'Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar.'

It’s been a couple of months since my last blog. In that time, my wife and I have been blessed with a beautiful baby boy and he is just perfect.

After being away from work for 6 weeks to enjoy with our new boy and using that time for an extended break from training, I am hoping to get back into some regular blogging aimed at helping everyone understand more about the real and vital effects that food has on our health and longevity. I will provide some reviews on books I have read as part of my ongoing research which I hope will entice you to go and grab a copy of them to get deeper into the details of why we should be getting rid of sugar, the majority of carbohydrate rich foods and ‘vegetable’ oils, from our diets. Also, I want to continue explaining why we need to eat much more saturated fat and fat in general, from quality animal and some plant sources to ensure the life long quality of our body’s cells and, importantly, our brain.

I would like to give a brief review of an amazing book written by Dr Robert Lustig, who I have mentioned before in previous blogs for his YouTube video lecture ‘Sugar: The Bitter Truth’. His book is titled, ‘Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar’. Here is the description of the book as found on Amazon.com –

Sugar is addictive, toxic and everywhere. Find out how your sweet tooth might be nibbling you to death in this straight-talking exposé.

‘Fat Chance’, documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of metabolic syndrome – which results in conditions like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Dr Robert Lustig exposes how changes in the food industry and in our wider environment have affected our collective metabolisms and our waistlines, and he shows how industry and political forces, motivated by greed, don’t want things to change.

To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger and reward and suggests societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Discover how every calorie is different and that cutting out sugar is not just about making us thin – it’s about making us healthier, happier and smarter.

Dr Robert Lustig is a professor of Paediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. For quite some time, he has been treating children who suffer from obesity, Type 2 Diabetes (formerly known as Adult-onset Diabetes until more and more children started getting it), Hypertension, metabolic syndrome (which covers an array of symptoms) and even cardiovascular disease.

Prior to beginning his time at the University of California, San Francisco, he had been working at St. Judes Children’s Research Hospital, in Memphis, Tennessee, treating kids who had received damage to the part of the brain which controls weight and appetite resulting in the same conditions mentioned above. The damage came from brain tumours, surgery and cancer treatments and he explains in his book how he found ways to treat various individuals in relation to a variety of hormones which also play pivotal roles in weight control and appetite.

However, he was astounded when he began seeing an influx of children, at his clinic in San Francisco, who were suffering the same symptoms and conditions but these kids didn’t have brain tumours and hadn’t had surgery or cancer. Instead, there was an even bigger problem making these kids horribly sick. Dr Lustig shows how the prevalence of sugar and refined carbohydrates in the diets of these children are basically killing them. They have such bad health that, without intervention, they would be on the road to a very early death and the years they do have on earth will most certainly be laden with doctors and hospital visits, medication and likely mental illness adding up to a very poor quality of life.

Although, it is somewhat easy to point out that the foods being consumed by these sicks kids are the problem and simply changing the way they eat will almost certainly cure their ailments, Dr Lustig continually asks the question, are the kids, or even their parents, the ones to blame?

For me, the overwhelming theme of this book is the necessary blame placed on all of the big players in the world who make foods that contain many different types of sugar – for Americans, that is usually High-Fructose Corn Syrup and in Australia we have sugar from the sugar cane – refined carbohydrates and, not forgetting those cheap, pro-inflammatory ‘vegetable oils’. Along with the manufacturers, there are the people, governments, lobby groups and other organisations who promote and/or allow these foods to be the cheapest and most abundant and accessible ‘food’ sources on the planet.

When you take into account how all of these cheap, highly processed foods have filled our supermarkets, convenience stores, food courts and now grace every corner in the form of a vending machine, food stand or fast food outlet, combined with the bogus information about the need to eat a low fat diet which started in the 1950’s, and gained huge momentum through the 70’s and 80’s, and still infects the minds of many people today, can we really blame anyone for eating those foods and getting overweight and/or sick? After all, these foods are as addictive as some drugs and nicotine because they work the same through the reward pathways of the brain and the big players know this. They prey on this human function and they make big money from it. That’s right, the health of the human race is put aside in preference of making big money for a tiny percentage of the population.

Dr Lustig provides many anecdotes about how he has helped changed the lives of sick children and their families through his treatments but, in many of these stories, some of which involve sickness caused by diet and lifestyle, he points out some of the regular foods that these families consume. Some of these families believe their food choices to be fine to eat based on information (or propaganda) they have grown up with. Others simply eat what they can afford and in most low socioeconomic areas – a considerable portion of the American population – all that is available are the foods found in convenience stores and fast food restaurants. Many of these businesses flourish in these areas because they know it’s all that the locals can afford or they simply have no other choice because supermarkets with fresh produce don’t survive due to the food being far more expensive than the fast food.

Again, can all of these people be blamed for their foods choices? Dr Lustig makes a compelling case to suggest that big food, drink and pharmaceutical businesses, governments and a bunch of other people and organisations make these situations possible and are to blame and I very much agree. Particularly, in such a powerful country like America, supposedly the lucky country, it seems this shouldn’t be possible.

However, agreeing with this didn’t come easy for me. Before I began learning about what really goes on inside the body and brain with food, I genuinely thought people consciously made the choice to eat bad foods and be lazy, and it was a matter of simply choosing the healthy option. I now know better. There are so many factors out there which effect the decision making for everyone in relation to their health and I firmly believe that the number one detrimental factor, currently, is the fact that the people who are supposed to give us the best possible advice to achieve optimal health – doctors and various other medical and health industry professionals, along with governments and government supported health agencies – are not doing so.

