By far the chief wreckers of our health today are sugars and bad fats. So which are the
good ones and which ones are bad? My aim is to enable you to make better food choices for
you and your family.
Sugars
Sugars are more than just the white grains you put in your coffee or tea. Sugars are also
to be found in the caffeine in coffee, alcohol, honey, fruit juice without the pulp and
peeled potatoes. Even the so-called slow sugars, such as whole grains, are still sugars.
We are the descendants of Stone Age men. By an evolutionary twist, this man was a mammal
whose liver was not capable of converting sugar into vitamin C (most mammals can, in fact,
do this). Thus we need to get our vitamin C from external sources, such as vegetables and fruit. We are not
genetically equipped to deal with a whole lot of sugar.
Fast Sugars
One needs to distinguish between fast and slow sugars. Fast sugars are sugars which are
not converted into energy by the liver but into fat instead. These are more or less
immediately released into the bloodstream, causing your blood glucose levels to rise. This in turn
provokes an insulin response by the pancreas
to stabilize your blood sugar by
bringing it down. Insulin is also responsible for the conversion of these sugars into fat.
Basically your body is in survival mode because excess sugar levels can cause serious
health complaints such as high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease,
candidiasis and other bowel disorders, hypoglycemia, high blood pressure, diabetes, and even cancer, insulin shock and death. It is the job
of your pancreas to prevent this from happening.
Western food is, however, loaded with fast sugars, causing a daily panic in our bodies.
Since too much insulin in the system can also be sickening and because our body is
constantly trying to find a balance, we develop insulin resistance. This
causes you to be free of complaints for many years. However, it is a pseudo-balance and it
is therefore no coincidence that most people develop complaints and ailments in midlife.
As the accumulated damage spans a period of 20 to 30 years, most people will not trace
their health problems back
to the food they have been consuming all these years. We are currently experiencing an
explosion of cancer, cardiovascular
disease and type 2 diabetes. And these diseases are occurring at an increasingly younger
age too!
Diabetes is not called sugar diabetes for nothing. Sugar sickens. Diabetes is nothing more
than a used-up, weakened or worn-out pancreas. It has been working overtime for years and
is now no longer capable of producing sufficient amounts of insulin to regulate the blood
sugar, resulting in pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer or other afflictions of the pancreas.
On top of this, insulin resistance causes your body's insulin to be increasingly less
effective. The only way to reverse the process is to eliminate fast sugars in your food.
Start drinking your coffee or tea
black (without that dead, ultraheated creamer as well) and don't eat products containing
sugar. Which is kind of a pain because it's in nearly all our food. Check the ingredients
on the label – and that goes for products from health-food stores too. Watch out for
glucose, fructose, dextrose, sucrose, invert-sugar syrup, but also 'natural' alternatives
such as raw cane sugar, corn syrup, rice syrup, date syrup and wheat syrup. Our bodies
were not made to process that much sugar, natural or otherwise.
Slow Sugars
Slow sugars are also sugars. They're in whole-grain products such as brown bread, brown
rice, brown pasta, etc. These are called whole grain because the germ, the
outer bran as well as the inner starch, are used. Particularly the bran slows down the
sugars of the starch. White bread is therefore a fast sugar because the bran has been
removed from the grain, leaving only the starch. For that reason, brown bread, brown rice
and brown pasta are healthier than their white varieties. It's the fiber in bran which
slows down the sugars, slowing down their release into the bloodstream.
The same happens with potatoes and fruit. Those of you who remove the skin from an apple
are refining the apple by throwing away the fiber and leaving only the fruit sugar. Peel a
potato and you're doing the same. Without its skin, a potato is merely a starch bomb and
therefore a fast sugar. For this reason, fruit juice without the pulp fiber
is nothing more than liquid candy.
Nature didn't intend it this way, otherwise she would have produced apples and potatoes
without pulp and fiber. So don't buy commercial fruit juice from a pack but squeeze your
own fruit juice and don't forget to drink the pulp either. Choose sour and bitter fruits instead of sweet ones,
particularly berries, sour apples and citrus fruits such as lemon and grapefruit. Sour and
bitter fruits are the original fruits and were eaten by Stone Age men.
