The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (3 page)

We have a big fat problem.

America is a fat nation, and we are failing to solve our big fat problem. Failing big-time. Almost 70 percent of Americans are overweight. In fact, one in two Americans has what I call diabesity—the spectrum of imbalance ranging from mild insulin resistance to pre-diabetes to full-blown type 2 diabetes. The scariest part is that 90 percent of those suffering from this serious health condition don’t even know it (to find out if you have it, take the quiz on the next page).

Being thin today puts you squarely in the minority, and of that thin 30 percent, about one-quarter are what I call skinny fat. That means that while they may not be technically overweight and may even look skinny on the outside, they are fat on the inside, with the metabolic features of a pre-diabetic obese person: low muscle mass, inflammation, high triglycerides, low good cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.

To help you understand why so many people are suffering from similar health problems, I’m going to explain the underlying causes of both the weight-related problems and the chronic diseases that plague us. Then I’m going to show you how you can beat the odds and take back control of your weight and health.

Why are nearly 70 percent of Americans and almost 1.5 billion people worldwide—projected to be 2.3 billion by 2015—overweight?

Why do so many of us eat the foods that we know aren’t good for us, that cause us to gain weight, that aggravate chronic symptoms, or make us feel sick, bloated, and guilty?

Why would anyone choose to use a substance they know destroys their life?

The answer is simple. Addiction. We are a country—no, make that a world—of food addicts. The industrial food complex has hooked us with a steady stream of hyperprocessed, highly palatable, intensely addictive foods that are sabotaging our brain chemistry, our waistlines, and our health.

The science of food addiction is clearer now than ever before. A powerful study recently published in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
proves that higher-sugar, higher-glycemic foods are addictive in the same way as cocaine and heroin.

Dr. David Ludwig and his colleagues at Harvard proved that foods with more sugar—those that raise blood sugar quickly or have what is called a high glycemic index—trigger a special region in the brain called the
nucleus accumbens
that is known to be ground zero for conventional addictions such as gambling and drug abuse. This is the pleasure center of the brain, which, when activated, makes us feel good and drives us to seek out more of that feeling.

Previous studies have shown how this region of the brain lights up in response to images or when the subject eats sugary, processed, or junk food. But many of these studies used very different foods for comparison. If you compare cheesecake to boiled vegetables, there are many reasons the pleasure center will light up in response to the cheesecake
and not to the vegetables. The cheesecake tastes better or it looks better. This is interesting data, but it’s not hard proof of addiction.

This new study took on the hard job of proving the biology of sugar addiction. To be certain of their results and to ward off any potential criticism (which the $1-trillion food industry inevitably churns out in response to studies that don’t reflect well on its products), the researchers did a randomized, blind crossover study using the most rigorous research design.

They took twelve overweight or obese men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five and gave each a low-sugar, low-glycemic-index (37 percent) milk shake. Four hours later, they measured the activity of the brain region (
nucleus accumbens
) that controls addiction. They also measured blood sugar and hunger levels.

Then, days later, they had the same subjects back for another round of milk shakes. But this time they switched the milk shakes. They were designed to taste exactly the same, look exactly the same, and
be
exactly the same in every way as the first round of shakes—except in how much and how quickly they spiked blood sugar. In contrast to the first shakes, this second batch of milk shakes was designed to be high in sugar, with a high glycemic index (84 percent).

Not only were the two sets of shakes engineered to deliver precisely the same flavor and texture, they also had exactly the same amount of calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrate. Think of them as trick milk shakes. The participants didn’t know which milk shake they were getting, and their mouths couldn’t tell the difference, but according to the study results, their brains sure could.

Each participant received a brain scan and blood tests for glucose and insulin after drinking each version of the milk shake. Without exception, they all experienced the same response: The high-sugar, high-glycemic-index milk shake caused a much greater spike in blood sugar and insulin levels, and also yielded reports of increased hunger and cravings four hours after it was consumed.

This part of the study findings was not surprising and had actually been shown in many previous studies. But the breakthrough finding here was this:
When the high-glycemic shake was consumed, the
nucleus accumbens
lit up like a Christmas tree
. By contrast, when the low-glycemic shake was consumed, the
nucleus accumbens
showed no such response. This pattern occurred in every single participant and was statistically highly significant.

