Sugar is everywhere these days. Sugar’s story is one so complex, it’s difficult to tell it in full all in one place. The dark side of sugar is something we read often in the headlines, ’causes cavities!’, ‘increases risk for heart disease!‘, ‘puts us at greater risk for obesity and diabetes!’, ‘speeds aging and memory loss!‘. Although all health experts agree that too much sugar is bad for you, sugar is still something we need in small amounts. At the cellular level, we couldn’t survive without sugar. But the way we eat sugar in today’s American has become something only just short of deadly obsession. With so much to tell about sugar, this Better Bites is focusing on the issue of added sugar. So let’s take a look at where sugar went wrong in America, and look at some ways we can reduce how much of the added sweet stuff we eat to get ourselves to a healthier place.
In days gone by, refined sugar was a luxury. It was added sparingly to foods on special occasions for most, if they could afford it. Most folks got what little sugar they did consume from naturally-occurring sugars in milk (lactose), fruit (fructose), alcohol (ethanol) and grains, which contain starch that is broken down into sugar by the body. After advances in agriculture, government subsidization (the politics of this we’ll save for another day) and scientific manipulation of agricultural commodities, sugar became cheap and easy to include in most everything we eat. With more sugar available and at low prices, and more processed and prepared foods available that used sugar, we started eating more of the sweet stuff.
The real sugar boom however, happened in the last 30 years. Remember our discussion on fat? When the nutritional experts went to war on fat nearly 30 years ago, Americans actually listened. We, as a society, reduced fat consumption from 40 to 30% of our calorie intake. The trouble is, without fat, we upped our intake of highly processed, added sugar. You want a fat-free muffin? Processed food companies gave us fat free muffins! To keep them from tasting like cardboard, they added more sugar. Especially newly developed, extra-cheap, shelf-stable sugars like high-fructose corn syrup. These added sugars have become ubiquitous in common grocery and restaurant items. Is anyone else horrified that regular yoplait yogurt has more added sugar than a krispy kreme glazed donut? Or that the amount of added sugar in those two items combined is still less than the amount of added sugar in one California Pizza Kitchen Thai Chicken salad? None of this should be read as an endorsement of artificial sweeteners, however. For me, the possible dangers of artificial sweeteners, not to mention the fact that they, like sugar, have been shown to raise blood sugar, is more than enough to prove that they are more hassle than they’re worth.
This sugar boom hasn’t been about getting more sugar from natural sources in our diets like our grandparents likely did. The sugar boom of the last 30 years has been fueled on added sugars. But what is added sugar? We’re talking non-naturally occurring sugar. This is usually processed sugar in some form or another, removed from it’s original source (sugar cane, beets, corn, grains, fruit, etc…) and highly refined, then added to prepared and processed foods to make them taste sweeter. What added sugar doesn’t mean is naturally occurring sugars in milk or fruit (technically, this means alcohol too, but you should go easy on the stuff anyways). Grains also contain carbohydrates that are broken down into sugar once digested, but they do not officially count as added sugar. According to current USDA recommendations, along with the recommendation of a recent report put together by the WHO and the FAO, added sugar intake should not exceed 10% of your daily calorie intake. That’s less than what you would consume in 1 20oz soda, which is sadly a daily part of of many Americans’ diets.
OK, so we eat too much of the wrong kind of sugars. So what do we do about it? First, cutting back on processed food is perhaps the single best way to take control of your intake of sugar. Sugar is added to just about everything processed in amounts that exceed what you would add cooking the same thing on your own at home. Secondly, Remember when we talked about taste and how it affects what we eat? It’s possible to relearn to taste sweet, slowly cutting back on added sugars until you are much less reliant on them.
For me, it started with coffee. After preferences for the sweet, whipped and creamy frappuccino-family of coffees, I started ordering plain lattes or coffee and adding the sugar myself. I was able to gradually use less and less sugar and still enjoy a morning cup of joe. Eventually, I weaned myself off the added sugar completely. You know what I discovered? Coffee can be really delicious. Without the sugar, I began to appreciate the subtle sweetness frothed milk adds to a latte, and how delectable the warm, nutty flavor of great coffee, served black, can be. I also realized that I consumed much less coffee in total. I wasn’t throwing back the addictive sweet drink without thinking anymore. I was sipping and savoring the fabulously intense flavors of coffee and milk, unadulterated. Now, when I sip great coffee, I can enjoy how it compliments and contrasts with the occasional sweet treat at breakfast or dessert.
