One doctor, endocrinologist Robert Lustig, describes sugar as a toxin and talks about how sugar contributes to many of the diseases you hear about in our current health care crisis, including diabetes, obesity and heart disease that are usually associated with adults but are now appearing in more and more young people.  He has become a prominent spokes person on the dangers of sugar.  You can watch Dr. Lustig’s YouTube video if you want to hear more from him.  It is an hour and a half long, but full of great and troubling information.  I highly recommend this to you.

Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist is focusing on how sugar affects heart disease and stroke.  Their five year research study involves paid subjects who were kept in the hospital for weeks at a time where all food intake was carefully measured and monitored.  After a few days of a low sugar diet to get baseline measurements, 25% of their calories were replaced by a sugary drink and their blood was drawn every 1/2 hour.  After only two weeks on a sugary diet, there were increases of LDL cholesterol in their blood.  We’ve been told for years to avoid fatty foods because they increase our cholesterol and it is standard practice to have your cholesterol levels checked to give an indication of how healthy your cardiovascular system is.  In spite of all the low fat foods available, heart disease has not decreased.  According to Dr. Lustig, it is not fat consumption, but rather sugar consumption that is causing these health problems.  Dr. Lustig goes into detail on why this occurs in his talk linked above.

Lewis Cantley, a Harvard professor and the head of the Beth Israel Deaconess Cancer Center discusses how sugar increases insulin in our bloodstream and because of insulin receptors on tumor cells, actually encourages the growth of cancer cells in our bodies.  I’ve mentioned the book Anticancer, A New Way of Life by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber before, but if you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so whether or not you personally have dealt with cancer.  I keep a copy at Forza! you may check out.

Finally, Eric Stice, a neuroscientist at the Oregon Research Institute talks about the addictiveness of sugar and how it lights up the same areas of the brain as cocaine does.  There is a reason we find it so difficult to avoid eating sugar.

I don’t expect most of you to give up sugar entirely, but I would advise you to be careful at least how much and when you eat it.  Try to keep sugar consumption to a minimum and when you do consume sugar, certainly don’t eat it without eating additional fiber and protein to slow your body’s insulin response.  Eat fruit rather than drink fruit juices.  Find the time to watch these videos.  Unless we change our toxic sugar environment, we are going to continue to pay the health and monetary consequences.  Things have to change!  Why not start with you and your family?

A great article in The Wall Street Journal describes some of the current research on how the condition of your digestive system can affect other areas of the body, including organs such as the pancreas, gall bladder, lungs and heart.  It might even be linked to autism in children.  The gut produces 95 % of the serotonin found in the body.  This hormone is responsible for pushing food through the gut as well as repairing cells in the liver and lungs and plays a role in normal development of the heart and in bone-mass accumulation.  Having low levels of serotonin can also affect your mood and sleep.  In one lab study, newborn rats, whose stomachs were purposely irritated, later displayed more depressed and anxious behaviors and showed an increased sensitivity to stress, producing more of a stress hormone than the control rats.

This is one of those “I knew it!” moments for me.  Over the last year, I have been working with my osteopath to get my adrenal glands working properly.  This is the gland that produces cortisol, the stress hormone.  My cortisol levels are elevated and peaking at the wrong time, contributing to difficulty sleeping and difficulty controlling blood sugar levels.  Articles like these show me that by looking at how my diet effects my health and even my moods, I’m on the right track.  I’ve had issues with my digestive system on and off as long as I can remember but my food issues seem to have gotten worse over the last few years.  I’ve done some food sensitivity testing to help me determine which foods are giving me a problem.  I was surprised at how many foods and which foods were on this list and puzzled at why some foods were on the list that I had eaten while growing up and didn’t seem to give me any problems.

One theory of how we develop food sensitivities goes like this:   when you don’t feel good or are feeling particularly stressed and you eat something as benign as say coconut (one of my trigger foods), your body can decide that that particular food is what is making you feel sick and so next time you eat that food, your body reacts to it and triggers your immune response.  This is similar to what happens when you overeat something or eat something that has gone bad and you get sick.  Thereafter, you find yourself unable to eat that particular food.  Triggering that immune response can result in a multitude of possible symptoms.  For me, I can tell when I’ve eaten something I shouldn’t when I feel unmotivated, get a headache, start feeling cold symptoms in my ears and throat, have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, or feel achy in my joints.  Everyone reacts differently and it is up to you to figure out your own tell-tale signs.  This is a journey that I am on and continue to travel.  I take detours every time I eat something I know I shouldn’t and have to get myself back on track.  It is not easy, but I feel so much better when I give my body what it needs to flourish.  Eventually the hope is that when I’ve healed my digestive system, I’ll be able to start adding back in some of these foods that now give me problems.  So here is my recommendation to you:  keep a food journal that records what and when you eat, and how you are feeling physically and emotionally.  Eventually, you should be able to make some connections for yourself.  Good luck and I wish you a safe a speedy journey.

When I did my training with Gray Cook in October, he talked about the use of his system in the N.F.L., but one of his goals in working with the professional teams is to get this system to filter down all the way to the high schools and middle schools and to the public in general so that people are building strength on functioning systems.  He talks a lot about “safe strength”.  Now, you may not need to keep healthy in order to maintain a professional sports contract, but isn’t it great to know you are working on building safe strength to keep you healthy for all the things you  need and love to do?