCER. Too much sugar can also destabilize blood sugar, lead to sugar spikes and crashes and cause moodiness.

There is also less than 1 gram of fibre in the entire bottle, which is an essential piece of our nutritional needs. It helps to move things through the digestive system and sweeps up toxins as it goes.

The canola or corn oil are both extremely inflammatory compounds and cause a great deal of havoc in the body.

All of the vitamins and minerals that are in the bottle are synthetic, and your body really has no idea what to do with them. Your body likes natural vitamins and minerals from real food, as they are synergistically available to work together in the body. There are many vitamins/minerals that need others to be fully utilized by the body, and Mother Nature provides this for us in REAL FOOD.

There are many artificial ingredients in this bottle which help to create flavour, thickness,  colour and preservatives to let it sit on the shelf for months. All of which cause a host of inflammatory responses in the body.

What should you eat instead?

For people who are suffering ill effects from chemotherapy, or have decreased appetites, or anyone who needs to eat when they may not feel like it, a simple smoothie is the best recommendation.

For example, you could blend up a bit of frozen banana and strawberries with almond milk and that would be a perfectly healing meal (that needs no replacement!)

Or raspberries, blueberries and peaches.

Or strawberries, kiwi and natural peanut butter.

It does not matter what the combination is, as long as the person enjoys the ingredients. There is a much higher chance of them drinking something fruity and palatable than blended green vegetables to start. Meet them where they are at, and if it is a plant based, whole food – throw it in that blender and I really hope they enjoy it!

With Sources from:

https://ensure.com/nutrition-products/ensure-plus#milk-chocolate
https://draxe.com/meal-replacement-shakes/

What Otto Warburg Actually Discovered About Cancer

5 Hacks to Upgrade Your Paleo Diet

5 Hacks to Upgrade Your Paleo DIet

There are so many diet plans that you can choose from to follow, but it really comes down to how your body functions best. You know your body and how you function, and how your body feels after eating certain foods.

That’s not to say that you can proclaim “my body feels best on bread and chips” just because your taste buds like it.

This is a real observation about how your body feels after eating meat, or dairy or starches.

It’s time to listen to your body because it’s easier to hear it when it whispers, than when it has to start shouting.

So if you have listened to your body and chosen to follow a Paleo diet, there are a few ways to make it even better.

But first of all, let’s break the Paleo diet down.

A Paleo diet consists of foods that mimic what our pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer ancestors may have hunted, gathered or foraged for in the wild. Such as a variety of meats and vegetables and a small amount of fruits and nuts. No grains or processed sugar.

Hacks to Upgrade Your Diet:

1. Buy Organic!

Organic foods that are not treated with pesticides and heavy metal toxins contain more accessible vitamins and minerals that conventionally grown produce. They may cost a bit more, but they are definitely worth it. To learn more about the value of organic, check out our previous blog on The Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 here.

2. What Meat are You Eating?

Think back a few million years. Were there abundant sources or added growth hormones, antibiotics or vaccines added to the animals’ feed? I doubt it. So steer clear now!! Choose organic, grass-fed beef, buffalo, free-range chicken, wild caught salmon, elk, venison, etc.

3. Focus on Veggies

Choose a variety of leafy and cruciferous veggies to go with every meal! That means kale, lettuce, spinach, Bok Choy, Celery, Brocoli, Cauliflower, and Brussels Sprouts. Also add in low-sugar fruit, like raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, cranberries and Granny Smith apples. These fruits will not spike your blood sugar. Raw nuts and seeds and avocados are great sources of healthy fats.

4. What else are you eating?

Food marketing companies are very tricky – they can put Paleo on just about anything and get away with it! I don’t think that cookies, bread and chips were available in the wild a million years ago, but somehow they have found their way to the Paleo aisle at the grocer. They tend to have excessive amounts of sugar, sweeteners, preservatives and varying degrees of unhealthy additives but fly off the shelves because they are “Paleo”.

