Sugar Addicts Anonymous: Break your sugar addiction and feel better
Transcript
All of this isn't to say that we have to go cold turkey all at once. It's really about evaluating where you are right where you are, you have to start where you are. And if you are at the point where you're just sick and tired of being sick and tired. Sugar is the first way to help affect your overall health and it can make a huge, huge difference in the way you feel.
Welcome to the work in your guide to natural ways out of stress, tension and trauma. My name is Ericka Thomas. I'm a certified trauma release exercise provider health coach, and yoga instructor, and I'm using my 20 plus years of experience to bring you a new perspective on health and wellness. I believe that true health and healing begins and ends with the nervous system. And that means, for most of us, we need to reintroduce those connections. The great news is that we can, and that's what The Work IN is all about.
Throughout this podcast, you'll find tools, resources, practices, people, and perspectives that will help you add to your own resilience arsenal and shake off the effects of all sources of chronic physical, mental, and emotional stress, my intention is solely to bring you information and empower you with permission to stop working out and start working in.
The Work IN is brought to you by Kinetic Grace Resilience. Kinetic Grace is an online program designed to teach safe self regulation of the stress response through the body using trauma release exercise guided body awareness, and the breath. The program includes private instruction, exclusive access to certified providers and 30 days of group classes. And because it's online, kinetic grace is available anywhere you are. Enrollment is open now. Visit elemental kinetics.com to learn more.
Hey there everyone, I just wanted to pop in here today before we get started in today's episode on sugar and sugar addiction, and let you know that there's a video slide presentation that goes along with this episode of The Work IN. And you'll find it on our YouTube channel, Kinetic Grace Resilience. Under the Happy Belly Kitchen playlist. So be sure to head over there and check it out. And if you’re looking for a direct link you can find that in our show notes at elemental kinetics.com forward slash the work in and don't forget the dashes in between the work in. Thanks everybody, and enjoy.
Hi there everyone, and welcome back to The Work IN. Today's episode we are going to jump back into our happy belly kitchen, and I wanted to share with you a presentation that is near and dear to my heart, and it is all about sugar. And sugar addiction, and so today we want to step into a sugar Addicts Anonymous meeting for myself. Sugar has been the biggest nemesis in my journey towards a healthier metabolism, a healthier gut, healthier overall relationship with food, like most Americans, I used to eat a majority of my calories from carbohydrates.
It's taken me really years to get my sweet tooth and my sugar addiction under control and I have to say I still struggle with it sometimes. I still get into it sometimes, but for the most part, I feel like I have a very different eating pattern today than I did, even four or five years ago. But it's taken quite a bit of time. I used to eat pop tarts for breakfast, I'd go teach three classes, kickboxing, sculpting, whatever. And then by the time I get home, I'd be starving, literally starving, I could hardly stand it and then I would go and make myself a couple of loaded baked potatoes for lunch, and then crash like literally collapse on the couch, until my kids would get home from school, and then dinner. Dinner was usually based around some more potatoes but Midwestern girl so meat and potatoes or pasta or rice and corn. Really, I was never a big green vegetable person, I don't naturally gravitate towards vegetables. So that part of my plate was often yellow. So corn counted starchy vegetables counted carrots, things like that, but never really anything green unless it was a simple Iceberg lettuce salad.
But after dinner I go out and teach 2, 3, 4 more classes in the evening. Come home, actually. So, physically exhausted I could hardly move. But I would be unable to sleep. I always had a hard time sleeping. Never really slept well, even though I was definitely tired, you know, physically tired. Tired and wired is what they call it.
At that time,in my life, my stomach hurt all the time and I know I've shared things about that with you in the past, but I would literally binge on carbs at night, or right before I would go to teach class, and then go to teach classes that were really designed to punish myself for my poor food choices because I really felt like at that time, like I deserved to eat whatever I wanted to eat. I felt like I worked hard enough, physically hard enough that I could eat whatever I wanted to eat, but it was not giving me any more energy. It wasn't helping me be healthy, I was at a point where I was hypoglycemic which made me feel like I had to eat every two hours, because there would literally be a blood sugar crash and I thought that was normal, I thought that was good, actually.
