The Sugar Trap

Here is the fourth part of an interesting article I found in The Sunday Times


Alcohol

The sugar content of alcohol drinks varies greatly. Dry white wine and red wine have relatively low fructose content, while dessert wine and champagne contain more. Stay away from mixed drinks, which are usually laced with sugar syrups and sodas. If you must indulge in spirits, choose a “clean” mixer such as sparkling water or fresh lemon juice.


The author David Gillespie says in his book The Sweet Poison Quite Plan: “alcoholic drinks are ok for the recovering sugarholic as long as they don’t taste sweet and are not mixed with other drinks that contain sugar. You can keep the dry wines, beers and spirits, but you need to toss out the dessert wines, ports, sweet sherries, liqueurs and mixers.” But remember: alcohol is calorie dense, so if you want to lose weight, drink as little alcoholic as possible.

Richard Taylor Personal Training Club
www.richardtaylorpt.co.uk

"Changing your lifestyle to incorporate exercise and proper nutrition is not easy. But it is defiantly a journey with endless rewards that are well worth achieving!

The Sugar Trap

Here is the third part of an interesting article I found in The Sunday Times

Beware of the hidden sugar

The nutritionist and naturopath Rhian Stephenson tells her clients to check all labels of canned vegetables, breads, sauces, prepared foods and so-called “health” foods carefully. “if sugar, or a sugar pseudo, is one of the first three ingredients, steer clear.” Even though it is a long list, it ios important that you acquaint yourself with the vocabulary, much of which is made to sound healthy, organic and pure. The most common terms are: barley malt syrup, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, rice syrup, cane crystal, coconut sugar, corn sweetener, corn syrup, crystalline fructose, dextrin, evaporated cane juice, fruit juice concentrate, fruit purée, fruit pulp, agave, molasses, organic evaporated cane juice, palm sugar, raw sugar, saccharose, sorghum, treacle, turbinado sugar and xylose.

Sugar is often present in foods you don’t even associate with sweetness: pasta sauces, canned salmon, breaded fish fingers, porridge, fruit yogurt and bouillon cubes. I could scarcely find a breakfast cereal, a deli meat or an Asian cooking sauce that wasn’t loaded with added sugar. And that’s before I got to the plethora of “healthy”, “organic” and “light” products that are boosted with sugar to compensate for the lack of fat. The American dietician Susan Burke-March warns: “just because a food is labelled ‘low fat’ or ‘fat-free’ does not make it calorie-free; manufactured add sugar to increase the texture and bulk lost by removing fat.”


Jenna Zoe, author of Super Healthy Snacks and Treats, says: “craving sugary foods doesn’t make you a weak human being. We are programmes to opt for the sweet foods because, in nature, sweetness is a sign that the foods are safe to eat; it meant that early man chose juicy fruit over poisonous plants that are bitter in taste. The problem arises with processed foods, because sweeteners are used in conjunction with junky fats or hydrogenated oils. This is where the addictiveness is created. In nature, sugars and fats are not often found in the same foods.”

Keep an eye out for the next part of this fantastic article

Richard Taylor Personal Training Club
www.richardtaylorpt.co.uk

"Changing your lifestyle to incorporate exercise and proper nutrition is not easy. But it is defiantly a journey with endless rewards that are well worth achieving!

The Sugar Trap

Here is the second part of a interesting article I found in The Sunday Times

How much sugar should we eat?

Most health organisations recommend that people limit themselves to 10tsp (40g) of added sugars a day, but many researchers say it should be as low as 6tsp for woman and 8tsp for men. Teaspoons are much easier measurement to visualise than grams, so lock this easy equation in your head: divide the number of grams by four to get the number of teaspoons. To put that in perspective: a regular Snickers bar contains 27g or about 7tsp sugar, a 220ml can of Coke has 35g or 9tsp of sugar, three Oreos have 14g or 3 ½ tsp, and a chocolate-glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut has 26g or 6 ½ tsp of sugar.

We shouldn’t eat manufactured sugar bombs like that, full stop. Any food with sugar in the first three ingredients is a bad idea. Sadly, it’s not as simple as cutting out foods that you know are packed with sugar. Lustig says “The food industry has contaminated the food supply with added sugar to sell more products and increase profits. Of the 600,000 food items in American grocery stores, 80% have been spiked with added sugar; and the industry uses 56 other names for sugar on labels. They know when they ass sugar, you buy more. And because you do not know you’re buying it, you buy even more.”

