|
Dental Problems
Sugar also makes the blood very thick and sticky, inhibiting much of the blood flow into the minute capillaries that supply our gums and teeth with vital nutrients. Therefore, we wind up with diseased gums and starving teeth. America and England, the two largest sugar consumers, have horrendous dental problems.
Consumption of processed foods (which are laced with sugar) cost the American public more than $54 billion in dental bills each year, so the dental industry reaps huge profits from the programmed addiction of the public to sugar products. ...
In 1948, a $57,000 ten-year study was awarded to Harvard University by the Sugar Research Foundation to find out how sugar causes cavities in teeth and how to prevent it. In 1958, Time magazine reported the findings, which were reported in the Dental Association Journal. They discovered there was no way to prevent the problem and their funding immediately disappeared.
"The most significant human study was done in Sweden, reported in 1954, and known as the Vipeholm Dental Caries Study. More than 400 adult mental patients were placed on controlled diets and observed for five years. The subjects were divided into various groups. Some ate complex and simple carbohydrates at mealtimes only, while other supplemented mealtime food with between-meal-snacks, sweetened with sucrose, chocolate, caramel, or toffee. Among the conclusions drawn from the study, was that sucrose consumption could increase caries activity. The risk increased if the sucrose was consumed in a sticky form that adhered to the tooth's surfaces. The greatest damage was inflicted by foods with high concentrations of sucrose, in sticky form, eaten between meals, even if contact with the tooth's surfaces was brief. Caries, due to the intake of foods with high sucrose levels, could be decreased when such offending foods were eliminated from the diet. But individual differences existed, and in some cases, caries continued to appear despite avoidance of refined sugar or maximum restriction of natural sugars and total dietary carbohydrates." (2)
Diabetes
Diabetes is another commonly known disease which is caused by the failure of the pancreas to produce adequate insulin when the blood sugar rises. A concentrated amount of sugar introduced into the system sends the body into shock from the rapid rise in the blood sugar level, and over time this can cause the pancreas to wear out and not be able to produce the levels of insulin that it should.
Hypoglycemia occurs when the pancreas overreacts to the large amount of sugar in the blood and releases too much insulin leaving one with the "tired" feeling as the blood sugar level becomes lower than it should be.
Of all the foods consumed today, refined sugar is considered to be one of the most harmful. ...In 1997 Americans devoured 7.3 billion pounds of candy. Americans spent an estimated $23.1 billion dollars on candy and gum. The average American consumed a record 27.3 pounds of candy and gum in the same year-the equivalent of about six regular sized chocolate bars a week-marking the fifth consecutive year of increased demand.
"A recent article in the British Medical Journal, entitled The Sweet Road to Gallstones, reported that refined sugar may be one of the major dietary risk factors in gallstone disease. Gallstones are composed of fats and calcium. Sugar can upset all of the minerals, and one of the minerals, calcium, can become toxic or nonfunctioning, depositing itself anywhere in the body, including the gallbladder.
"One out of ten Americans has gallstones. This risk increases to one out of every five after age forty. Gallstones may go unnoticed or may cause pain-wrenching pain. Other symptoms might include bloating, belching, and intolerance to foods."
WHAT ABOUT GUM CHEWING?
Besides the sugar in gum being damaging to the teeth there is another harmful problem to consider and that is: "teeth and jaws weren't designed for more than a few minutes of solid chewing per day-far less than the two hours clocked in daily by hardcore gum chewers. All this chewing results in inordinate wear on the jawbone, gum tissue and lower molars, and can change the alignment of the jaws" says Michael Elsohn, D.D.S., in the Medical Tribune.
And lastly, sugar is a major contributor to the aging process.
Non-nutritive sweeteners (e.g., saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame-K. . . Splenda (sucralose) [and neotame]) offer no energy, and, as they sweeten with little volume, can also be referred to as high-intensity sweeteners.
neotame: Neotame, another product of Monsanto’s Nutrasweet Company and also the most recently approved sweetener, deserves several red flags of caution. Also known as "superaspartame," it was first synthesized from a base of aspartame and 3,3-dimethylbutyraldehyde by French scientists Claude Nofre and Jean-Marie Tinti. In an amazing display of sweetening power, neotame hits the scales at 8000 times sweeter than sucrose, and its chemical name is a mouthful--N-[N-(3,3-dimethylbutyl)-L-a-aspartyl]-L-phenylalanine 1-methyl ester.
aspartame: Problems associated with aspartame consumption are neatly summarized in Nourishing Traditions. "Aspartame. . . is a neurotoxic substance that has been associated with numerous health problems including dizziness, visual impairment, severe muscle aches, numbing of extremities, pancreatitis, high blood pressure, retinal hemorrhaging, seizures and depression. It is suspected of causing birth defects and chemical disruptions in the brain.