I for some reason thought that that was the way it was supposed to be if you're really physically fit, but I really wasn't feeling well. And so finally I had to start to get a handle on that. And as I've shared before I went through several different types of food cleanses and remarkably these food cleanses really removed all of the processed sugar from my eating pattern from my diet. And it took me a while I am embarrassed to say a little bit longer than I wanted it to or thought it should, before I realized that it was really, eliminating sugar from my diet that really was causing some really drastic improvements for me.
But I'm not going to stand up here and tell you that I never eat any kinds of sugar. I really can't do that, that would be hypocritical, but, but I have removed enough of it, so that I know, I know what my body feels like and I have a much more natural response. Kind of an off switch, so that it doesn't overwhelm my system, the way it once did, and it allows me to pay much closer attention to how I feel, while I am eating. And so, it gives me a lot more control over my health.
I want to share with you some of the background, some of the things that go into sugar addiction, because I know for many people, they may not even know that they are addicted to sugar. It seems like that would mean that you're always eating candy or something like that or you crave sweets. When really, sometimes it is the opposite of that.
I have done this presentation in corporate settings before and a lot of people are like well I'm not addicted to sugar I like salty things. Well, the truth is, the salt that is on all those salty things is covering up the carbohydrate, and all carbohydrates break down into sugar, glucose, every kind of carbohydrate, including our vegetables and fruits, those are carbohydrates too.
Now, when you hear recommendations for carbohydrate type diets or low carbohydrate type diets, they are not talking about cutting out fruits and vegetables, they are talking about processed carbohydrates that are simple carbohydrates.
So I want to start our Sugar Addicts Anonymous, by talking a little bit about what goes on in the body. Just review this idea of carbohydrates in general, and see if we can't get a handle on that and then we'll go from there. So let's talk about sugar right, we think of suga as table sugar. Sugar is a carbohydrate but carbohydrates come from a lot of different things.
They are broken down into either complex carbohydrates or simple carbohydrates, right. So, all carbohydrates are going to break down eventually in the body to glucose, but from the complex carbohydrate side, you have a lot more fiber involved there. Those carbohydrates are digested and then absorbed and broken down into glucose, and then they enter the bloodstream, very very slowly complex carbohydrates, enter the bloodstream, slowly. Okay. Because of all the fiber nutrients attached.
Now the simple carbohydrates, especially in the form of added sugars, the sugars that are not naturally in whatever food that is, those are stripped out of other foods and put into other forms. So you have glucose, but then, for example, fructose, comes from fruit, stripped out of fruit and then pumped into other foods so you've got glucose and fructose, those are the simplest forms of carbohydrates and they're just kept in that simple form, and then put into foods. Now these are absorbed into the bloodstream almost immediately, beginning at our mouth. and we're going to talk a little bit about that sensation of sweetness in a minute.
But for Americans, we consume 156, pounds of sugar per year. Now that's, that's really high, that's really high. If you Google that you're gonna be like 156. Sometimes you'll see 152 That's, That's total sugar, but the important thing to pull out of there, it's, it's, it's the added sugar that's the problem, the added sugar into foods that is hidden, only about 29 pounds of that 156 comes from a sugar bowl. This is average. Okay, so you have to kind of averages over the total population. I happen to have had a family member that would go through a 10 pound bag of sugar every week, he would pump that into his coffee. I'm not kidding 10 pounds of sugar in one week. The rest of that is made up of added sugar that is in, in our processed foods, and I would say a majority of that comes in our, our beverages, Right, so think about what you drink, that could be alcohol but it's most likely soft drinks right. Coke, Pepsi Mountain Dew, tons of sugar in that stuff that we don't even recognize off that right
There's more than 60 different names for sugar on ingredient labels. They keep changing them and kind of sneak them in there. And you might be surprised by some of the things on there, where he would think, Oh well sugar isn't even on this ingredient label but really there's like four or five different kinds of sugar in that ingredient level label.
