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All About Food: Sugar is sweet, and so is moderation

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Did you know that the amount of total added sugar (not the sugar found in fruits, vegetables or dairy products) that we consume has risen from 6.3 pounds per person per year in 1822 to more than 100 pounds today?

An 18.2% rise occurred between 1980 and 2005. In 1997, Americans devoured 7.35 billion pounds of candy and spent $23.1 billion on candy and gum.

Though there is a lot of sugar in many breakfast cereals, desserts and pastries, the worst offenders are soft drinks and other sweetened beverages. The Harvard School of Public Health has said that one sweet drink a day raises the risk of death from a heart attack by 20%, and one or two a day increases the risk of type 2 diabetes by 26%. Sugary drinks are now the largest single source of calories for teens.

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The intake of sodas has been declining since 2003, but they have been replaced with sports drinks, energy drinks, coffee and tea drinks and “enhanced’ vitamin waters, which are supposed to be healthier but often are not.

Food manufacturers are also adding hidden sugar to hamburgers, salads, processed breads, applesauce, tomato sauce, cold cuts, peanut butter, yogurt, crackers and canned soup, to name just a few items. Lean Cuisine Bistro Chicken Salad has 4.5 teaspoons of sugar. Organic Stonyfield Farm Fat Free Chocolate Underground Yogurt has almost 9 teaspoons of sugar. Worldwide, we are consuming about 500 extra calories a day from sugar.

The three simple sugars are glucose, sucrose and fructose. Your tongue cannot tell the difference, but your body can. They all provide the same amount of energy per gram but are processed differently and used differently throughout the body.

Sucrose (table sugar) is a combination of glucose and fructose. Glucose increases satiety, but fructose does not. In fact, it raises the level of ghrelin, a hormone that increases appetite. Glucose, on the other hand, raises insulin, suppresses ghrelin and stimulates leptin, a trio of hormones that work together to let us know we have eaten enough.

The liver does not handle fructose in the same way that it does glucose, and the belief is that fructose builds up fat at a greater rate. Also, there is evidence that a diet high in fructose leads to a higher level of abdominal fat in children and changes the maturing fat cells making them less receptive to insulin. Refined sugar contains no fat, fiber, minerals, proteins or enzymes, only empty calories.

The real underlying issue is the effect that excess sugar and fat can have on our bodies. An article in Scientific American says, “Our brains maintain healthy body weight by signaling when to eat and when to stop. Hormones regulate feeding circuits that control appetite and satiety. But fatty, sugary foods can motivate some people to overeat. The more they have, the more they want, a sensation common to drug addiction.”

Recent studies show that overeating is not a behavioral disorder, such as a lack of self-control, and is not caused by a hormonal imbalance. Instead, foods rich in fat and sugar can supercharge the reward system in the brain, which can overpower its ability to tell an individual to stop eating. In these cases, the more someone eats, the more he or she wants.

A study done at Connecticut College was designed to investigate how addictive high-sugar foods are and how they might have stoked the nation’s obesity epidemic. The researchers conducted an experiment using Oreos and lab rats.

The conclusion was that rats find Oreos just as addictive as cocaine because the cookies stimulate the brain in the same way drugs do, and, interestingly, the rats went for the cream in the middle first, just like lots of humans do.

High fructose corn syrup has been vilified lately, but we all need to read labels to determine the health risks of processed food and drinks. The FDA has recently announced that it is going to rethink the current method of labeling to better inform the public about what exactly they are eating and drinking.

TERRY MARKOWITZ was in the gourmet food and catering business for 20 years. She can be reached for comments or questions at m_markowitz@cox.net.

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