The Phantom Menace is SUGAR

Creeping under your skin? You bet!

This could be the single biggest biological reason why you’re fat.

The phantom menace is SUGAR.

A couple of years ago, I was simply mis-educated. I thought all I had to worry about was just the white powder.

As it turns out, I had to cut down on potatoes and rice as well, especially in the evenings.

I was also a regular consumer of soda, the “Real Thing”. I soon learned that these types of drinks were one of the worst, most especially the diet version.

Sugar is all over the place, so it’s important for you to guard against it on all fronts.

I’ll tell you WHY it’s a menace in a second, but here is how it glides under your radar, without your conscious knowledge, and how it literally creeps under your skin:

• high fructose corn syrup


• sucralose (splenda), aspartame, saccharin


• enriched flour


• enriched white rice


• instant mashed potatoes

You see, sugar is everywhere. It’s very easy for sugar to infiltrate your body, because it’s really like a phantom. It’s actually more like a stealth bomber that if you don’t turn on your super-sensitive radar, you won’t notice how it’s accumulating in your body.

• An apple pie from your mother.


• The “health” tea drink from the vending machine


• The bagel from the Little Julie’s Bakeshop


• The pasta at the Via Venezia restaurant


• The cake for Johnny’s 5th birthday

Are You A Victim Of The Diet and Exercise Industry?

Be honest with yourself, are you a sugar junkie, OVERLOADED and BLOATING from this scourge?

You’ve been led down the path of sweet innocence, and you’re buying the idea that you’ll be OK as long as:

1. you use no calorie substitutes


2. you burn it off with exercise.

Totally misleading, and here is why it’s a menace.

Artificial sweeteners are total baloney. Never mind the conspiracy theories that it causes cancer.

One thing terrible about sugar is that it is ADDICTIVE.

You’re never satisfied, and you’ll want for more. It doesn’t matter whether its real sugar or not, you’ll always get into a state of craving. So when you do eat sugar with real calories, you can’t help it but overeat.

What about exercise?

I won’t even talk about your tendency NOT to exercise to begin with. If you’re the type of person who does not get overcome by laziness more often than not, then you’re OK…you’re good to go.

However, I’ve you’ve been like me, a lazy bum who never exercised at all for a whole decade, I wouldn’t count on it.

Today, I exercise for other reasons, not to burn calories.

Here’s the problem. It’s not the total net calories that you lost or gained for the day, but it’s the sugar overload and deprivation you experience throughout the day.

Overload occurs when your blood sugar (glucose) exceeds your capacity. Your capacity is determined by your ability to produce insulin.

Every cell in your body needs glucose. It’s the fuel. However, the glucose molecule needs to be paired up with an insulin molecule, before it can be absorbed by your cell.

No insulin = no metabolism = excessive blood sugar.

Body Fat Is Unmetabolized Sugar

Excess sugar gets converted into BODY FAT.

This is the biological process of obesity. Mother Nature has designed our bodies to store extra glucose as fat. In times of famine, then it reconverts the body fat back to glucose.

This is the point in time when you get hungry, because it is faster to get the fuel from food in your stomach, than to retrieve it from your body fat. Your stomach grumbles - that’s the hunger signal.

When deprivation occurs, the best case scenario makes you hungry for more and makes you rapidly overeat by munching on snacks or compensating with a double-sized serving.

Here is one factor that is critical for you to understand:

the speed at which your food gets converted to glucose.

Let me illustrate with a metaphor. Let’s say that the glucose molecule is the groom, while the insulin molecule is the bride.

Let’s say you eat a donut, and it has 100 grooms. Because these guys are wild boys who cannot wait (highly processed sugars), the grooms will arrive at a rate of 100 per minute.

Meanwhile, the brides need some time (they’re dressing up in the pancreas), and they can only come out at the rate of 10 brides per minute.

So for every given minute, there are 90 grooms who are left hanging, and they simply couldn’t wait.

Guess what? They will just leave and live a bachelor’s life, occupying your belly, your arms, and your butt as excess pounds of fat.

This is the reason why counting calories is a prehistoric method to control your weight. It does NOT take into account, the rate at which glucose is released into your bloodstream.

If bride and groom are not there at the same time, then no marriage takes place, and there is no metabolism that will burn the food that you’re eating.

Do all grooms quietly tuck themselves into the fat fraternity? Some of them will actually do some wild things, instead.

Here are two more problems with sugar, that you may not know.

Problem #1
Sugar and Heart Disease

Do you know what caramelization is? If you cook a lot, then you know what it is.

Basically, you heat sugar to a cooking temperature, until it turns brown, and it crystallizes. It is the basis for many of our foods.

It looks simple - deceivingly simple.

Chemically speaking, the process is so complex that leading scientists don’t have a full understanding of the transformation that takes place.

Here is what we know: Body temperature is sufficiently high to enable caramelization. If excessive sugar floats around our blood stream, this process produces a gooey and sticky compound.

Would you be surprised with this medical theory: that caramelized sugar could be responsible for the hardening of our arteries, that lead to heart disease?

Let’s take this one step further.

Remember we talked about cholesterol in the last email? Cholesterol, by itself, is NOT bad, including the so-called ‘bad cholesterol’.

Cholesterol is manufactured by your liver, because it is required to repair tissues throughout your body.

Cholesterol becomes a problem when it binds with sugar. This is a different chemical process called glycation. These modified molecules are now considered as alien invaders.

Your immune system responds to these invaders, and it results in inflammation.

Remember CRP from our last session? (I hope you still do, because that was an assignment.)

CRP is a measure of inflammation. The lower the better.

There is yet one more sinister step - oxidation - but we’ll talk about that in a future session.

Problem #2
Sugar Feeds Cancer

Do you know how PET scans are used to detect cancer?

Patients are given a radioactive glucose. Inside their bodies, they end up accumulating in the cancerous cells, allowing the doctors to locate where your problems are.

In other words, glucose is being used as bait for the cancer cells!

Why? Based on the research done by Nobel laureate Otto Warburg, cancer cells use sugar as their primary food for growth. The cancer cells are voracious eaters, that they suck up all the sugar that they can get.

Next time you visit a medical lab - go ask the technician what do they feed you, if you were to go for a PET scan.

If cancer cells feed on sugar, then why would you continue dumping sugar into your body? Will you stop your sugar parties after you’ve discovered your cancer cells?

Summary

So let’s summarize today’s session.

1. Avoid PROCESSED SUGAR.


2. Be aware of all the disguises it uses to fool you.


3. Excess sugar transforms into bad stuff that could lead to heart disease, and definitely accelerates cancer.


4. They key is to feed your body with sugar at the same rate as your insulin production.

References:

1. Dr. Andrew Weil, MD, Healthy Aging, pp 66-85,


2. Kurzweil and Grossman, Fantastic Voyage, pp 197-232

Is this enough scientific data? I don’t know about you, but personally, I have read enough myself, to come to my conclusions.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of articles about the dangers of sugar all over the media and the internet. These two sources are the last “nails in the coffin”, for me.