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!