I also don’t think that our ancestors had a deli they strolled up to and ordered salami, pastrami or any other nitrate-filled preserved deli meat. Eat real food!!

5. Mix it Up

Who says you have to be purely Paleo every day? Agricultural developments and transportation advancements have allowed for nutrient, vitamin and fibre-rich foods to come along. If your body likes legumes as they are significantly lighter to digest than meat, give it legumes! Or if you like freshly squeezed orange juice in the morning, have at it! Listen to your body and hear what it has to say.

How Processed Sugar Destroys Your Body

How Processed Sugar Destroys Your Body

How much processed sugar sneaks into your diet in a day? You may be surprised at how many grams of sugar you are consuming without even realizing it.

For example, a quick visit to Tim Hortons for breakfast, lunch or snack with a fairly routine order can tip the scales of sugar content at over 30 grams!! That is a lot of sugar for your body to process all at once, especially when the sugars are all processed, accompanied by equally processed foods around it.

A Tim Hortons Cinnamon Raisin bagel (11 grams) with plain cream cheese (2 grams), Double-Double Coffee (18 grams) = 31 grams of sugar

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre advises that women should consume no more than 25 grams of sugar per day, and men should consume no more than 37 grams of sugar per day.

So after one stop at Tim Horton’s you’ve maxed your entire daily recommended sugar intake in just one blow! Think about the rest of your day… how will that look? A sandwich for lunch? A granola bar for snack? Pasta for dinner? Your processed sugar intake is adding up to look mountainous.

So what is the problem with sugar?

Sugar is an anti-nutrient. It causes your body to leach nutrients in its attempt to clean up the damage that sugar leaves behind. It also directly feeds cancer cells, and causes serious inflammation.

Inflammation is the cause behind almost every single illness and condition, and sugar continues to fuel inflammation rather effectively once it has started. Because of its oxidative effect on the body, it can contribute to a whole host of conditions and issues that may be misdiagnosed as other illnesses or causes, but in actuality, the cause is actually the over consumption of processed sugar.

How can processed sugar affect your body?

According to Nancy Appleton, Ph.D., there are over 146 reasons that sugar is ruining your health. Here are the worst offenders, and if you’d like the full list and references, head over to http://www.rheumatic.org/sugar.htm

• Sugar can suppress the immune system.
• High intake of sugar increases the risk of Crohn’s disease, and ulcerative colitis.
• Sugar can cause a rapid rise of adrenaline levels in children.
• Sugar can cause heart disease.
• Sugar can cause appendicitis.
• Sugar can cause multiple sclerosis.
• Sugar can contribute to osteoporosis.
• Sugar causes food allergies.
• Sugar can cause cataracts.
• Sugar can increase kidney size and produce pathological changes in the kidney.
• Sugar can cause myopia (nearsightedness).
• Sugar increases the risk of gastric cancer.
• Sugar can cause depression.
• Sugar can adversely affect school children’s grades and cause learning disorders..
• Sugar feeds cancer.
• Sugar can exacerbate PMS.
• Sugar can slow down the ability of the adrenal glands to function.
• Sugar can increase the risk of stomach cancer.
• Sugar can cause low birth weight babies.
• High sugar intake can cause epileptic seizures.

These are very serious conditions and illnesses that are completely preventable! Reduce your processed sugar and processed foods intake by increasing your whole foods intake. Crowd out the bad foods with lots of delicious, colourful produce! Focus your diet on lots of leafy green vegetables, smoothies with berries and healthy fats, fresh fruits and vegetables, raw nuts and seeds, legumes and if you choose to eat meat or eggs, be sure they are from organic / grass fed / free range / wild sources.

With Sources from:

https://www.timhortons.com/ca/en/pdf/TH_Nutrition_Guide_CE_2013_-_FINAL.pdf

https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/may-2015/FOH-cancer-love-sugar.html

http://www.rheumatic.org/sugar.htm