A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food That Tastes Great (34 page)

Remember when the only downside of eating too much sugar was getting cavities? It seems laughable now that sugar has been exposed as the reason that many people’s health is in the toilet. After realizing that the low-fat craze only made people fatter, studies focused more on simple carbohydrates, especially sugar (which is pumped into many low-fat products to mask their cardboard taste). The results: Eating too much sugar makes us fat, destroys our livers, and opens the doors to type 2 diabetes and heart disease. If you’re tempted to pretend it’s not true, I’m with you. But sugar’s negative effects are no joke, and you have to consider how much play sugar is getting in your diet if you expect to fit into your pants and have a body that actually works in 10 years.

You may be thinking you’re home free because you don’t eat candy and cookies, but if you slam back sodas, bottled flavored teas, or fruit juice with any regularity, you’re basically mainlining sugar. One 12-ounce soda has a whopping 10 teaspoons of sugar. Sugar is also hidden in fast food and practically every processed food on the shelves—ketchup, jars of tomato sauce, peanut butter, even supposed healthy products like yogurt, instant oatmeal, and energy bars. And it’s not just sugar. All refined carbs—including white bread, many crackers and pastries—act like sugar in the body, so those count too. The food industry relies on it so heavily that the only way to avoid overeating sugar is to cut out nearly all processed foods and drinks.

Most of the sugar I ate was in the form of bread, cookies, pasta, and hamburger buns—all high on the glycemic index and impossible for me to pass up. I would joke that they were like crack … which science now supports as a legit fact. Sugar is addictive, lighting up the same feel-good areas of the brain as cocaine and morphine. It’s why just one cookie or one bite of ice cream didn’t satisfy me—it took increasingly larger hits for me to get the sugar rush. The problem is that our bodies aren’t built to handle the mountains of sugar we’re pouring into them. Compounding this is the fact that sugar fuels your appetite like gasoline fuels a fire: The more sugar you eat, the more you crave. The good news is that the opposite is also true: The less sugar you eat, the more sensitive you become to it, and the less you need.

When you eat a piece of chocolate cake, the carbs are broken down into glucose—the sugar your body uses for energy—and then sent into your bloodstream. Your pancreas responds by releasing insulin, which lowers blood sugar levels by sending the glucose to cells for energy and then to your liver. Normally, the amount of insulin released is just enough to bring things back to an even keel. But if you’re putting cake, soda, or any refined carb in your face regularly, an increasing amount of insulin has to be released to deal with all that sugar. This uptick in insulin triggers hunger, making you head back for more cake. If you do this often, your body can’t possibly use as much energy (glucose) as you’re putting in, and insulin may direct it to be stored as fat.

Fructose, the sugar in fruit, acts a little differently
than glucose. It is abosrbed by your liver, so fructose doesn’t spike blood sugar levels and is relatively low on the glycemic index. Sounds like the holy grail of sugar, right? It is, if you’re getting fructose only from whole fruit, where it exists in relatively small amounts and is packaged with fiber. But if you’re eating highly processed packaged foods, you’re likely getting a ton of high fructose corn syrup or the bullshit “healthy” sweetener, agave syrup, which has a freakish amount of fructose (about 97 percent). These concentrated forms of fructose put a heavy load on your liver, which can store only so much sugar. When your liver is full, the sugar gets converted to fat. So eating sugar, especially fructose, too often and in large amounts ultimately results in weight gain and serious wear and tear on your liver that can lead to fatty liver disease.

To your body, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Pop-Tart or a fancy baguette, white sugar or honey: All forms of sugar can lead to some nasty outcomes if you down too much. That being said, some sources of sugar are better than others. (See my
guide to sweeteners
and how often to indulge in them.) Fruit and naturally occurring sweeteners are the best options. High-quality maple syrup tapped out of a tree and honey from local bees are a lot less processed than granulated sugar and high fructose corn syrup (which clearly had a very long road from a stalk of corn or sugarcane). Read the labels of the natural sweeteners you buy to make sure they’re unadulterated versions—some may have added refined sugars. And despite the fact that sugar substitutes like Splenda, NutraSweet, and Sweet’N Low don’t raise blood sugar levels, I don’t use them. They’re heavily processed and still relatively new to the food world, so their long-term health consequences are unknown. Also, most are hundreds of times sweeter than table sugar, so they keep your palate accustomed to overly sweet foods.

After my doctor-prescribed hiatus from sugar, I found that I didn’t crave it as much. And when I started indulging in it again, I realized that it didn’t take much to satisfy my urge. When I took my kids to the chocolate shop L.A. Burdick for hot chocolate one afternoon a few years ago, I was completely satisfied with a 2-ounce Dixie cup portion. They have insanely good, high-quality hot chocolate, but I still couldn’t believe that tiny portion was enough for me. It was such a victory.