We can love sugar. We can have a healthy relationship with it, consuming it judiciously in simply prepared and homemade foods. We can definitely try to cut back on processed foods, which can sneak high amounts of sugar (and other health offenders) into our diets. In so doing, we can work to live healthfully, ever after.
Photos taken at Back to Eden
Kiija Manty-Miller I’m not a chef, not a PhD (although maybe someday I will be…), but someone who is passionate about food and cooking, a nut for nutrition and excited about eating well. I’m no poster child for fit America, but I’m someone who is taking on healthy living with hope, humility and a sense of humor. I’ll be stopping in once a month and share some of the insight I’ve gained on my way to more healthful living, inside and out.
How we eat seems quite simple: food, spork, mouth, repeat. Taste, however, is a matter much more complex. It’s a process that involves taste buds, neurotransmitters, the brain and a whole host of other biologic functions. We have nerve endings that fire, transmitting neural impulses to the brain allowing us to process, identify and experience and taste what we are eating. There is still so much we do not know or fully understand about how our brains function, but more and more is being learned every day. Specifically, more is being learned about how taste and how we eat are connected.
Have you ever noticed how when you eat foods with some combination of sweet, salty and/or rich flavors you tend to want to eat more foods with sweet, salty and/or rich flavors, whether it’s cured meat, chips or your sister’s birthday cake? Have you also noticed that when faced with a cookie or apple at snack time, you’re usually drawn more to the cookie? Can you blame kids, like those on Jamie Oliver’s recent Food Revolution TV show, for picking the souped-up sweet flavor of chocolate milk over plain old, delicious but decidedly not chocolaty milk? Dr. David Kessler, former commissioner of the FDA, in his book, helps us understand the science behind eating experiences like the ones above. He describes his holy trinity of flavors most patable to us: fat, salt and sweet. These are flavors that, unlike other flavors, trigger instinctive responses in us to eat more foods with the same taste of fat, salt and sweet. He points out that most manufactured food has these tastes in spades (do the slogans “betcha you can’t eat just one” and “once you pop, you can’t stop!” ring a bell?). Not only do they contain combinations of sugar, fat and salt but they have engineered substances that are sweeter than sugar, chemically restructured fats and amounts of sodium often in excess of our daily requirement. Sweet, salt and fat are a heady combination of flavors that sets off neurologic fireworks in us and the more concentrated, processed versions of the natural sources of sweet, salt and fat flavors triggers a proportionately more intense reaction. This combo stimulates the same part of the brain that heroin does and triggers instinctive responses in us to eat, eat, eat – instinct bred into our ancestors to prevent starvation in times of scarcity.
When we are constantly bombarded by these flavor fireworks, we can overstimulate the part of our brain that regulates how full we feel, how we taste and how we eat, knocking us off kilter. Suddenly, our innate ability to judge satisfaction, hunger and over-all equilibrium are compromised. With that fail-safe gone, we often eat and eat and eat, to satisfy the craving for more of those fireworks – eating more sweet, salt and fat. Kessler calls this being in a state of ‘hypereating’.
It isn’t impossible to regain our taste equilibrium, though. It just takes a little concerted effort to unlearn harmful eating habits and a willing palate.
For me, it started with a re-discovery of simple cooking. A pot of leek and potato soup, in fact. Before that, I admit to being one of those people who believed in the healthy promises of ‘fake food’. You know, artificial sweeteners, faux fats and the like. Hello 100-calorie pack snack foods and aspertane-spiked yogurt! I avoided the ‘real’ versions of those things in the attempt to make healthier food choices. The irony was, these fake versions were even worse for me and my sense of taste than the original versions! Artificial sweeteners are notorious for warping your sense of sweet and lets just say faux-fats like olestra are better off down the tubes where I eventually sent them. After becoming so used to these intense flavors, I really had to make an effort to train my palate back into appreciating more subtle flavors.