NutraSweet: side effects include headaches blindness seizures and strangley enough causes people to crave carbs..so yes diet drinks (sweetened with nutrasweet) can make people fatter..
Equal:
Splenda; also known as sucralose, is artificial sweetener which is a chlorinated sucrose derivative. Splenda is basically sucrose (table sugar) which chlorine atoms have replaced some of the H and OH groups. The result is something like a cross between table sugar and PCB! The moecule has the same shape as table sugar - which is why it is sweet - it fits into all the same receptors that sugar does both on the tong and elsewhere. The problem is that it can't be broken down!
Many people have reported that it was affecting their bodies like sugar, giving them an insulin surge followed by hypoglycaemia! Apparently the pancreas thinks there is sugar in the system, the splenda molecule is sensed as sugar, and I'll bet it stimulates the sugar receptors in the blood liver and pancreas 200x as strongly as sugar just as it does on the tong! The problem is there is no sugar and the all the insulin ends up dropping the blood sugar even lower. Add to that the stuff just floats around until it's flushed from your system, it can't be metabolised.
acesulfame-k (Sunette, Sweet-n-Safe, Sweet One).
Because refined dietary sugars lack vitamins and minerals, they must draw upon the body tissue micronutrient stores in order to be metabolized into the system. When these storehouses are depleted, metabolization of fatty acid and cholesterol are impeded, contributing to higher blood serum triglycerides, cholesterol, promoting obesity due to
higher fatty acid storage around organs and in subcutaneous tissue folds.
NOTE: If you are a diabetic, it is important to work closely with your healthcare practitioner when you change your diet. Diabetics can safely use STEVIA (listed below) and usually small amounts of LICORICE ROOT and FRUCTOOLIGOSACCHRIDES (FOS).
Some diabetics who are allowed to use small amounts of sugar can use small amounts of Sucanat or Florida Crystals. Please consult your healthcare practitioner.
Gradually reduce or eliminate:
White Sugar
Brown Sugar -- Brown sugar is usually white sugar mixed
with molasses or sprayed with caramel coloring.
Raw Sugar -- Raw sugar is often white sugar with coloring.
Fructose -- Beware the "natural" products with fructose.
It's not much better than white sugar (IMO).
D-tagatose -- Far safer than neotame/aspartame, sucralose, etc., but best used as a transitional sweetener to healthier ones.
Corn Syrup
Dextrose
Artificial Sweeteners (Nutrasweet (aspartame, "contains phenylalanine" on the label), Equal, Spoonful, Neotame, Sunette (Acesulfame-k), Splenda (Sucralose), Sweetener 2000 / NutraSweet 2000))
-- Avoid these like the plague. Please don't become a guinea pig for another poorly-tested toxic sweetener only to find out years from now that it contributed to the destruction of your health.
Important Note: MSG (Monosodium Glutamate) has some of the same toxicity mechanisms as the toxic sweetener aspartame. In order to cut out MSG, you need to
remove foods with the following ingredients: - Monosodium glutamate - hydrolyzed proteins (any type of hydrolyzed protein)
- autolyzed yeast
- yeast extract
- caseinate (in many cases)
- "Natural Flavors"
MSG that occurs naturally in tomatos, cheese, etc. is absorbed and metabolized differently (safely) due to other factors in the food. See the following web page
http://www.holisticmed.com/msg/ for more information.
1) it blocks thyroid hormone secretion and when the thyroid hormone is deficient;
a) estrogen increases.
b) the ‘protective hormones’ progesterone and pregnenolone decreases,
c) cholesterol increases
d) impairment of the conversion of thyroid hormone T4 to T3 hypothyroidism occurs.
( to create the enzymes needed to convert fats into energy, T4 must be converted to T3)
2) polyunsaturated / veg oils are of long chain fatty acids which are manufactured in cheap abundance by oil industries, they have been traditionally used for livestock feed because they promote the animals to gain weight, causing the same impact for humans.