Though slow sugars are better than fast sugars, this does not mean you can consume brown
bread, rice, pasta and whole sweet fruits unlimitedly! Once again, we were not made to
pump large quantities of sugars into our system. Therefore you should eat no more than two
slices of bread and have brown pasta or rice only twice a week. So what should you eat
instead? A much more complex form of carbohydrates is in vegetables. Try eating a salad a
day containing, for example, carrot, green leafy vegetables, alfalfa and sprouts with a
dressing of lemon juice and extra virgin coconut oil or olive oil and see
how long that keeps you going. I guarantee you will get more energy and feel less hungry.
You will also shed those excess pounds fast because you have drastically lowered your
sugar intake, reducing your risk of diabetes and making you feel healthier and more vital.
Don't forget that viruses, parasites and cancer cells feed on sugar too.
Honey
Though honey has many healing
qualities it should nevertheless be regarded as a fast sugar. Nature made the stuff so
darn sweet for a reason – you should eat it only in small quantities. Because of its
healthy aspects, honey need not be avoided. Make sure you eat raw honey (available in
health-food stores or from local bee keepers), though, and not the highly processed honey
supermarkets sell, which has been industrially heated and robbed of all its nutrients.
Very often the bees were fed ordinary sugar as well, so this kind of 'honey' is nothing
more than sugar disguised as honey.
Green Tea
A very special role is reserved for the caffeine in green tea. Just like alcohol, caffeine is a natural substance which,
when used sparingly, can have a healing effect. In coffee, the caffeine is however
released at lightning speed, which makes coffee a fast sugar. This is of course why we
drink coffee in the morning, to kickstart the brain into action. If you don't want to give
up your coffee, limit yourself to two cups a day.
Drinking green tea is better, though. For reasons yet unknown, there is a substance in
green tea which slows down the release of caffeine into the blood, making it a slow sugar
and giving you only the health benefits of caffeine. It gets even better: green tea also
'eats' the glucose in your blood, helping you to stabilize your blood sugar and supporting
the pancreas so it doesn't have to produce massive amounts of insulin.
Artificial Sweeteners
Please don't let this be a reason for you to fall into the trap of using artificial sweeteners
such as aspartame, sorbitol, saccharine and other cancerous chemicals! Teach yourself to
avoid sweet foods and enjoy the natural taste of real food instead. People who add cream
and sugar to their coffee are really drinking coffee-flavored candy. It's time we become
adults and appreciate all four tastes (sweet, sour, salt and bitter) instead of only two
(sweet and salt). If we did this and used all the colors of the rainbow, we would
automatically make better food choices. We have been conditioned since we were children
toward sweet and salty foods by a powerful food industry and therefore as adults, we often
still have the taste of a four year old.
Fats
Our government tells us that unsaturated plant fats are good for us and saturated animal fats aren't. This is a
little too black and white. Here's the grey area:
Omega-3/6
First off, it's essential that we look at the omega fatty acids in vegetable and animal
fats. Next to sugars, it's necessary to reduce your omega-6 intake. Omega-6 is a natural
and healthy fatty acid but only at the right ratio to omega-3. We can eat unlimited amounts
of omega-3 fats but too many omega-6 fats will inevitably lead to health problems.
The omega-3 to 6 ratio in Paleolithic times was no more than 1:4. What is it today?
Anything from 1:20 to a staggering 1:50! Time, therefore, to up your omega-3 intake and
lower your omega-6 intake. Eat fewer grains and avoid grain-based oils such as corn oil.
Other omega-6 oils which are best avoided are soy oil and sunflower oil. Commercial meat
and dairy comes from animals fed grain pellets and therefore also contain too much
omega-6. Besides the animals' suffering and the antibiotics, growth hormones, and the
GMO's they get, this is another reason to choose organic, grass-fed meat and dairy. Cows
are supposed to eat grass and clover. So are pigs. Did you know chickens also eat grass?