People can only safely metabolize about six teaspoons of added sugar per day. But the average American consumes about 32 teaspoons per day and I would say that is not on purpose, right, that is just if you're not paying attention to what you eat, you could easily get 32 teaspoons of sugar per day, if not more than that, right.
So let's look at what happens in the body when we eat, when we consume sugar as glucose right so we think of glucose sugar as glucose. Maybe some of you have had a glucose test, right, where they test the glucose in the bloodstream. But what happens in the body when we eat sugar is that insulin is released to help the cells absorb excess glucose in the bloodstream so we've eaten something, it's breaking down in the body. The body is saying hey here's a bunch of glucose, it's going to I'm going to send it through the bloodstream, and somebody needs to do something with it. That's insulin's job.
So insulin is released from the pancreas, and it helps your cells absorb anything that doesn't get burned up by movement.
Now, here's a lovely picture of my cutie. Remy, when he was a puppy that dog had just two speeds, it was either on or off, and he was a very very bouncy puppy, and he reminds me of somebody on a sugar high, right, we've got all of this sugar and energy running around the body and it gives us lots of energy. If you burn it off, then it doesn't need to be stored. Okay, if you don't burn it off insulin is going to send it to several different places, the liver, the muscles, and then into the fat cells to be stored. So that's insulin's job right. When insulin has done its job. The blood sugar levels are going to drop back down again. Right. We come off of that, energetic, sugar high and it can, if we had way too much sugar. If that's a big drop a big fast drop from simple carbohydrates, this straight up glucose and fructose can drop you down below the energy levels that you started with, which leaves you very sluggish and sleepy and tired just like my little Remy here.
Okay. And so that's really that's what's going on in the body, a very simple thing right there. Okay. And, and simultaneously. Along with that, we have something going on in our brain. When we eat that sugar, when we eat that carbohydrate, sugar, or not just sugar but that sweet taste, as it hits your tongue, actually triggers a release of feel good chemicals in the brain, those are dopamine and serotonin.
Okay, so dopamine is responsible for this pleasure and motivation response in the body. It is a motivation towards pleasure, right this is an evolutionary response because our primitive brain knows that sweetness means energy. Okay, and the brain wants to help us survive for longer and so if it is sensing this sweet, it knows that this is going to be a lot of energy for us to consume so it makes us like it, right? makes us feel good. The brain tells you to feel good.
This is also where some of that comfort food comes from. Right, that idea of comfort food where we just feel really good after a big pasta dish or macaroni and cheese or something like that.
Just like with certain kinds of drugs, your brain can actually become addicted to that feeling, that feel good feeling that comes from food.
This is where that that saying, eating your feelings comes from right we don't feel good so we eat something sweet, and then we feel we start to feel a little better, right, that is a dopamine release the serotonin side of that connection actually comes from the gut serotonin is, is the, the chemical reaction that kind of makes you feel satisfied, it's contentment content with what you have that kind of thing. So, those two work together, we've got this motivation towards pleasure and then serotonin kicking in and makes us feel like, oh yes I've had I've had enough or this is making, I've got plenty. Right. So. So that's what's going on in the body and the brain.
Let's look at that in a picture of that brain response. Okay, so let me see if I can zoom in here, right. So you see four pictures of a brain. This is the reward center in the brain, okay and these colors are interesting, this top left, we have a normal brain, okay you see the red, the red is a high dopamine response this motivation towards pleasure right normal pleasure and interest in things, okay. The top right picture is this brain of an obese person, although I want to take a note I want to make a specific note here. Metabolic dysfunction when it's related to sugar and fructose is not limited to people who are overweight or obese. Okay, so this could just as easily be someone of normal weight, who has insulin resistance or metabolic dysfunctions some other way. Alright, so don't get hung up on this being necessarily overweight or, or obese.
