The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (5 page)

Calorie for calorie, sugar is different from other calories that come from protein, fat, or nonstarchy carbs such as greens. As you’ve seen, it scrambles all your normal appetite controls. So you consume more and more, driving your metabolism to convert it into lethal belly fat. There is no doubt about it: By any definition, sugar is a toxin. Paracelsus, the great medical philosopher, said,
“The dose makes the poison.”
We are all overdosed at an average of twenty-two teaspoons of sugar a day per person in America.

Remember the milk shake study? Sugar lights up the pleasure center in the brain and releases dopamine, the “feel-good” chemical. It works on the same parts of the brain as cocaine or heroin, but it is much worse. When researchers provide direct electrical stimulation of the reward centers in the brains of rats, they still can’t compete with sugar water. Cocaine lights up only one part of the brain, while sugar lights it up like fireworks on Independence Day!

Brain imaging studies in humans find the same thing. Eating—or even seeing pictures of—junk and processed food lights up the brain like heroin. People say they gain weight just by looking at a donut. They may actually be right, because the body pumps out insulin in response to even the
thought
of something sweet.

When you continue to “use” sugar and processed foods, your dopamine receptors are decreased. That means you need more and more of the addictive substance to generate the same amount of pleasure. This dynamic is called tolerance. It explains why a light or occasional drinker, like me, might feel significant effects from a single alcoholic drink, while a heavy drinker or an alcoholic may need to drink a fifth of vodka just to get a buzz.

When food addicts try to “quit” without proper support, they get withdrawal symptoms lasting up to seven days, including nausea, headaches, shakiness, disorientation, fatigue, cravings, irritability, disturbed sleep, and nightmares. (Don’t worry—these symptoms are much less challenging and last for a shorter time when you follow the 10-Day Detox Diet.)

For many, even gastric bypass cannot overcome this addiction. One patient of mine lost 200 pounds through gastric bypass and ate his way back to obesity through a constant stream of M&M’s. Too often, gastric bypass fails because it doesn’t fix the underlying biology of food addiction.

Remember the rat study? It showed us that sugar-sweetened water (whether sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners) is eight times more addictive than cocaine. Even more than junk food, fast food, or processed carbs such as bread and pasta or chips, sweet drinks have super-addictive properties. While regular old sugary or starchy food will still cause cravings and addiction, the liquid stuff wreaks even more havoc.

It’s easy not to notice all those empty calories hidden in sweet drinks. Drinks don’t fill you up, which is why, if you include sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened drinks, you end up eating more total calories in a day. They are easy to consume without thinking about it; we call that passive consumption. They are just drinks, after all. But they add up fast and crowd out real food from your diet. Plus, artificially sweetened drinks jack up your cravings, driving you to eat more food over the course of the day.

Liquid sugar is absorbed very quickly, driving up blood sugar and insulin and mainlining fructose to your liver, setting off a cascade of events that causes weight gain and more cravings. When your insulin spikes and your blood sugar drops, your body sees it as a life-threatening emergency, so you are driven to go looking for your next sugar fix.

It’s not just soda we have to worry about, but also sports drinks, sweetened teas and coffees, energy drinks, fruit drinks, and hundreds of other sugary drinks. Ounce per ounce, orange juice has more sugar than cola. If you consume these highly sweetened drinks, your taste buds become adapted to this high-intensity sweetness, and other real, whole food such as vegetables or fruit tastes bland and boring.

Fully 90 percent of kids and 50 percent of the US population drinks soda once a day. One billion cans of Coke are consumed daily around the world. In a review of all the relevant research, scientists found that the number one cause of obesity is sugar-sweetened beverages. One can of soda a day increases a kid’s chance of obesity by 60 percent, and in a study of more than 90,000 women, one soda a day increased the risk of diabetes by 82 percent.

One young woman with eight kids from New Zealand had a bad Coke habit. It killed her. She drank 2.2 gallons a day, or 2 pounds of sugar and 900 milligrams of caffeine. Autopsy reports show she died of a fatty liver and heart damage from the Coke. Though the American Beverage Association would have us think otherwise, sugar-sweetened drinks are a major contributor to our big fat problem.

Considering that 15 percent of our calories come from sweetened beverages, cutting them out is an easy way to dramatically improve your health. One patient of mine lost seventy-five pounds just by becoming aware of and cutting out his liquid sugar calories.

Diet soda and diet drinks make you fat and cause type 2 diabetes.

Wait… diet soda makes people fat? Really? How does that happen?

If losing weight were all about the calories, then consuming diet drinks would seem like a good idea. That’s certainly what Coca-Cola wants us to believe, judging by its ad campaigns highlighting its efforts to fight obesity. (And the other food giants making diet drinks push the same propaganda.) Coke proudly promotes the fact that it has 180 low- or
no-calorie drinks and that it has cut sales of sugared drinks in schools by 90 percent.

Is that a good thing? I don’t think so. In fact, it may be
worse
to drink diet soda than regular soda. A fourteen-year study of 66,118 women published in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
(and supported by many previous and subsequent studies) discovered some frightening facts that should make us all swear off diet drinks and products:

Let me lay out a few more of the evils of artificial sweeteners, just in case you’re not yet convinced:

The bottom line is that there is no free ride. Diet drinks are not good substitutes for sugar-sweetened drinks. They increase cravings, weight gain, and type 2 diabetes. And they are addictive.