First, Eat No Sugar

The quantity of nutritional advice available is immense.    Adkins, Paleo, vegan, South Beach, low-fat,  Macrobiotic, low-carb, “healthy whole grains”, gluten-free, “fruits and vegetables”, Jenny Craig, “raw food”,  Ornish,  ….you name it!    Often, one can find two or more pundits, each recommending a “healthy diet”, yet directly contradicting each other.   One must study the evidence and choose what he or she thinks is the most helpful. 

One trap that seems easy to fall into is to change one’s nutritional plan daily depending on what one wants to eat.  Feel like a pizza or an enormous bowl of spaghetti?    Sure, let’s just say today will be a “healthy whole grain” day…  (just make sure to order “whole wheat” pizza or pasta!).    The next day, do you feel like having a king-sized cut of prime rib?   No problem, we’ll just designate this to be a “low-carb” day.    Just don’t order the baked potato with that prime rib!    Next day, how about “low fat”?   Start with a bowl of Rice Krispies, (low-fat… be sure to use skim milk!), for lunch, a giant salad with “low-fat” salad dressing, and for dinner the ubiquitous “boneless, skinless chicken breast”  and some steamed vegetables (without butter of course… we are “low-fat” today!) .   Add a stack of “low-fat” or “fat-free” cookies for dessert.  Next day, let’s go vegan.   Tons of fruits, beans, salads, tall glass of orange juice, piles of white rice, PB&J sandwich on Wonder Bread, and a big slice of apple pie for dessert…the choices are many!   So you see the point.  Pretty much everything we want to eat fits into some nutritional plan.   So in total, we end up eating pretty much anything we want.    Except….

Sugar!

While there is great conflict among the various nutritional camps, you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who says it’s OK to eat large amounts of sugar.    It’s something they all apparently can agree on!

I am reminded of one of the guiding principles for doctors, “Primum non nocere” which means “First, do no harm”.   So I suggest a good motto for us would be “First, eat no sugar”.    (As far as I can determine, the Romans did not have a word for “sugar” (good for them!) so I won’t bother trying to translate this into a cool-sounding Latin phrase.  (I’m reminded of “Semper ubi sub ubi” and “Illegitimi non carborundum”, but I digress.)

Now, some qualification is in order.  You are probably thinking, “Hey, fruits are loaded with sugar, does that mean I shouldn’t eat all those healthy fruits?”   No, I think it’s OK to eat, in moderation, fruits that contain sugar.  So let’s modify that catchphrase to “First, eat no added sugar”.   It does not sound as cool or all-encompassing, but in this form it is something that can really be done, and your diet will be much better off for it.
   
First, let’s look at a couple of foods that just should not exist.   The first one, in my opinion, is soda pop.  There is absolutely nothing good about it.  Nutritionally, it’s just sugar water.  The same is true, or nearly true, for drinks like kool-aid, lemonade, Hawaiian Punch, and other “fruit juice drinks”.   Sports drinks add “electrolytes” but they are loaded with sugar too.

Actual fruit juices, while often considered “healthful” choices, are, in fact, not much better.  Yes, they sometimes contain vitamins and other nutrients, but with the solid portion of the fruit removed, you take in much more juice (and therefore much more sugar) than you would have if you sat down and ate the actual fruit.  How many oranges did it take to make that tall glass of orange juice you had for breakfast?   My guess is way more than you’ve ever eaten in one sitting.  And you miss out on any nutrients contained in the solid portion of the fruit, and also the fiber.

In the next category are foods that have so much added sugar, that it probably would be best to avoid them completely.   In this category I am thinking of dessert type items like pies and cakes, cookies, donuts, candy, etc.   In other words, “sweets”.   Fortunately, I do not have a “sweet tooth” and it’s easy for me to “just say no” to these things.   If you do  have a "sweet tooth", I have read that it diminishes over time if you discontinue feeding it.

Now let’s look at the large number of foods that might contain added sugar, in some cases where you least expect it.  Many if not most of these contain added sugar for one reason –to entice the customer to eat large quantities of it, prefer the taste to other brands, and buy more.    This is where you can make some real changes that will help you in the long run.  Look at the ingredients, and buy “real food”.

As you probably know, “sugar” can take many forms in the ingredient list.    Some examples are as follows:

Agave Nectar, Barley Malt Syrup,  Beet Sugar, Brown Rice Syrup, Brown Sugar,  Cane Crystals, Coconut Sugar, Coconut Palm Sugar, Corn sweetener, Corn syrup, corn syrup solids, Dehydrated Cane Juice,    Dextrin,  Dextrose, Evaporated Cane Juice,  Fructose,  Fruit juice concentrate, Glucose, High-fructose corn syrup, Honey, Invert sugar, Lactose, Maltodextrin, Malt syrup, Maltose, Maple syrup, Molasses,    Palm Sugar, Raw sugar, Rice Syrup, Saccharose, Sorghum, Sorghum syrup,  Sucrose, Syrup, Treacle,    Turbinado Sugar, or  Xylose.

Foods likely to contain these substances include breakfast cereals (pre-sweetened and non pre-sweetened), canned soups, ketchup, barbeque sauce, pasta sauce, salad dressings, many brands of peanut butter (believe it or not!), snack foods, frozen dinners, and yogurt (except for “plain” yogurt), just to name a few.

Two comments:

1. You’ve probably heard the advice to “shop the outer perimeter” at the grocery store and avoid the center aisles, where the processed foods are.   Note that the list above contains foods that are, for the most part, in the center of the store.    It is quite possible to reduce greatly the amount of food you buy from the center aisles.  Just don’t go there.
2. In many cases, you can buy healthy brands of the above items that do not contain added sugar.  For example, there are healthy brands of pasta, peanut butter (the only ingredient really needed is peanuts), and soups available.  Ketchup and barbeque sauce are two items we have not found a healthy alternative for.

As an example, consider a this jar of “Jif Reduced Fat” peanut butter that is advertised as a healthy choice.  (Reducing the fat is suspect in itself, but that is for another post).    One look at the ingredient list shows this is not a healthy choice at all!

Ingredients: PEANUTS, CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, SUGAR, PEA PROTEIN, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: SALT, FULLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OILS (RAPESEED AND SOYBEAN), MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, MOLASSES, MAGNESIUM OXIDE, NIACINAMIDE, FERRIC ORTHOPHOSPHATE, ZINC OXIDE, COPPER SULFATE, FOLIC ACID, PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE.

Blecchh!   Three different added sugars!?  “Pea Protein”?  What is that and why is it needed?  Fully Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils?  (AKA Trans-Fats!).   Why are those needed?   And the rest of the items are chemicals that most of us have no clue as to what they are and what they do.  (OK, MrsWW says some of the chemicals are synthetic vitamins.  I hope they are recognized by the body as such.)

I think most people eat peanut butter along with something sweet… such as in a PB&J sandwich, peanut butter cookies, or spread on fruit, such as apples.   Yet it appears that this product is adulterated in such a way that they are trying to get people to scoop it out into a bowl and eat the whole bottle straight!

Now, compare that to this peanut butter from Krema…  Ingredients: PEANUTS.  That’s it!  We have tried this brand and it tastes great.  You can also toss a bunch of peanuts into a food processor and make your own!

So, once we have stopped eating the sugar, what to do next about the myriad of dietary choices, as mentioned at the beginning of this post?   Stay Tuned.