So notice this, this brain picture here with very little red, very little red mostly yellow difficulty feeling joy or pleasure. The green is very low dopamine or lack of pleasure, right, and then compare this, this is just a food addiction, this is a sugar addiction here top right, compare it with the brain of a cocaine user, and the brain of an alcoholic. Right. They're not that far off. It is, it is the same kind of pathway, doesn't have to be a legal or illegal drug in order to trigger those same addiction responses in the brain at that neurological level.
Now, there's some symptoms of sugar addiction that you may or may not be aware of.
Feeling sluggish all the time. Now that was absolutely me. I was not moving unless I was highly, highly caffeinated, and I couldn't understand that because I felt like I ate all the time. And I should have plenty of energy, but that was sourced from quick energy not long term energy that was not burning fat for fuel or anything like that so, of course, of course there's a sluggish feeling.
Always feeling hungry. Yes, that, that idea that you have to eat every two hours or that you feel like you want to eat every two hours and this kind of goes to a disruption and balance between some of our leptin and ghrelin, that satiety, that hunger and satiety hormone that balance between am I full or am I not full, that gets really confused with insulin resistance.
You have a lot of cravings for things when we are addicted to sugar and not necessarily sweet things. We can crave salty things, we can crave protein, it's almost like the body is craving what it's craving is balance right, something to balance out everything else.
Obesity, or being overweight, although there used to be this idea that it was excessive weight that caused metabolic dysfunction, that's not necessarily true. And more and more what we're discovering is actually the metabolic dysfunction starts first and that is what leads to weight gain and obesity. And so if we can get handle on that metabolic dysfunction, early on reverse it, then we can address some of that obesity.
Always feeling thirsty that's indicative of prediabetes and diabetes.
One, never being enough in other words never really feeling like you have an off switch. And again that goes back to this hunger satiety balance that comes from our leptin and ghrelin response to insulin.
Eating until you feel sick. That is, that is also a symptom of sugar addiction related to that one is never enough right, not being able to know when you are full.
Eating your feelings like I mentioned before, there's a lot of reasons that we eat, right. A lot of people have a relationship with food that is tangled up in emotions and emotional dependence, sometimes from childhood, feelings of never wanting to waste food. Sometimes we eat as a reward we think we deserve that, that treat, and that was a big one for me. My family celebrates around food so all celebrations are kind of centered around eating. So those things can actually really disrupt what the body naturally would do on its own without all of those emotional things.
So, let's talk about the real culprit here.And that’s fructose or added sugar. Okay, now, fructose comes from fruit, when you consume, like an apple, let’s say. That apple is sweet, because of the fructose there. Now if you have let's say high fructose corn syrup in your soda. That fructose comes from corn, it can be pulled out of corn, and a stripped of all the fiber and nutritional value of eating whole corn, and, and then shoved into our process soda so there is definitely a difference between something that is sweetened with fructose and an apple, they are not the same thing. Your can of Mountain Dew is not the same as an apple in fact you'd have to eat a heck of a lot of apples to be the same level of fructose that's in Mountain Dew, so keep that in mind.
But I do want to make a note here that fructose is not measurable in the bloodstream.When you get a glucose test, blood glucose does not tell you how much fructose is in the bloodstream and that's going to matter here in a minute when we talk about that. Alright so, fructose is 20% Sweeter than table sugar, so it's gonna blow your palate out of the water. right, there's nothing as sweet, in nature, as an Oreo cookie. You just cannot find that same level of sweetness and so, it destroys what we naturally think of as good and the brain just kind of gets a little bit confused. Remember that brain response with dopamine? You have something with fructose in it, and the brain is like wow, this thing is amazing. We need way more of this, because it doesn't understand that that's not real, it's just, it's just the sweet flavors that overwhelms the system.
Fructose can only be metabolized in the liver. Just like alcohol. Alcohol and fructose, that it doesn't get metabolized like glucose does.
Where glucose gets pulled out of the food through the digestive process and it's broken down, and then absorbed into the liver, the muscles for instant energy and then sent into those, those cells to store it later the fat cells. No, fructose goes straight to the liver, and then once it's in the liver, it's broken down into actual droplets of fat and stored there.