3) polyunsaturated veg oils oxidize quickly, becoming rancid and free radicals damaging the human body. Food manufacturers know this oxidization problem well, therefore, highly refine their vegetable oils leading to trans fatty acids, and hydrogenated oils.
4) poly oil blocks protein digestion in the stomach, we can be malnourished even while eating well.
5) people who take thyroid hormone replacement drugs to treat symptoms won’t fix the underlying problems. However creates more toxions and burdens for the body such as impairing calcium absorption leading to bone loss. That is why many people with hypothyroidism also experience osteoporosis.
Please note also:
- for over 4 decades, the mass public has been conditioned to believe that polyunsaturated oil is a healthy choice and saturated fat is bad [ corporate interest & politics ]
the truth is just the opposite, the bottom line is really the food processing.
- you will find many food products made with polyunsaturated veg oil because it is cost effective. Even worse, these products are cleverly marketed as healthier foods, creating tragic consequences.
- commercial salad dressings, chips contain polyunsaturated oil
[ especially soy oil which is even cheaper to produce ]
- Restaurant foods are particularly worrisome because the oils used are heated to very high temperatures and often used over and over for deep-frying, loaded with trans fatty acids.
The Truth About Fats and Oils
Many dietary oils can negatively affect thyroid health. We cook with them almost every day and they are plentiful in commercially prepared foods. Expeller-pressed or solvent-extracted oils only became a major part of the American diet in the last century. It is possible they are among the worst offenders when it comes to the thyroid. They are known as vegetable oils or polyunsaturated oils. The most common source of these oils used in commercially prepared foods is the soybean.
Large-scale cultivation of soybeans in the United States began after World War II and quickly increased to 140 billion pounds per year. Most of the crops are produced for animal feed and soy oil for hydrogenated fats such as margarine and shortening. Today, it is nearly impossible to eat at restaurants or buy packaged foods that don’t have soy oil in the ingredients. Often labels simply state "vegetable oil."
Ray Peat Ph.D., a physiologist who has worked with progesterone and related hormones since 1968, says that the sudden surge of polyunsaturated oils into the food chain post World War II has caused many changes in hormones. He writes:
Their [polyunsaturated oils] best understood effect is their interference with the function of the thyroid gland. Unsaturated oils block thyroid hormone secretion, its movement in the circulatory system, and the response of tissues to the hormone. When the thyroid hormone is deficient, the body is generally exposed to increased levels of estrogen. The thyroid hormone is essential for making the ‘protective hormones’ progesterone and pregnenolone, so these hormones are lowered when anything interferes with the function of the thyroid. The thyroid hormone is required for using and eliminating cholesterol, so cholesterol is likely to be raised by anything that blocks the thyroid function. 1
There is a growing body of research concerning soy’s detrimental affect on the thyroid gland. Much of this research centers on the phytoestrogens ("phyto" means plant) that are found in soy. In the 1960s when soy was introduced into infant formulas, it was shown that soy was goitrogenic and caused goiters in babies. When iodine was supplemented, the incidence of goiter reduced dramatically.
However, a retrospective epidemiological study by Fort, et al. showed that teenaged children with a diagnosis of autoimmune thyroid disease were significantly more likely to have received soy formula as infants (18 out of 59 children; 31 percent) when compared to healthy siblings (nine out of 76, 12 percent) or control group children (seven out of 54; 13 percent). 2
When healthy individuals without any previous thyroid disease were fed 30 grams of pickled soybeans per day for one month, Ishizuki, et al. reported goiter and elevated individual thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) levels (although still within the normal range) in thirty-seven healthy, iodine-sufficient adults.
One month after stopping soybean consumption, individual TSH values decreased to the original levels and goiters were reduced in size. 3
For more information about the effects of soy in the modern diet, see the Weston A. Price foundation Web site: http://www.westonaprice.org/soy/index.html
The Five Absolute Worst Foods You Can Eat
By Dr. Joseph Mercola with Rachael Droege
There are no “bad” foods, right? Only food you should eat in moderation?
Well, not really. The following foods are so bad for your body that I really can’t see any reason to eat them. Not only do they have zero nutritional value, but they also give your body a healthy dose of toxins, which should make the idea of eating them really hard to swallow.
