Eat Real Food
Too much sugar is bad for you. Decades of research make that statement a pretty sure bet.
High sugar diets depress immunity and raise your risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and just about every other modern ill.
But anyone who thinks that artificial sweeteners are, by implication, good for you should think again.
While most of us are gearing up for the holiday feeding frenzy, we report this week on a study showing that animals fed artificially sweetened yoghurt as part of their regular diet gained more weight than those who had the sugar-sweetened variety.
The study shines a spotlight on some things that most of us would rather ignore; chiefly, given how ubiquitous they’ve become, if calorie-free sweeteners really worked we’d all be a lot thinner. But it also shows you can’t fool Mother Nature (or your body) for long.
Human studies, too, have shown increased weight gain with increasing consumption of all the popular fake sugars. Indeed, as far back as the mid-1980’s, use of the then-popular sweetener saccharin was associated with increased weight gain.
One theory is that sweet taste without the expected calories upsets the body’s natural mechanisms for controlling appetite and energy expenditure. Another is that fake sugars alter gut flora to such a degree that it triggers inflammatory processes that can lead to metabolic disorders.
A teaspoon of sugar contains around 15 calories and for most of us it’s not the sugar in our coffee or tea or on our cereal that is the problem. The problem is the overwhelming number of snack foods, laced with hidden, and not-so-hidden sugars, that we eat.
In the developed world sweet drinks (both sodas and fruit drinks) are the major source of sugar in our diets. Sugar is also hidden in many savoury foods such as sauces, takeaways and ready meals.
Addressing this problem by sucking down artificial sweeteners in an ever wider variety of everyday foods is the foodie equivalent of sweating the small stuff while all the big stuff is falling apart somewhere outside our field of vision.
This holiday season don’t sweat the small stuff. Eat real food. Eat food that, as Michael Pollan would say, your grandmother would have recognised. Ditch the fake sugars (and fake fats and fake everything else) and for health’s sake vow that this is the way you will try to eat each day. But most of all enjoy yourselves!
This newsletter will be taking a break now until the end of 2012. All of us at NYR Natural News wish you good health and we look forward to sending you more of the best in natural vitality and alternative healing in 2013.
This article first appeared on the NYR Natural News e-newsletter.