That should make you a little bit nervous. It tricks the body into gaining weight. Okay, tricks the body into gaining weight because there's nothing of nutritional value. It disrupts the leptin signaling from the fat cells so let's talk about that how does it do that how does it trick the body?
Fructose overloads insulin and leptin. So leptin is created in your fat cells, it's released by fat cells and it signals your appetite control in your stomach to shut down, it basically tells the body. Hey, you have enough energy, you don't have to eat anymore. Okay, it triggers the reward centers in the brain to the point that the desire to eat never gets shut off. Everything gets confused there. Alright, so that's how fructose actually starts to trigger this weight gain. It's very subtle and insidious, what we're talking about here is the beginnings of metabolic syndrome.
Okay, metabolic syndrome is a group of symptoms that are directly related to excessive fructose in the diet. However, we don't have a way to test for excessive fructose in the body yet. There's just other outside symptoms that you can look for and what are some of those, those symptoms?
Insulin resistance that leads to elevated blood sugar right so when they test your blood they're testing for glucose in the blood. All right. When insulin can no longer put glucose into the fat cells, it just pumps out more insulin, but the cells won't take any more glucose. So you've got all this extra glucose floating around in the blood. Alright, that's what that test is measuring.
Another symptom of excess fructose in the body is obviously weight gain and particularly abdominal obesity. So this is just highly related to metabolic syndrome in general tends to lay on fats around the center of the body.
Okay, you tend to have a decreased HDL which we think of as the good lipoproteins the good cholesterol, and it increases LDL, and there's a really striking elevated triglyceride level. Okay, so it's not just higher LDL levels it's very high triglycerides, very closely related to, to excessive amounts of fructose and glucose too but fructose specially and bloodstream, and then, high blood pressure.
Now you don't have to have all of these to have metabolic syndrome. There are people who are at normal weight, like I mentioned before, you can be at normal weight and still have metabolic syndrome. Okay, you can have everything else going on, and still have no, no, obesity, necessarily, so that does happen in about 20% of people, so idon't think that because you are normal weight, where you don't have a weight problem, that this cannot happen to you.
What we are especially concerned about is this... non alcoholic fatty liver disease, that doesn't necessarily show up on the outside of your body. So what is non alcoholic fatty liver disease? It's basically cirrhosis of the liver. That is something we think about for alcoholics, but without the alcohol, Okay, because fructose is metabolized exactly like alcohol, the excess glucose beyond what the liver can store anything that's beyond what the liver can store, and the any fructose it's floating around in the body. Both of those can get converted to fatty acids, and then stored as fat in the liver. So you can see in the picture here, the difference between a healthy liver and a fatty liver.
The liver cells are actually being replaced by fat, which enlarges the liver there.
And this is, this is just crazy so non alcoholic fatty liver disease can develop in as quickly as five years or even faster depending on the person's predisposition and dietary habits you can either speed this up or you can slow it down, right, you have control over this. This non alcoholic fatty liver disease is not a foregone conclusion, you don't just randomly catch it. This is not contagious. You can have a lot of influence over the health of your liver, by what you are consuming, what you are putting into your body.
So there's some other ways that we can visually see sugar toxicity. So that's kind of what we're talking about with excessive amounts of fructose in the body. One way is through the skin, okay because sugar, excessive sugar glucose and fructose, can age your skin. Glucose will attach to proteins. The proteins elastin and collagen. I'm sure you've heard about collagen, right, helps keep your skin nice and plump. Basically glucose is interfering with elastin and collagen and their ability to repair themselves it's aging you prematurely. So if you want beautiful skin. That's a great reason to cut back on the sugar intake.
Alzheimer's, okay so I know a lot of people my age and older who are just really concerned about the risk of Alzheimer's disease. A high fructose diet is highly correlated with an increased risk of Alzheimer's. Because although they're not certain exactly what causes Alzheimer's. They do understand that these metabolic pathways that lead you to type two diabetes, possibly, are the same pathways that lead us into Alzheimer's, okay so if for no other reason then you want to lower your risk. Then, making it easier for your brain to function by keeping the sugar out of your diet. The excessive amounts of sugar out of your diet is a great reason to do it.
