r(HealthAndLovePage) The Fifth Estate is an investigative program that airs on Canadian CBC. In their 39th episode, they are discussing the less known properties and the potential DR Hyman.
If you take a closer look at the TV shows about healthy food and even in the articles found on the Internet, you can find many resources about the dangers of salt and fat in your diet, but those focused on sugar come in a really small number. All these things suggest that the sugar industry is making efforts to hide the truth about the real properties of sugar from the public.
Several medical researchers have decided to be part of the investigation involving four family members who will exclude sugar from their diet. These researchers are convinced that sugar can lead to heart disease, cancer, and even Alzheimer’s disease.
According to some statistics an average American family (Two adults and two children) consumes about 95 teaspoons of sugar per day. Of course, this amount is not taken in teaspoons but found in the food itself. This is why many people are not aware of the amount of sugar they take daily.
For example, there are about 5 teaspoons of sugar in the Healthy Choice chicken pineapple and seven teaspoons in one can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Who would’ve thought, right? On the other hand, an average Canadian consumes about 26 teaspoons of sugar every day. That’s about 40 kilograms per year.
The entire food industry in North America includes large amounts of sugar in their products, but yet almost none of them puts recommendations about daily sugar intake on their products.
The bliss point
Dr. Howard Moskowitz reminds people about the term “bliss point”. This is a point when people like the product they consume the most, the moment when they feel the best. Although Dr. Moskowitz is a mathematician educated in Harvard he is also a food industry consultant. What he is trying to determine is the bliss point in a product – the perfect combination of ingredients that will make people want to buy a certain product.
Dangers of Using Sugar: Toxicity of sugar
During the 80s and the 90s, many nutritionists were focused on dietary fat and the negative effects of fat. However, what we can determine from this perspective is that the introduction of products that don’t contain fat at all didn’t change the fact that people were still getting sick from modern diseases and their weight remained more or less the same. This is why many experts consider that sugar is the answer to this question. According to Dr. Robert Lustig, a medical professor and pediatrician, sugar is much worse than fat. He is also one of the main figures in the so-called anti-sugar campaign. He has his own YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers.
The main reason why people are still getting sick and obese is sugar. People are trying to replace fats with sugar and this is a big mistake. Sugar consists of 2 molecules – fructose and glucose. Once they are in the system they are separated. While the glucose reaches every part of our body and nourishes the brain and muscles, the fructose goes straight into the liver. When the body is dealing with an excessive amount of fructose it converts the energy into liver fat. The liver fat leads to heart disease and cancer.
Why do people consume more food than they are supposed to?
Eating excessively and not being involved in physical activity is the “winning” formula for those who want to get fat. Dr. Lustig blames the fructose on the sugar because it practically blocks the areas of the brain that signal us when we are full. It is worth mentioning that the food companies and the experts working for them consider these theories to be wrong and without any scientific support.
READ ALSO: How Sugar Affects Your Brain [VIDEO]
Food industry’s reactions
What makes this episode from The Fifth Estate interesting is that the food industry was well aware of the effects of processed food and diseases even 15 years ago.
The heads of some of the most popular food companies in the USA and Canada (including Nestle, Kraft, and Coca-Cola) organized an auditorium in Minneapolis in 1999. They were discussing the trend of obesity and overweight in these countries and some of them were worried about getting sued because of the foods they offer on the market because they knew that there is a link between processed food and obesity, cancer, and heart disease.
They were also worried because this was the period when the tobacco industry suffered from the many multimillion lawsuits and they thought that they could be next. The VP of communications at Kraft – Michael Mudd – who was part of this meeting is now blaming the food industry they knew exactly what they were doing, but they didn’t take any measures in all these years.
READ ALSO: Brown Vs. White Sugar
Is there a link between sugar and serious diseases?
Dr. Lustig has decided to conduct a serious study that involved records about diabetes in more than 170 countries around the world. He included all the possible factors that lead to diabetes and concluded that sugar is the number one factor of diabetes and several other diseases. However, expert nutritionist Dr. John Sievenpiper disagrees. He agrees that the consumption of sugar has increased in the past two decades, but people have also started using some other products like bottled water for example, but this doesn’t mean that they are the cause of all these diseases.
He says that the most important thing is noticing the warning signs and this is exactly what students and scientists at the University of California at Davis were doing. They fed guinea pigs with sugary drinks and after two weeks they determined that the warning signs for cardiovascular disease had significantly increased. However, even this study didn’t impress Dr. Sievenpiper because the tests were performed on animals and they didn’t take the amount of calories into account.
Despite this fact, many scientists are convinced that added sugar is significantly increasing the probability of developing some of the previously mentioned diseases. This is certainly not enough for the FDA and the Health Canada body to confirm the link between sugar and these diseases.
The good news is that the American Heart Association has recommended cutting the amount of added sugar for both men and women. According to them, men should have about nine teaspoons of sugar per day while women should have six. In addition, there are many congressmen like Frank Pallone for example, who are trying to introduce bills that will improve food labeling and emphasize the effects of sugar and the daily recommendation of sugar.
What happened with the Breedons?
The Breedon family was eating food prepared by professional chefs. They could eat as much as they want and add butter and salt if they want. They were not forced to perform any exercises that they didn’t do before. The only thing that was forbidden was the use of added refined sugar in the recipes. After three weeks we can see the first results of this interesting experiment.
The adults have lost a couple of inches from their waist (without feeling hungry at any point) and reduced the levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the system by 10% to 20%. Watch the entire video and see what happened.