or beets are refined; the chemical name is sucrose. To produce white sugar, this product goes through a series of washings, filterings, and bleachings, and nutrients are stripped away. Since raw sugarcane is brown and sticky, most refineries use slaughterhouse bone ash as a filtering agent to remove the molasses and create a free-flowing sugar. This sugar has virtually no nutritional value. It is readily available and found in many commercial desserts and packaged foods and treats.
Brown sugar is mostly white sugar flavored with molasses. Its brown color comes from a charcoal treatment that may introduce traces of carcinogenic impurities, resulting in a product that is more refined and possibly more harmful than white sugar.
Fructose is the chemical name for one kind of sugar that occurs naturally in honey and ripe fruit. The connection between commercial fructose and natural fruit sugar is in name only, however. The product you find most often in packaged foods and table sweeteners is not from fruit or honey. Powdered fructose is often extracted from sugarcane, beet sugar, or corn syrup. In processing, the sucrose molecule is broken down into two component simple sugars—fructose and glucose. This makes fructose more processed than white sugar.Calorically, fructose is equivalent to sugar, but it is sweeter, so less is needed. Though fructose is often recommended for diabetics because it doesn’t affect blood sugar and insulin levels like sucrose, it actually is more likely to cause insulin resistance. Studies on animals and humans have shown that consumption of large amounts of fructose impairs the body’s ability to handle glucose (blood sugar), which ultimately leads to hyperinsulinemia (elevated insulin levels) and insulin resistance. Dr. Meira Field says, “All fructose must be metabolized in the liver. [In studies] the livers of rats on a high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and chirrhotic.”4
Corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup are highly refined sweeteners made from corn. Corn syrup is composed of dextrose and small amounts of fructose. It is considerably cheaper than sugar, which accounts for its popularity in processed food. Manufacturers make high-fructose corn syrup by converting some of the dextrose in corn syrup to fructose.”
Dextrose is a powdered form of corn sweetener that is used widely by food processors. It is structurally similar and biologically identical to glucose.
Table syrup (includes maple-flavored syrup, pancake syrup, and waffle syrup) are often confused with pure maple syrup. They can actually look and taste like maple syrup, but they are made from a blend of sweeteners with emulsifiers, stabilizers, salt, viscosity adjusting agents, acidifiers, alkalizers or buffers, defoaming agents, artificial flavors and colors, additives, chemical preservatives, and fats and oils, as desired by the manufacturer. All these additives are not healthful and contribute to the body’s burden of toxicity. This type of syrup should be avoided completely, even after you have achieved your weight loss goals.
Many of the sweetener definitions in this section have been adapted from The Goldbeck’s Guide to Good Food by Nikki and David Goldbeck.5
Artificial Sweeteners: Avoid These Fakes
There is a great deal of controversy over sugar substitutes. I’ve placed them in the “completely avoid” category because of negative reports about some of them and the fact that the body doesn’t recognize them because they are foreign substances that have undergone molecular changes. Such substances are not found in nature and have not produced healthful results for many people. That’s why they don’t have calorie counts; the body doesn’t know what to do with them.
Miryam Ehrlich Williamson, author of Blood Sugar Blues, says she knows of people “who were unable to lose weight, and some who actually gained, on a low-carbohydrate diet that included liberal use of sugar substitutes.” Her hunch is that some people are conditioned to pump insulin whenever they taste something sweet, just as Pavlov’s dog learned to salivate when it heard a bell.6
Blood sugar and insulin spikes aren’t the only concern with these sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners were first introduced as saccharin, which is 300 times sweeter than sugar. It was later packaged under the brand name Sweet ’n’ Low and in 1977 it was found to cause bladder cancer in lab animals. Because of public outcry it was not banned; it now comes with a cancer-warning label.
The most widely used artificial sweetener today is aspartame, popularly known as Equal or NutraSweet. Though more research may need to be done, current data collected from thousands of reports indicates that it may contribute to headaches, mood changes, neurological disorders, seizures, and brain tumors.7 And if that’s not enough of a deterrent, it doesn’t appear to help with weight loss either. A study published in the International Journal of Obesity, monitored fourteen women on weight loss diets who were given drinks of aspartame-sweetened lemonade, sucrose-sweetened lemonade, and carbonated mineral water on three separate days. The women ate significantly more food when they drank the aspartame-sweetened beverages.8
One of the latest and most popular artificial sweeteners is sucralose; sold under the brand name Splenda. To make sucralose, three components of a sugar molecule are replaced with three chlorine components. It is hundreds of times sweeter than sugar and has no calories; the body doesn’t recognize it or know what to do with it because of the molecular changes.
There’s also another new substitute marketed under the name Sweet One. This sweetener is derived from vinegar and has a similar molecular structure as saccharin with no caloric value.
It’s too soon to know if these new sweeteners produce unhealthy effects in the body or if they cause people to eat more food. But why be a human test case with sugar substitutes the body can’t recognize or use? It appears that every other artificial substitute that has been studied has had adverse effects on the body; it’s wise to stick with natural sweeteners the body can recognize.
The Worst Carbs
Alcohol: wine, beer, hard liquor
Chips and crackers made with refined flour
Breads made with refined flour/pizza dough
Bagels and most muffins
Pasta
White potatoes
Cookies
Cakes and pastries
Candy
White rice/rice cakes
The Glycemic Response
The Glycemic Index was developed by David Jenkins in 1981 to measure the rise in blood glucose after consumption of a particular food. This index shows the rate at which carbohydrates break down to glucose in the bloodstream. Test subjects are given a specified amount (50 grams) of carbohydrate in a test food and then their blood glucose is measured over a period of time to see how it is affected. The blood sugar response is compared to a standard food, usually white bread, and a rating is given to determine how blood sugar is affected.9
Though the glycemic index provides some insights as to how foods react in our bodies, there are numerous inconsistencies in connecting this index with the actual physical response. Due to this fact, some researchers have been attempting to determine the relative glucose area (RGA) of foods, which explains some of the inconsistencies in the glycemic index.10
Different