The other piece here is flat out straight up organ damage. Okay so, sugar filled blood,when your body is overwhelmed with excessive amounts of sugar that cannot be stored, the blood becomes thicker, almost like sludge or basically syrup. So, that thickening of the blood damages any organ that relies on really tiny blood vessels and we have a lot of those.
The kidneys, the brain, the eyes, the heart and anytime we have damage to any part of the body but blood vessels especially, what happens, well the body increases inflammation is a way to try to heal that damage and inflammation is going to lead to some really serious types of problems for us.
Like what? Like a higher risk of chronic kidney disease, kidney failure, high blood pressure. Obviously if you've got inflammation in those blood vessels that makes it harder for the heart to pump, there's a higher risk. As a result of that, of heart attack and stroke. And because like we said before metabolic syndrome increases LDL and triglycerides, you've got a lot more fat then floating around, cholesterol floating around in your bloodstream, waiting to get stuck somewhere that's basically what a heart attack and stroke are.
So, the other piece to this is that there is some research out there, some new research out there that fructose in particular, promotes cell division and speeds up growth of cancer. Okay, so basically it allows cancer to spread faster, right, that all by itself. If nothing else, is a reason to pull back on the sugar, we can actually starve those cancer cells by removing their source of energy.
Something to think about, especially if you or someone you know is at higher risk for breast cancer or any other type of cancer or you've had cancer in the past and you're moving out of that, I mean this is a way that you can support your body to heal itself without, possibly, relaxing, okay.
Now, I don't want to give you all this bad news without giving you some tools or some suggestions to help you break that addiction but keep in mind this is an addiction. Okay, this is an addiction, this is not something that's going to be like a one or done kind of thing like, oh, just do this and you'll never want anything with sugar in it ever again because I know it's not that easy. I've done it, I've done it, I've done it cold turkey, it is really really difficult. You have to have a big reason. A big reason to do it. Otherwise, it's just as difficult as breaking any other addiction.
If you want to go cold turkey. That's fantastic, I'm all for it. Right. Just be prepared for the withdrawal and there will be one. And it's sometimes just as hard as anything else. Right, you're not going to be a really happy camper for a few weeks, you might be kind of hard to be around. It will be worth it at the end, once those things once your body gets back to quote unquote normal or a more natural energy breakdown for yourself. So, so just keep that in mind.
Another way, besides cold turkey, is to start to replace things, right. So, instead of saying, I'm not going to eat anything sweet ever again. Substitute the things that you know have excessive amounts of sugar in them with whole fruit. Okay and we say whole fruit, because, because you're going to get the added nutrient benefits, the antioxidants, vitamins, things like that. Plus, the fiber from that fruit in your diet. And so, keep in mind that it has to be the whole fruit. There are a lot of fruit juices out there, and they are sweeter, sometimes have more added sugars and actually soft drinks, so please be wary of that, as far as what you are substituting in your diet but whole fruit. It's a fantastic way to do it.
The next thing to help you break that sugar addiction is to really purge your pantry to clean out your pantry of all trigger foods. Okay, so there's a lot of things that we eat together with other things that kind of feed on each other, right, and this may go for alcohol consumption as well, but specifically those soft drinks and the things that you drink sometimes will trigger you to eat more. So let's say you're having kind of an afternoon slump and you go and you have a soft drink with caffeine in it, and the sweetness there is looking for balance and so you grab the chips, and the, the Cheetos and the crackers and the cheese and before you know it you've consumed all kinds of excess of calories so we're gonna look for those trigger foods, try to get them out of your house.
And then have a backup plan for any cravings right so we want to find a way to distract ourselves, staying busy is a great way if you've got something that you can do with your hands, that will keep them out of the bag of chips or out of the bag of cookies, and if there's no cookies in the pantry, you won't have to worry about that, but having that backup plan and starting that plan before you get to the point where you absolutely cannot stand that craving anymore is always a good, a good thing to do.
