Sugar: Giving up the Sweet Stuff for good.

Over the next week, as I approach this year of Sanitas, of building an awareness and attempting to live in total health, I thought I would take some time to just quickly address some key areas of health concern.  It is Christmas night, and today I watched my family over-consume sugars and refined carbohydrates as though they hadn’t eaten in months and might not be allowed to eat tomorrow.  In particular, a couple of members of my family just cannot stop themselves when it comes to sugar anythings – drinks, cookies, other desserts, candies, and even salad dressings and sauces.  My mom is pretty good about this stuff, but she admitted that today she had too much and, at the end of the day, she was feeling it.

Sugar and refined carbohydrates are highly inflammatory.  We know that they cause abnormal spikes in blood sugar and this can lead to insulin resistance.  But we also know less of how they work on our brains and other muscles.  My mom was having intense muscle cramping tonight, which we are pretty sure, is caused by a combination of over-exertion and then eating WAY too much sugar.  In a blog by Rick Foster, he writes about the intense muscle cramping he got when he ate some refined sugar after being off of it for a long long while.  This blog entry is worth taking a look at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-foster/no-sugar-diet_b_1397439.html.

So, I believe that for this year I just have to give it up.  COMPLETELY.  This is because it runs in my family to have super-cravings for it and our levels of addiction to sugar are higher than in the normal family.  In a normal family, 1 out of 4 persons is possibly addicted to sugar.  In my family, it is 3 out of 4.  We have a high risk for developing diabetes and hypoglycemia…many people in my family are at potential risk for this.  For these reasons, I am giving it up for a year.  

Another interesting article is looking at how sugar poisons the body.  This YouTube video by Robert Lustig is a bit long, but the science is worth listening to:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM. 

He also has a book coming out on December 30^th all about this.  I cannot wait to read it!:  http://www.amazon.com/Fat-Chance-bitter-truth-about-ebook/dp/B0095ZMPTU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1388065513&sr=8-2&keywords=robert+lustig. 

Probably the most disturbing things we learn from Lustig and his colleagues is not that sugar is bad for us and affects our health terribly, but that, just like the tobacco industry, the sugar industry spent millions of dollars on covering up the deadliness of their product and there are loads of documents to prove it.  Check out this article in Mother Jones:  http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/10/sugar-industry-lies-campaign

There is also the fact that refined carbs and sugars do continue to show negative affects on brain development in children and in memory impairment in adults.  Sugar is quite inflammatory on the body, so we must be careful of this because Alzheimer’s and other related dementia’s are caused by inflammation.  There are tons of articles out there on the effects of sugar on the body.  Here is just one on how sugar affects the brain:  http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/high-blood-sugar-linked-to-dementia/?_r=0.

There are plenty of links between sugar and ADD/ADHD too, although the scientific literature is not as great on this.  I think that, bottom line, we can say for sure that sugar has a detrimental affect on focus for the brain, so it should be cut in any and all people who have focus issues.  And perhaps that really is all of us.

I’m going to encourage everyone to stop and do it cold turkey.  This is my plan.  I do not want to live a less-exuberant life and it seems that sugar is one of the keys that leads to chronic pain.

Give it up for a year.  This is my #1 health tip and I plan to follow it.   And then maybe it will be forever. 

I’ll give monthly updates on just how the “no sugar” year is going, but here is what I hope:

First, I hope that going off sugar helps my own focus issues and that I will see an enhanced result in my abilities to concentrate for long periods of time.

Second, I hope that I see the inflammation in my body go down.  Specifically the struggles I have with cramping in my legs and my right hip pain which I am not sure what it is, but it’s been going on for years and I’ve been treated for it several times.  I do know that when I cut sugar from my diet for 90 days a couple years ago, it got better.

Third, I do hope that cutting it completely will reduce the cravings for it.  The addiction.  There, I said it.  I am a sugar ADDICT as probably a huge percentage of our population is.  Admitting our addictions is the first step in overcoming them.  So now we can begin the path of healing.

Even though my year of super healthy living does not start until January 1.  I am stopping the sugar TODAY.