So where do we get all these omega-3 fats? From anything with a green leaf. Green leafy
vegetables are an excellent source of omega-3, particularly when raw. For cooking, also
use green veggies, such as kale, sprouts, broccoli, etc. Other vegetable fats containing
omega-3 are flaxseed oil and walnut oil. Be careful, though, as these oils do not allow
themselves to be heated. Use only extra virgin olive oil for this or use olive oil
cold. The best animal source of omega-3 is wild fatty fish and cod-liver or krill oil.
These contain the long-chain EPA and DHA
omega-3 fats.
Saturated Fats
For years we've been hearing that saturated
fats are bad because they increase cholesterol levels. This is a persistent myth. In
Asian, African and South American countries people cook with butter, coconut oil, and lard
all the time and look at the health of these people! Saturated fats can withstand high
temperatures and can be used multiple times and are therefore perfectly suited for frying.
The best fats for frying are butter, coconut oil and olive oil. Natural saturated fats
(animal fats but also plant fats like coconut fat) are processed by the body without
difficulty and are not fattening. What makes people fat and unhealthy are sugar and
refined oils (trans fats). By all
means, help yourself to an organic egg fried in butter, full-fat yogurt or organic
grass-fed meat.
Trans Fats
Trans fats are the missing link between unsaturated and saturated fats. It's not saturated
fats which are the enemy but trans fats. Trans fatty acids are formed by solidifying
cheaply available unsaturated plant fats like sunflower oil, soy oil, corn oil, peanut
oil, etc. Through a heating process, the liquid is extracted from these fats, either in
part or whole. Then a hydrogen atom
is added. This results in the transformation of unsaturated fatty acids into saturated
fatty acids, a kind not found in nature
and which is alien to the body. When you consume these fats, your body doesn't know what
to do with them, giving them free range to form free radicals and cause damage even at the
cellular (DNA) level!
Which products contain trans fats? It's better to ask which ones don't nowadays. Frying
oil, potato chips, coffee creamer, cookies - chances are they contain hydrogenated or
partly hydrogenated fats. Even peanut butter is no longer exempt. And it isn't just foods
either: make sure you also read the labels of vitamin supplements, ointments, creams,
gels, lotions, cosmetics – even the ones you buy in health-food stores. It's very
important that you check the labels for these and other ingredients. You will find empty
foods very often also contain sugar, salt, flavour enhancers and chemical sweeteners to hide the fact that
they taste like cardboard. Food should be prepared in a kitchen, not in a lab.
Interestingly enough, trans fats are not completely unnatural. Meat and dairy from hoofed
grazing animals (ruminants) naturally contains 2 to 3% trans fats. Tests have been done to
measure the potential harmful effects of natural and unnatural trans fats. Natural trans
fats turned out to be completely harmless, whereas chemical trans fats did prove harmful
to natural organisms, even though they looked identical under the microscope. Nobody knows
why this is. My guess is other micronutrients
play a role in cancelling the potentially harmful effects of natural trans fats in, for
example, butter. We see the same mechanism at work with the caffeine in green tea. Nature
works in complex synergistic wholes, never with isolates. We are only beginning to
discover the complex interaction of these micronutrients.
The deadly cocktail of sugars and trans fats is responsible for the many health challenges
we face today. Our blood and blood flow suffer particularly because of their devastating
effect on the liver, guts, kidneys and heart. No wonder so many of our modern diseases
affect exactly those organs.
About the author
Mike Donkers is an English teacher from the Netherlands who started taking care of his own health in October 2006 because doctors couldn't help him. His interest in the connection between food and health has led to more in-depth research, particularly in the role sea minerals can have in the regeneration of cells. He is also a self-taught guitarist and singer. He is the songwriter and frontman of his own band, The Mellotones (www.nubluz.com). (naturalnews, 4.23.2008, Mike Donkers (see all articles by this author) | Key concepts: sugar, sugars and trans fats) http://www.naturalnews.com/023085.html