We want to keep lots of healthy snacks nearby, again we are replacing things with something healthier. The body recognizes every step towards health towards something healthier, right, it doesn't have to be perfect, nutrition, but stepping towards something healthier is going to help correct that palate so that you're not so overwhelmed by the sweetness in natural food it and again it does take, take some time, it's gonna take some time so be patient with yourself.
Find some new ways to reward yourself. Okay, so if you’ve got your first five days and you've given up sugar or your coke, your Diet Coke your Pepsi whatever it is that you're going to start with to break that sugar addiction. We want to find a different way to reward ourselves rather than going out to happy hour right. We want to find rewards that are not centered around food and sugar, and that might be a little challenging but you can get creative, maybe go for a walk with a friend, or visit a museum. Whatever, do something out of the box out of the ordinary. This one is really important.
Say no to fat free products and this may seem counterintuitive because of course, there's some sort of common knowledge or beliefs out there that healthy diet, or eating patterns includes low fat or fat free things all foods that have been processed to be fat free, they have to replace that the flavor that comes with full fat with something else. And typically that's either artificial or processed sugar or some other sweetener or thickeners. So, you are getting, not the whole food anymore. And if you stay with your full fat options, you actually don't need to eat as much of them, in order to get the same satisfaction, the same response. So, if we're removing sugar. Then we also get to remove the fat free products.
Okay, so we're gonna talk about artificial sweeteners in just a minute, right? Because we, we need to ditch those artificial sweeteners. And you might say, what? But why, why, why should we ditch artificial sweeteners, we can keep the sweetness without the calories. But it isn't the calories from the sugar that is the problem for the body, okay. It is the fructose itself that causes the issues in the liver and the excessive amounts of glucose. Alright, so it isn't necessarily the calories, it's the molecule itself.
So let's take a deeper look into artificial sweeteners, okay so here's some of them you've probably heard of aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, neotame, things like that, these actually triggered the exact same insulin response in the body as sugar does. Okay, so if you are trying to change your metabolism, if you're trying to correct metabolic dysfunction, we need to alter our insulin response. We need to correct our insulin response.
Okay, these are 600 times sweeter than table sugar. Okay, so it's going to blow that dopamine response in the brain. It's just going to blow your mind. All right, so they make all other natural foods not taste as good because there is not, there's nothing in nature, that tastes as sweet as artificial sweeteners, there's absolutely zero nutritional value, right, these are all like zero calories right quote unquote zero calories, there's no nutritional value they're non nutritive they're addictive. They worsen insulin sensitivity, which actually will promote weight gain. They disrupt the microflora, which is the gut microflora which is really big, because there's a high correlation between a disrupted microbiota and the gut, and obesity, as well as mental health issues, okay, and there are so many safer options alternatives to artificial sweeteners. Okay, let's look at some of those.
All right, some natural alternatives to refined sugar, refined sugar that's white sugar that is 50% fructose 50% glucose, we have honey. Right, so honey is still sugar, but I'm pretty sure most people cannot eat the same amount of honey as they could straight table sugar.It just doesn't work that way. But you do have to keep that in mind, if you just need a little bit of a hit of something sweeter honey is a good option. There's also some other health benefits from honey as far as allergy responses and immune system responses, things like that, with local honey, so that's that makes it a little bit better option.
Now we have this thing called stevia, which is an all natural sweetener. Stevia is tricky, because it's not a one to one replacement for sugar. So, you have to be very careful if you're using it. It comes in liquid form, and powder form. Personally, I don't like the aftertaste, it can be very bitter. I guarantee you if you chew on a stevia leaf, it doesn't taste sweet like sugar. Okay, there's a lot of processing that goes into it. If you must have it, then it's a good option.
