Health In Motion

Source: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/99/285849339_db067ef8ac.jpg

As a Nutritional Practitioner, I see a lot of clients who complain about being addicted to food. This addiction, according to them, is likened to what an alcoholic or mild drug user suffers from: compulsive eating behaviour, binging, unnatural responses or actions, lying, etc. Most of this is said to be triggered by emotions, negative life events, boredom, or depression.

I agree that there are similarities with food addiction to other addictions; such as obsession with a substance to alter mood or outlook, overt or harmful  behaviours, or lack of self-control. But rather than blame the substance, we have to look at what triggers the response to the condition.

Many people are on destructive (restrictive) dietary paths which result in nutrient deficiencies. Indulging in fractionated carbohydrates, junk foods, canned and boxed foods which contain either starches, sugars or simple carbohydrates, only sets up a further strong psychological drive for more of these foods.  Why? Because they boost our immediate outlook through higher glucose conversion and temporary energy. But like other destructive substances, the end result is very short lived.

Refined Foods Don’t Lead To Good Health

As a society, we live for instant gratification. Rather than eating foods which give us long term energy, we desire a quick pick-me-up, even though we know the cycle has to be repeated over and over during the day, leaving us exhausted. Part of the problem is what manufacturers tell shoppers. Words such as diet, whole, goodness and so on are meaningless in light of what the food endures during processing.

In Canada, whole wheat is not “whole.” As much as 70% of the nutrients may legally be destroyed through removal of much of the kernel, which reduces shelf life. Whole wheat is not a whole grain – period. It is a product which, through loss of many of the nutrients (wheat germ and wheat germ oil), as well as bran and middlings, is now a fast absorbing energy food which spikes blood sugar. But still, our government says the end product remains good for us. In effect,  manufacturers legally (yet immorally) lie to us, desiring profit more than our good health.

Educate Yourself

Much of this can be remedied by education. With the availability of the internet and more authors writing about whole food nutrition, we should be able to find proper information on the subject. However, the excuse I frequently hear is that, “I don’t have enough time.” My answer is always the same: “Do you have the time to get sick?” Because once a person is on their sickbed, they cannot earn money, nor can they enjoy the fruits of their labour. Balanced nutrition is not an option, but a necessity to “keep the ability to be busy.”

Another angle is our relationship to food. Do we understand that restricting nutrients sets us up for psychological cravings? Most diets are about weight loss, rather than good health. Authors care more for immediate results, because this brings in income. Yet most of the poor souls reading these books don’t equate their subsequent weight gain (once off the diet) with the diet itself. Diets are a sham, which is why your 20 pound weight loss ultimately results in a net 40 pound gain. This is a protective mechanism of the body to an unnatural restriction of needed substances – a sure plan for long term failure. It’s an addictive cycle: We desire the short term weight loss rather than thinking about the end result. This is somewhat like the steroid user, or the person taking diet pills. Yes, there may be immediate dramatic results, but in the end, we suffer even more.

Don’t Worry – Make Decisions!

Dietary rules also get us thinking too much about what should be an enjoyable experience. All this weighing and calculating is a drain on a pure pleasure – the enjoyment of wholesome food. We should be able to look at a food and immediately understand if it is good or bad. Has it been refined? Then there is a great chance it is not healthy. I don’t care at all about what we are told to the contrary. I have thousands of clients who have had success with this approach. It does not lead to worry about food, because it merely entails making in immediate decision. We do this daily with our jobs. If you do “fall off the wagon,” get up and try again.

Those who eat to manage compulsive behaviours or emotions need to realize that whole foods also satisfy. Sweet, salty or fatty foods may increase serotonin or stimulate dopamine receptors in the brain, giving a temporary feel good situation. But they always result in a subsequent crash. On the other hand,  whole foods do the same, though not as strong in the short run. Wouldn’t you like to feel good in the long term, without getting depressed, run down, sad, or suffer anxiety? Fractionated foods WILL increase these feelings and set the person up for a vicious cycle of weight gain, ill health and and increased emotional disorders.

We Are To Blame

As a society, we are too dependent on psychological help. Everything is the fault of someone else, something or some situation. We don’t look at ourselves, our actions and our outlook on situations. Though some will define this approach as simplistic, it is because they have been taught to feel this way; are in the business of treating people affected by these situations, or profit from them.

You are not addicted to foods, and neither are you powerless over them and have to practice abstinence. We have been given a brain to use, but we don’t do so in many instances. The biggest predictor of weight gain (or ill health), is a level of self restraint. Don’t succumb to eating amnesia (unknowingly putting hand to mouth from a bag, box or plate). This is nothing more than mindless eating. Sit, relax and enjoy, but don’t stop thinking about what you are doing. You wouldn’t do it crossing the street (for fear of getting injured). Why do it through long term self poisoning?

Choose well, don’t diet, and don’t indulge in foods which injure the body. I have hundreds of articles on this blog which go into more detail about what I have  written here. Read them and educate yourself about balanced nutrition.