: Doughnuts are fried, full of sugar and white flour and most all varieties
contain trans fat. Store-bought doughnuts are made up of about 35 percent to 40
percent trans fat. An average doughnut will give you about 200 to 300 calories,
mostly from sugar, and few other nutrients. It’s too bad that Americans view
doughnuts as a breakfast food as, nutritionally speaking, eating a doughnut is
one of the worst ways to start off your day. It will negatively affect your blood
sugar and won’t stay with you so you’ll be hungry again soon. You are better
off eating no breakfast at all, or better yet grabbing a quick glass of Living
Fuel.
: One can of soda has about 10 teaspoons of sugar, 150 calories, 30 to 55 mg of
caffeine, and is loaded with artificial food colors and sulphites. I can't
think of any good reason to ever have it. The diet varieties are also
problematic as they are filled with harmful artificial sweeteners like aspartame.
Studies have linked soda to osteoporosis, obesity, tooth decay and heart disease,
yet the average American drinks an estimated 56 gallons of soft drinks each
year. Plus, drinking all that sugar will likely suppress your appetite for healthy
foods, which pave the way for nutrient deficiencies.
Soft drink consumption among children has almost doubled in the United States over the last decade, which is not surprising considering that most school hallways are lined with
soda-filled vending machines. Schools often make marketing deals with leading
soft drink companies such as Coca-Cola from which they receive commissions--based
on a percentage of sales at each school--and sometimes a lump-sum payment, in
exchange for their students’ health. School vending machines can increase the
consumption of sweetened beverages by up to 50 or more cans of soda per
student per year. If you routinely drink soda--regular or diet--eliminating it from
your diet is one of the simplest and most profound health improvements you
can make.
(and Nearly All Commercially Fried Foods): Potatoes are
bad enough when consumed in their raw state, as their simple sugars are rapidly
converted to glucose that raises insulin levels and can devastate your health.
But when they are cooked in trans fat at high temperatures, all sorts of
interesting and very unpleasant things occur.
Anything that is fried, even vegetables, has the issue of trans fat and the potent cancer-causing substance acrylamide. Foods that are fried in vegetable oils like canola, soybean, safflower, corn, and other seed and nut oils are particularly problematic. These
polyunsaturated fats easily become rancid when exposed to oxygen and produce large
amounts of damaging free radicals in the body. They are also very susceptible to
heat-induced damage from cooking. What is not commonly known is that these
oils can actually cause aging, clotting, inflammation, cancer and weight gain.
You can read the article “Secrets of the Edible Oil Industry” for more
information. It is theoretically possible to create a more “healthy” French fry if
you cook it in a healthy fat like virgin coconut oil. Due to its high saturated
fat content, coconut oil is extremely stable and is not damaged by the high
temperatures of cooking. This is why coconut oil should be the only oil you use
to cook with. I am fond of telling patients that one French fry is worse for
your health than one cigarette, so you may want to consider this before you
order your next ‘Biggie’ order.
: Most commercial chips, and this includes corn chips, potato chips, tortilla
chips, you name it, are high in trans fat. Fortunately, some companies have
caught on to the recent media blitz about the dangers of trans fat and have
started to produce chips without trans fat. However, the high temperatures used to
cook them will potentially cause the formation of carcinogenic substances like
acrylamide, and this risk remains even if the trans fat is removed.
This category represents the culmination of non-healthy aspects of food. Fried shrimp, clams, oysters, lobsters, and so on have all the issues
of trans fat and acrylamide mentioned above, plus an added risk of mercury.
Seafood is loaded with toxic mercury and shellfish like shrimp and lobsters can
be contaminated with parasites and resistant viruses that may not even be
killed with high heat. These creatures, considered scavenger animals, consume
foods that may be harmful for you. Eating these foods gives you a quadruple dose
of toxins--trans fat, acrylamide, mercury and possibly parasites or
viruses--with every bite. If you have a taste for seafood, there’s an easy solution. It’ s best to avoid your local fish fry and try the only fish I now eat--the delicious wild red Alaskan salmon that was proven through independent lab testing to be free of harmful levels of mercury and other contaminant.
Remedies
Food remedy: eating natural wholesome digestible foods that will nourish and detox your body.
1) - Natural saturated fat like natural coconut oil is made up of medium chain fatty acids [MCT] a very stable fat, that is known to increase metabolism, balance hormone and promote weight loss.
- contains high levels of vitamin E and phenols. Phenols contain flavonoids - biologically active compounds that are remarkably high in antioxidants. The study concluded that virgin olive oil may inhibit the oxidation of LDL
cholesterol, and might even do a little cancer fighting as well.
|