And then we also have sugar alcohols, like erythritol, xylitol, you don't want to be careful with xylitol, if you have pets,xylitol is toxic to pets. Sugar alcohols are and can be a one to one replacement in baking. Again, there's, you may or may not like the taste. It's not the same as sugar, it is sweet. I can taste a bitter aftertaste there so it's, I am not a fan, I would just rather cut way way way back on the actual sugar personally. We have another presentation. We can do another podcast on replacing sugar in an actual action, right. So different ways that you can get the same kinds of flavor in your baking and in your food, which we can talk about at another time. But, that is an option.
So if you, if you are choosing one of these, just keep in mind that there's some times, sometimes still an insulin response honey will give an insulin response stevia will give you a slight one. There isn't one in erythritol and it's kind of unknown whether or not that will disrupt the gut microbiota but just something to keep in mind it is an option to try.
We've got maple syrup, again, I can't imagine you replacing one to one of anything with maple syrup, but a touch of that is, is not terrible and I will say, for me personally, although I like maple syrup, I have to say that since I corrected my palate for sugar, I really barely, barely put any syrup, it's almost too sweet for me now. So, I never thought I would say that but that's the truth of it.
There's things like coconut sugar, you'll see coconut sugar and it seems like, yeah, that would be it's all natural right it's all natural, but it's still sugar, it's still sugar still glucose still sugar. So, so you want to be careful with that. Just a little tip on the side from the happy belly kitchen. Most recipes you can cut the sugar in half and not change anything about the texture of whatever you're making, I would definitely try that first before replacing it with coconut sugar for sure.
Okay, dates, mashed up dates, there's lots of recipes that use dates or monk fruit sugar that comes from dates or monk fruit are another option. Dates are, have a lot of fiber there too so it's going to slow down that absorption in the body, the slower it gets into your bloodstream the better.
And then straight up real fruit, straight up real fruit. So the interesting thing when you cook fruit is when you cook it down like when we turn apples into applesauce. It concentrates the sugar. Same thing with other types of fruit as well. And so you don't need to add anything to that. So if you are making desserts with real fruits especially in the summer it's great opportunity, don't need to add any extra sugar to it when you're working with the real thing and you keep all of that fiber in the dish.
All of this isn't to say that we have to go cold turkey all at once. It's really about evaluating where you are right where you are, you have to start where you are. And if you are at the point where you're just sick and tired of being sick and tired. Sugar is the first way to help affect your overall health and it can make a huge, huge difference in the way you feel your energy level, how you sleep, your, your gut health, your metabolic health, and that is going to go such a long way towards health for you.
Listen, I know the idea of giving up. Sugar is tough but I'm telling you, your body can stand almost anything. It's just your mind, just your mind that you need to convince, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. We find new things coming up with the body all the time. There's new studies all the time but I'm going to tell you one thing, right now, that none of those studies are going to tell you that sugar is necessary for you. It's, it's not, it is not something that the body absolutely needs. In fact, the body doesn't even need to eat any glucose at all, because the body will break down other things for glucose.
We can take the best out of everything that we eat, and we can correct things like non alcoholic fatty liver disease, disease, we can correct metabolic syndrome, we can roll back, type two diabetes, right, we can because we have that influence with what we put on our plate.
Thanks for joining me today everyone in the happy belly kitchen, and on the work in. And if you like what you heard, and you want to learn a little bit more you're looking for some other resources to help you on this health journey. Go to elemental kinetics.com/freeresources, and you're going to find all kinds of free goodies there that you can sign up for.
You can try the happy belly. Breakfast salad challenge. You can try the weekend warrior challenge if you're looking for a little bit of movement. And there's a couple of other things sprinkled throughout the website that I would love to share with you and if you have any questions feel free to message me or drop a note in the comments below and I'd love to chat with you. And with that, have a great day everyone. And I'll see you next time on The Work IN.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
I’m Ericka
I'm a certified trauma release exercise provider health coach, and yoga instructor, and I'm using my 20 plus years of experience to bring you a new perspective on health and wellness. I believe that true health and healing begins and ends with the nervous system.
I offer online, on demand private sessions, courses & memberships for individuals, small groups and corporate clients looking to build resilience and recover from stress injury.
I teach a powerfully effective modality called trauma release exercise that works through the body without the need to relive the story.
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