food industry, most doctors, and most nutritionists advise us there is no harm in eating modern food if our diet is “balanced.” The term balanced meal has been a favorite one used by dietitians for many years. It means that the optimum proportion (balance) of all necessary food components is provided. But it has come to mean something else: most nutritionists, in the name of a balanced meal, consider that even larger quantities of sugar in a meal are fine, provided that it is balanced against some protein, fat, and the essential vitamins and minerals. This leads to the preposterous idea that junk cereal and milk are nutritious, whereas in reality the cereal has diluted the nutritional quality of the milk. Some nutritionists consider the doughnut made from white flour, oil, and sugar plus a tiny quantity of vitamins a good food, presumably because it is “balanced.”
The concept of balance was originally useful, but it has been corrupted by our food technology and no longer serves any useful purpose. However, there is no better word, and we will use it in its original sense—to denote the importance of using optimum quantities of all the essential nutrients. This is best achieved by obtaining these from a variety of foods, which are more apt to satisfy our needs than is a dependence upon any one food.
Food should be balanced in itself, within each meal, and over the entire day. The best way to ensure balance in food itself is to use only whole foods, which nature has already balanced. Balance in a meal is achieved by eating several foods from different groups, such as meats, fresh vegetables, fruits, dairy products, and nuts and seeds. Balance over the whole day is ensured by eating balanced meals every time. Snacks need not be made from a variety of foods, as they are minor components of our diet, but they must be whole foods, not doughnuts, chocolate bars, and other junk.
Clinical nutritionists, orthomolecular physicians, and some clinical ecologists have seen how correcting a patient’s diet leads directly to his recovery. It does not require a major leap in logic to conclude that, had the patient followed the optimum diet all along, the disease would not have occurred.
Modern diets differ from diets we have adapted to in a number of ways. Protein levels, fat and lipid levels, and carbohydrate levels may be too high or too low. This applies to vitamin and mineral levels as well. But it is too simplistic to talk about too much or too little of any food component. One individual can eat only so many calories. If the amount of one is increased, there must be a reduction in the quantity of another. If one increases the protein level, there must be a decrease in fats and carbohydrates. For this reason, studies that take into account only fats and their relation to coronary disease but ignore carbohydrate levels will yield very low correlation, even if there were, in fact, a high association.
Here, we will discuss the most common fault with modern food, and what that fault does to people. This is the low-protein, high-sugar, low-fiber diet that causes the sugar metabolic syndrome.
TYPES OF CARBOHYDRATES
There is a common belief that all carbohydrates and sugars are the same. Nutritionists have fallen into the same serious error. They reason that, since carbohydrates are eventually broken down into simple sugars, such as glucose and fructose, they are all the same. They do not recognize the importance of the bulk of the food, nor the presence of other essential nutrients in the carbohydrate-rich foods, nor the importance of the rate at which sugar is released in the digestive tract and absorbed into the blood. Nor do they recognize that artifacts such as sucrose (table sugar) are not absorbed and metabolized in the same way as complex carbohydrates.
It is, therefore, essential to understand a bit of the chemistry of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are divided into complex long-chain carbohydrates and short-chain carbohydrates or sugars. Each carbohydrate is composed of a large number of molecules, which have five, or more commonly six, carbon atoms in a chain. The sugar glucose consists of individual molecules attached to one another in a chemical bond. Glucose is called a monosaccharide. Monosaccharides are usually glucose, fructose, and galactose. The main sugar in the blood and body is glucose—all the cells of the body depend on glucose, the brain more so than the rest of the body. It is an essential sugar in the body but it is not essential as a pure substance in our food. Glucose is made in the body by splitting complex sugars or carbohydrates into their basic units, yielding mostly sugar. This process begins in the mouth, where saliva contains enzymes that split (hydrolyze) these carbohydrates into simple sugars. Hydrolysis continues in the stomach until the process is inhibited by the acidity of the stomach, but it begins again when the food enters the small intestine, especially after the pancreatic juices are mixed with the food.
Glucose is the energy sugar. But the food industry, when it claims that sugar is a good source of energy, leaves the impression that sucrose, the common table sugar from beets or sugarcane, is a good source of energy. It is, on the contrary, the cause of a large number of physical diseases—all manifestations of the sugar metabolic syndrome—and of many cases of depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and other addictions. Glucose in its pure form is probably as dangerous. The apparent paradox arises from the fact that only the slow release of glucose from food, in conjunction with the release of the other nutrients, makes it safe. Pure glucose, devoid of any other nutrients, is nearly as harmful as sucrose. Patients who develop violent reactions after drinking 100 g of glucose before a sugar tolerance test have no doubt about this. The severe nausea and vomiting, headache, and other equally unpleasant reactions can be very persuasive.
Another monosaccharide is fructose. It is present in fruit and is probably somewhat less toxic than either glucose or sucrose for two reasons. It tastes sweeter, weight for weight, and less is used in order to achieve the same sweetness satiation. And it does not stimulate the pancreas to release insulin. However, consumed in large quantities, it is unhealthy since it too does not contain a normal quota of other nutrients. Like glucose, when fructose is released in the body from food, it is not harmful and is a useful source of energy. But there is no physiological need for free fructose from external sources. Fructose, either in the form of tablets or as a free-flowing crystalline material, is just as harmful as sucrose, even though it is available primarily in health food stores. It is not a safe substitute for pure sucrose or glucose or for any other pure sugar.
The third common monosaccharide is galactose, present chiefly as one of the components of lactose, the sugar present in milk. It tends to be less sweet than either glucose or fructose.
Disaccharides are sugars that have two monosaccharides linked to each other chemically. The two common ones are sucrose, which consists of one glucose and one fructose molecule, and lactose, which consists of glucose and galactose. These more complex sugars must be hydrolyzed into the simple monosaccharides before they are absorbed into the blood. If they are not split, they will remain in the bowel and become a source of calories for bacteria. They can produce serious gastrointestinal upsets. The body has enzymes that split these double sugars, sucrase (hydrolyzes sucrose) and lactase (hydrolyzes lactose).
Sucrose is by far the most common sugar. The average consumption of this sugar is about 120 pounds per person per year. Of course, an average means that half the population consumes more. This figure is arrived at by dividing the total sugar consumption by the total population. It includes sugar used in confectionaries, candies, soft drinks, breakfast foods, canned soups, and so on. Sucrose is so ubiquitous that it is very difficult to follow a sugar-free program because it is found even in foods where one would least suspect its presence. When sucrose is consumed, it is rapidly hydrolyzed and absorbed and then quickly shunted into the liver and converted into triglycerides. These fats are then released into the blood and stored in the fat depots. Of all the common sugars, sucrose is converted into triglycerides the most quickly.
Sucrose is very toxic because it does not carry with it the normal quota of other nutrients and because it is released into the blood too quickly. When sugar beets or sugar cane are consumed, they are not nearly as toxic, since they are present in diluted form in a bulky vehicle that cannot be consumed too quickly. In other words, the sucrose