Source: http://www.yes-zim.com/shopimages/products/thumbnails/sugar.jpg

Some people ask me if they should stop eating sweet produce such as oranges and carrots, because they want to cut back on sugar. I always tell them to consider that not all sugars are created equal. One class of sugars is natural (from whole foods) and the other is unnatural (added by food companies).

SO – don’t limit the natural sugars. Though an orange may contain 12 grams of sugar, it also provides vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and fibre – all which combine synergistically to absorb more slowly than its refined sugars. And natural sugar does not raise the risk of diabetes the way its refined counterpart does, so no health organization recommends limiting the natural variety. Fill up on wholesome foods – vegetables, fruits, dates, figs, etc. They’ll fill that sweet craving and are healthy to boot.

Added sugars should not exceed  10% of total calories (about 40-45 grams daily), according to a report released by the World Health Organization entitled “Diet Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases.” However, I recommend that you scale back even further for good health, because even small amounts of unnatural elements in the body add up over time and suppress bodily processes.

The makers of processed foods don’t care though. Every year they add more sugars to their products, up to the point where Statistics Canada says we consume about 23 teaspoons of them daily – based on an average 2000-calorie diet. This doesn’t include all the other added sugars we get from corn sweeteners (liquid candy) – the main ingredient in pop, nor the sugars in fruit juices.

Add it all up and by any mathematical standard, some people are eating more than half their body weight in sugars every year. That’s a whole lot of calories, with subsequent obesity and related health problems like diabetes and heart disease.

How can you tell if a food contains added sugar? Read the ingredient list! “Free sugars” are all monosaccharides and disaccharides (including refined sugars from cane, beet and corn). Look for:

1. brown sugar
2. corn sweetener
3. corn syrup
4. dextrose
5. glucose
6. high fructose corn syrup
7. invert sugar
8. malt syrup
9. molasses
10. sucrose
11. table sugar
12. sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices
13. turbinado
14. amazake
15. sorbitol
16. carob powder

“Food companies have to make food as cheap as possible so that more people will buy it and they do that by putting in corn sweeteners. The more corn sweeteners you have in a food, the cheaper it is on a per calorie basis.” (CBC Marketplace – Sugar Surprise, March 9, 2004).

ADDITIONALLY, look for added starches in food (which thicken a product cheaply) but also thicken your waistline, being quickly absorbed as energy and acting like sugars in the body.

If you really want to become healthy, don’t worry about reading labels. Yes, you read that right! Start eating wholesome foods which are not manufactured in a can or a box. Start cooking with your own ingredients and stop letting others do the work for you. That way you control what goes into your food and ultimately your own health. If you don’t like what I say because you deem yourself too busy, then count on getting sick and ultimately contracting a disease. Let’s face it, your health should be more important than a few extra hours at your job. You can’t enjoy the good things in life when lying in bed sick. Trust me on this, I’ve seen it too many times. And though I’m not a betting man, I’ll bet those sick people wished their hearing had been a lot better while they were still healthy!

Have you ever wondered why Coke comes with a smile? It’s because it gets you high. They took the cocaine out almost a hundred years ago. You know why? It was redundant.

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
• 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
• >60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
• >60 Minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.
• >60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

This will all be followed by a caffeine crash in the next few hours. (As little as two if you’re a smoker.) But, hey, have another Coke, it’ll make you feel better.

*FYI: The Coke itself is not the enemy, here. It’s the dynamic combo of massive sugar doses combined with caffeine and phosphoric acid. Things which are found in almost all soda.

Source: http://www.healthbolt.net/2006/12/08/what-happens-to-your-body-if-you-drink-a-coke-right-now/

Authors Comment: I found this article on this blog (hotgingeranddynamite.blogspot.com) and thought it was highly interesting, especially considering the interest in the apparent addiction factor of Timmy’s coffee. I’ve written on this subject before, (Tim Horton’s Nicotene/MSG? ) and that particular article went haywire with readers. After doing some research, I now find I have to alter my opinion on the ingredients of their coffee. Besides the moderation factor of coffee which most ignore, and the unhealthy chemicals so common in non-organic coffee, the Tim Horton’s brand may indeed have other highly undesirable ingredients. Check out the interesting read below:

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Speculation abounds on the internet as to why an entire nation can’t function without Tim Horton’s coffee. Canadians will go to astonishing lengths to wrap their hands around a hot double-double. Theories range from nicotine to MSG, to insane amounts of caffeine to good old all-purpose crack cocaine. Thanks to a CBC investigation, the coffee has even been submitted for laboratory testing and come up clean. A few days after our return from Canada, I was send this email:

From: Chris
Date: Oct 3, 2007 5:30 PM
Subject: Tim Hortons EXPOSED
To: Susannah

I spent some time yesterday evening looking into the mystery of Tim Horton’s rocket fuel. Some interesting finds:

Firstly, Tim Horton’s claim that none of their coffee contains additives (none of their food, for that matter). A huge and already prosperous business is unlikely to risk their reputation by lying about this, so I assume they’re telling the truth.

Harold McGee tells me that Colombian Arabica coffee beans, when roasted, contain small quantities of a substance called lactisole which reduces the apparent sweetness of sugar by two thirds. This is why a cup of ‘double double’ strength Tim Horton’s, which contains a whopping 18 grams of sugar, tastes quite benign. The same amount of sugar dissolved in water would taste unusually sweet.