Along with this, the ability for big food and drink companies to play on the vulnerable minds of the vast majority of the population, who are not familiar with the true effects of food in the body and brain, is not regulated sufficiently. Again, money talks and when there is a possibility of increasing regulation around what these companies are allowed to do or changing the advice given to the public, which may negatively affect the bottom line of these companies, they throw money at the problem. This may include threatening to withdraw research funding from those organisations who they ‘support’ in researching for better health practices because what they want to promote doesn’t fit in with these companies’ ability to make more money. The morals of these companies and other big players are flawed and your health doesn’t matter to them. These situations have also occurred in relation to tobacco products and pharmaceuticals. The tobacco industry has changed significantly and smoking rates have decreased dramatically in the past few decades. I am sure things will change for the food, drink and pharmaceutical industries in the next 50 years too but, you don’t have to wait for that. You can change now and get ahead of the pack.

Over the past 6 decades, the views on health have become extremely hazy. However, the most haze comes from the interference of money. Money which concerns big food, drink and pharmaceutical companies, then concerns the government and, ultimately, influences what information the general public get about what is healthy practice. This information is filtered out to the public in many different forms but despite the huge amount of evidence, from independent research, to prove much of this information is not accurate, money wins out and you can only get the right information from doing your own research or getting it from someone who has done it already.

I believe, we are at a point in time now that is the same as when the harmful effects of smoking were first getting real attention in the general knowledge of the public and it went on to becoming completely known and proven that smoking causes massive problems to our health. There was a time when smoking was considered healthy, then some questions were raised about the possible harmful effects, manufacturers then needed new marketing strategies and started paying medical professionals to endorse cigarettes, then they couldn’t claim health benefits anymore and now we have plain cigarette packaging with warnings, advertising campaigns about the dangers and the understanding that previous beliefs were absolutely wrong. Well, it’s now starting to happen with sugar, carbohydrate rich foods (mainly the refined kind) and cheap vegetable oils which contain high amounts of pro-inflammatory polyunsaturated omega-6 fats.

In this day and age, I believe most non-smoking people feel that anyone who smokes at all is absolutely crazy. I can’t blame them for that and I once felt exactly the same. I definitely hate the act of smoking and will avoid being around anyone smoking at all costs. However, I now feel that anyone who takes up smoking, for the first time, in this era, is absolutely crazy. Why? Well, my wife stated that to me and it made sense because it’s the same issues that we have with food. There are a lot of measures put in place to prevent or stop people from smoking but, as it was with smoking in the first half or so of last century, the real risks of consumption of sugar, refined carbohydrates, excessive carbohydrates and vegetable oils are not properly recognised in the information presented to the general public.

My previous views about people and poor food choices were that it was entirely their choice and the individual was to blame for their poor health. I thought it was pretty obvious what was bad for you but I have learned, in a big way, that it isn’t that simple because of how our brains are being played from all angles. I know now that I was harming myself with the way I used to eat and the changes I have experienced over the past 8 months prove that what I am now doing is unbelievably better. Instead, I see the health problems of today as the fault of governments, big food, drink and pharmaceutical companies and anyone else who chooses money over the genuine health of each and every person on this earth.

Therefore, if you suffer from – now or in the future – any number of illnesses including; cardiovascular disease, stroke, obesity/overweight, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or even an array of brain diseases not limited too; dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, ADHD and Tourette’s syndrome – I will discuss brain diseases more in the future – and you have not had the real effects of the foods we eat explained to you, then getting sick is not your fault. I sincerely hope that anyone who may encounter any of these illnesses at any point in their lives will be shown how to treat it with the right foods because food truly is medicine. Preferably, none of you will ever have these issues because, either, I have gone some way to helping you change your ways to properly nourish your body with the most healthful foods or the advice to the population catches up with the best independent scientific evidence in the very near future.

When the world catches up with the truth about our foods, those who continue to choose the wrong foods will be the minority, just like smokers. Things are slowly changing with small indications from such agencies as the WHO (World Health Organisation), the American Heart Association and even in the US dietary guidelines. From these sources, in just the past 6 – 12 months, we have seen the recommended daily added sugar consumption reduced to just 6 teaspoons (approximately 25 grams), saturated fat and dietary cholesterol have been removed from the nutrients of concern list and eggs (the whole egg because the yolk is the most nutritious bit) have been praised for being so packed with nutrients and highly recommended for consumption. These small changes will continue towards showing that a diet consisting of fatty meats and fish, eggs, full fat dairy, lots of non-starchy vegetables, some nuts and fruit, olive and coconut oil but very little to no sugar, grains, starches or ‘vegetable oils’, is the way we need to eat to achieve optimal health.

I see it as my personal responsibility to use my passion for health and do what I can to help as many people as possible to learn the truth about food. I will do this in the hope that providing the right information will give you the tools to make the best choices for your health and go on to encourage others to do the same. A part of that will be for you to gain an understanding of what is really going on inside your body so that it may help you find the strength to overcome the addiction that these harmful foods cause and successfully ditch those foods from your diet.

I absolutely recommend the book, ‘Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar’. It is an eye opener to the horrible greed amongst high rollers in this world and appropriately questions their integrity and practises.

Cheers,

Lincoln.