Thank goodness, I was able to begin that readjustment with a bowl of soup. There were all of maybe 5 ingredients in the dish, and tasting the result was a revelation to me. Suddenly, instead of SWEET! SALT! FAT! flavors overwhelming my taste buds, I was able to appreciate the more nuanced flavors of food cooked from scratch. A little salt, a little pepper, a kiss of butter, golden potato and melted leek. Food didn’t need fireworks to taste delicious. Once I knew what real delicious food was supposed to taste like (and perhaps, more importantly, I cut back on the fake stuff) I was able to get in better touch with my body’s needs for food and nourishment. Eating more real foods, simply prepared, I was able to help my overstimulated brain regroup and recalibrate my innate satiety and hunger detectors. Eating whole, minimally refined foods seems to be a recurring theme here. It’s true. Eating simply prepared grains, breads, vegetables and yes, even the occasional sweet treat made from whole, ‘real’ ingredients is just better for you all around than their highly processed counterparts. That said, do I still eat some processed foods? Sure. Sometimes, a girl is just going to enjoy an oreo. But I can approach it with caution and the knowledge of what those kinds of food really do to me, and how much better real food can be. We all can.
Kiija Manty-Miller I’m not a chef, not a PhD (although maybe someday I will be…), but someone who is passionate about food and cooking, a nut for nutrition and excited about eating well. I’m no poster child for fit America, but I’m someone who is taking on healthy living with hope, humility and a sense of humor. I’ll be stopping in once a month and share some of the insight I’ve gained on my way to more healthful living, inside and out.
I am so excited to introduce to you Eating Is Arts’ very first guest blogger, Kiija Manty-Miller. Once a month, she will be sharing with us her favorite topics about health in her column called Better Bites. Welcome, Kiija!
FAT
F.A.T. Those three little letters have been the bane of nutritionists and cardiologists throughout the US for the last three decades; And perhaps any chubby child on the playground and the menstruating woman (or her partner). Increasingly, however, research has been disproving fat as the ultimate enemy in America’s war on obesity.
Why the turn-about in conventional nutritional knowledge? There is an informative summary here, published by Slate, of the studies published, but basically, researchers have determined that not LDL (“bad” cholesterol) is so bad after all. The researchers identified that consuming saturated fat, while increasing total LDL levels, only increased the levels of the benign LDL particles, not the ones that do indeed raise the risks of heart disease. Another study identified that women who ate the highest amounts of vegetable fat (from foods like olive oil and nuts) had lower risks of heart disease than women on low-fat diets.
Now, fat as an integral part of a healthy diet and is hardly new knowledge, but it has been so demonized in the last three decades that my head is still spinning a bit from this latest about-face in conventional nutritional knowledge. Real food advocates like Nina Planck, have long asserted that traditional saturated fats like lard, butter and coconut oil are not the health enemies they have been depicted to be. Publications like Nourishing Traditions have also advocated a return to real food – a book precipitated by the start of the ‘war on fat’ decades ago. While the positions these writers advocate may be a bit extreme for the average American, they clearly reflected a polarization of approaches to healthy eating with a rather inflexible national nutritional standard that went against generations of eating habits. Now, it seems, the position of conventional nutrition is moving somewhere more moderate in terms of dealing with fat. But I imagine it will still be quite some time before Americans can imagine welcoming fat to their tables.
So what DOES raise the levels of the really naughty LDL cholesterol? The kind that leads to an increased risk of heart disease? Highly processed carbohydrates – foods that spike blood sugar levels. Research suggests that highly processed carbs, particularly those with high fructose levels (like high fructose corn syrup) not only increase the risk for heart disease, but diabetes, gallbladder disease and breast cancer (for references to all of these findings, please see the Slate article). Keep in mind, this does not mean ALL carbs are bad – whole grains, fruits, vegetables are all still fiber and carbs and vital to a healthy diet. Trans-fats also are still perpetrators on this front as well. No change in policy there.
And what has America been reaching for when it cuts fat out if it’s diet? Perhaps diet foods like Snackwells, Baked Lays and other low-fat products ring a bell? You know, the highly processed carbohydrates? Uh, what I spent a good part of my teens and early 20′s indulging in thinking it was making a ‘healthy’ choice? Uggh.
Bottom line? We KNOW how to eat for optimum health. We’ve known for centuries and it’s all about eating real food. Food you grow, food you make from whole ingredients. Simple and delicious foods you don’t need a PhD in Biochemical engineering to understand. Now, we (meaning I and many other Americans) just have to get over our fat phobias and relearn that yes, healthy fats – even saturated fats!- have a place in a healthy, well-balanced diet.
Kiija Manty-Miller I’m not a chef, not a PhD (although maybe someday I will be…), but someone who is passionate about food and cooking, a nut for nutrition and excited about eating well. I’m no poster child for fit America, but I’m someone who is taking on healthy living with hope, humility and a sense of humor. I’ll be stopping in once a month and share some of the insight I’ve gained on my way to more healthful living, inside and out.