I did discover that lactisole has been synthesised and used by a company called Domino Sugar in a mixture called Super Envision Flavour and Texture Modifier. Not mentioned on their main website, they’ve hived off all their more controversial formulas onto www.dominospecialtyingredients.com, which tells me that:

Super Envision® Flavor and Texture Modifier is the latest Domino Specialty Ingredient product of the Envision sweetness inhibitor line. This unique ingredient reduces sweetness and allows the food formulator to use a full range of carbohydrates to maintain the desired attributes of products, such as: moisture retention, mouthfeel and water activity. Super Envision can typically be used at < 1%.

In other words, this stuff is used to cram more sugar into foods and sports drinks whilst not making it taste too sweet. Possibly why a can of coke is stuffed with 39 grams of sugar in only 12oz and still remains palatable. So the recipe seems pretty simple. Very strong coffee beans carefully chosen for a wide popularity, lots of sugar, lots of cream. Keeps ‘em coming back for more.

In short: Tim Horton’s coffee has no secret ingredient. Its crack-like qualities arise from its unique ability, thanks to naturally-occurring lactisole, to deliver not only caffeine but a double dose of good old-fashioned sugar — 18 g, or just under 4 teaspoonsful, roughly as much as you’ll find in 8-and-a-half Pixy Stix — across your blood-brain barrier in a matter of minutes. The fact that a double-double also delivers 7 grams of delicious, delicious fat (4g of which are saturated), or roughly as much as you’ll find in 2 teaspoonsful of butter, doesn’t hurt either.

From: Susannah
Date: Oct 3, 2007 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: Tim Hortons EXPOSED
To: Chris

This is better than Matthew’s calling up Kleenex to cross-question them about the “anti-viral” properties of their latest bird-flu-paranoia-inspired tissue.

That Super Envision stuff is scary. I presume all that bland corporate jargon just serves to conceal the fact that the stuff is used to allow food makers to shoehorn even more sugar into processed foods to give them the true crack effect. From Domino’s company history:

During the mid-1990s, the company embarked on an intensive research and development program to develop non-sweet sugar for different food applications. For example, the company’s development of such a product, which combined Lactisole, a sweetness inhibitor, with sucrose, enabled it to tone down the sweetness in sports drinks and energy boosting beverages. Another application involved using non-sweet sugar as a fat substitute for frostings, icings, and a variety of frozen desserts. By 1995, the company had received approval for 18 food applications for its non-sweet sugar, including use in low-oil salad dressings.

You’re right — in other words, lactisole is a compound used by the forces of evil to satisfy our monkey brains and give us an “energy” boost without us realizing it’s all just sugar. Notice also that the use of “non-sweet sugar as a fat substitute” came about in the mid-90s during the “fat is bad” craze, when pretty much every edible item in the world, including Oreos, sported a badge proclaiming it was low in fat. Never mind how high it was sugar. Thus proving absolutely spot-on the words of Richard E. Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising: “[It] must be low in something, and if it isn’t, it must be high in something else, and that is its health-giving ingredient we will sell.”

Further Information:

• Lactisole is a carboxylic acid salt isolated from roasted Colombian Arabica Coffee beans. Like gymnemic acid, it is a sweet-inhibitor or taste-modifier.

• Kinghorn, A.D. and Compadre, C.M. Alernative Sweeteners: Third Edition, Revised and Expanded, Marcel Dekker ed., New York, 2001. ISBN 0-8247-0437-1

Anti-sweet properties

At concentrations of 100–150 parts per million in food, lactisole largely suppresses the ability to perceive sweet tastes, both from sugar and from artificial sweeteners such as aspartame. A 12% sucrose solution was perceived like a 4% sucrose solution when lactisole was added. However, it is significantly less efficient than gymnemic acid with acesulfame potassium, sucrose, glucose, and sodium saccharin. Research found also that it has no effect on the perception of bitterness, sourness and saltiness. According to a recent study, lactisole acts on a sweet taste receptor heteromer of the TAS1R3 sweet protein receptor in humans, but not on its rodent counterpart.

Lactisole Interacts with the Transmembrane Domains of Human T1R3 to Inhibit Sweet Taste. P Jiang, M Cui, B Zhao, Z Liu, LA Snyder, LMJ Benard, R Osman, RF Margolskee and M Max. J. Biol. Chem., Vol. 280, Issue 15, 15238-15246, April 15, 2005

As a food additive

The principal use of lactisole is in jellies, jams, and similar preserved fruit products containing large amounts of sugar. In these products, by suppressing sugar’s sweetness, it allows fruit flavors to come through. In the United States, lactisole is FDA GRAS (Fema number: 3773) and approved for use in food as flavouring agent up to 150ppm. Currently, lactisole is manufactured and sold by Domino Sugar and its usage levels are between 50 to 150 ppm.

JECFA “Specifications for Flavourings”

Sugar sans sweetness – lactisole. Prepared Foods, May, 1995 by Fran LaBell