So, are we actually physically addicted to the sweet stuff? Most nutritionists respond to that question with: “Try giving it up and then tell me what you think.” The chairman of the Functional Medicine Institute, Dr Mark Hyman, believes we are. “The slick combinations of sugar, fat and salt in junk and processed food have hijacked our taste buds, brain chemistry and metabolism. These foods are biologically addictive. We are held hostage by the food industry and yet we blame ourselves for not having willpower,” he says. “One animal study found that sugar is more addictive than cocaine. When rats were given the choice between cocaine or sweetened water, scientists found that most rats who initially preferred cocaine switched over.”

Sugar improves our mood by prompting the brain to release the “happy” hormone serotonin, which is exactly why we turn to it when we are happy and celebrating, but also when we are sad, lonely or tired. The problem is that what goes up must come down, and those inevitable sugar crashes just make us crave more sugar and encourage a cycle of binge eating that makes us increasingly overweight and unwell.

Keep an eye out for the next part of this fantastic article

Richard Taylor Personal Training Club

www.richardtaylorpt.co.uk

"Changing your lifestyle to incorporate exercise and proper nutrition is not easy. But it is defiantly a journey with endless rewards that are well worth achieving!

The Sugar Trap

Here is the first part of a interesting article I found in The Sunday Times

THE SUGAR TRAP

Part One

Forget diets: the real reason we are putting on the weight is all the sweet stuff hidden in our food. Cut it out and watch the pounds slip away.

The number one new year’s resolution is to lose weight, and yet we are failing spectacularly. Despite the growing list of diets - from Atkins and Caveman to the fasting or 5:2 diet – none of them ever seems to work long term. Instead, we are getting fatter. There are now 1bn overweight adults worldwide, and 200m of them are clinically obese. In Britain, a 2012 NHS survey found that more than a quarter of all adults in England are obese – rates that have risen three fold since 1980. Increasingly, however, experts here and in America are beginning to wise up to the real culprit behind our ever-increasing girths. Rather than fat, as was originally thought, it is sugar consumption has increased, so has our weight, and the more we eat the more unwell and overweight we become.

The NHS reckons the average person in Britain now consumes about 700g of sugar a week – that’s 140 teaspoons. Experts say our bodies are designed to handle only half or less a week. If you really want to look and feel better in 2014, then forget about following a diet: make quitting sugar your new year’s resolution. So what exactly is this socially acceptable drug; why is it makes us increasingly overweight and unwell; why can’t we stop eating it? Any ingredient that ends in “ose” is a sugar, and there’s a mighty long list of them: glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose, sucrose, lactose and high-fructose corn syrup. The white granulated syrup you put in tea is harvested and refined from sugar beets and sugar cane and, like all other sugars, it has absolutely no nutritional value – no proteins, no essential fats, no vitamins or minerals. These “oses” are the emptiest of empty calories. It’s pure, refined energy. It contains a whole bunch of calories and nothing else. When we eat any form of sugar, the body deals with it in one of two ways. Either we burn it off as energy- but, given the amount of sugar the average person now consumes, it is impossible to expend it though activity unless you are Mo Fara (and I guarantee you he limits his sugar intake) – or if it isn’t burnt off, it is converted into fat by the liver and stored directly in the fat cells.

The nutritionist Amelia Freer says: “If the amount of glucose in the blood stream is above the body’s comfort zone of about 1 ½ tsp- 2 tsp at any one time – one regular coke has 9 tsp – then the hormone insulin gets produced to chauffeur the excess glucose out the blood and store it as fat. Elevated levels of insulin circulating in our bodies can be detrimental to our long-term health. Our cells can become less responsive to the presence of insulin, meaning our bodies keep needing to produce more and more insulin to get the same reaction. Eventually the cells stop responding at all. This is type 2 diabetes.”

Dr Robert Lustig, author of Fat Chance, says: “In 2011, there were 366m diabetics in the world – more than double the number in 1980.” Furthermore, the Center for Science in the Public Interest in America reports that “sugar consumption has increased by 28% since 1983, with many individual foods providing large fractions of the US Department of Agriculture’s recommended sugar limits”.

Keep an eye out for the next part of this fantastic article

Richard Taylor Personal Training Club

www.richardtaylorpt.co.uk

"Changing your lifestyle to incorporate exercise and proper nutrition is not easy. But it is defiantly a journey with endless rewards that are well worth achieving!