This study proved two things. First, that the body responds quite differently to different calories, even if the protein, fat, and carbs (and taste) are exactly the same. And second,
foods that spike blood sugar are biologically addictive.

So yes, food addiction is very real. Not only is it real; it’s the root cause of why so many people are overweight and sick. They are stuck in a vicious cycle of cravings. They eat sugary foods that spike their blood sugar, and their brain’s pleasure center lights up. This triggers more cravings, driving them to seek out more and more of the substance that gives them this “high.” They are powerless against their brain’s hardwired response to seek out pleasure. It’s no wonder so many people feel trapped!

My friend and colleague Kelly Brownell, PhD, while at Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, created a scientifically validated food questionnaire to help you determine whether you are a food addict. Here are some clues that you may be addicted to sugar, flour, and processed food. The more intensely or more frequently you experience these feelings and behaviors, the more addicted you are:

1. You consume certain foods even if you are not hungry, because of cravings.
   
2. You worry about cutting down on certain foods.
   
3. You feel sluggish or fatigued from overeating.
   
4. You have spent time dealing with negative feelings after overeating certain foods, instead of spending time in important activities such as time with family, friends, work, or recreation.
   
5. You have had withdrawal symptoms such as agitation and anxiety when you cut down on certain foods (do not include caffeinated drinks such as coffee, tea, and energy drinks in this).
   
6. Your behavior with respect to food and eating causes you significant distress.
   
7. Issues related to food and eating decrease your ability to function effectively (daily routine, job/school, social or family activities, health difficulties), yet you keep eating the way you do despite these negative consequences.
   
8. You need more and more of the foods you crave to experience any pleasure or to reduce negative emotions.
   

If you see yourself in these clues, don’t worry—you’re far from alone. Millions of people in every corner of the world have fallen into the food addiction trap. In this book, you’re going to discover once and for all the path that leads you out of biochemical imprisonment and into food freedom.

Governments, the United Nations, the Institute of Medicine, and the World Health Organization are all struggling to solve this big fat problem, which accounts for 80 percent of our health care costs and will create a global price tag of $47 trillion over the next twenty years. The National Institutes of Health spends $800 million a year trying to find the “cause” of obesity. Yet despite all this attention, we are still failing.

The causes are multiple, and it’s easy to point fingers. Big Food blames lack of exercise and our sedentary lifestyle. Parents blame schools, and schools blame parents. The government won’t blame anyone, for fear of losing lobbying and campaign dollars.

The food industry would have us believe obesity is the result of personal choices. Its implication: People are fat because they are lazy and gluttonous,
not
because their biology has been masterfully tricked into craving the toxins that these industries produce. If we all just took more personal responsibility, the industry’s paid experts assert, we could solve this problem. There are no good or bad foods, they claim; it’s all about moderation. And of course, we should all just exercise a bit more. What they don’t explain is that you would have to walk four and a half miles to burn off one twenty-ounce soda. To burn off just one supersize fast-food meal, you’d have to run four miles a day, every day, for a week. Oh, and thanks to the addiction-generating genius of fast-food engineering, once you’ve eaten that supersize meal, you’re going to want another one—soon.

It’s true that finger-pointing isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem. But I think it’s important for us all to understand that the real blame for our weight and health problems lies less with the individuals who’ve inadvertently become addicted to processed foods than with the food companies that designed food products with highly addictive properties in the first place.

The last few decades have seen the emergence of a whole new breed of “food scientists.” Their job is to invent addictive, hyperpalatable processed and junk foods to ensure that their employers (Big Food) get the biggest market share, or what industry insiders call stomach share.

Food scientists focus on creating foods that maximally trigger the “bliss point,” that addictive reward pathway in the brain that keeps you coming back for more. They chemically exaggerate certain flavors while suppressing others and alter the chemical structure of fats to enhance the “mouth feel.” Their goal: to create a taste sensation so intoxicatingly appealing that no matter how much you eat, you feel you can never get enough.

If the food industry just happened to accidentally create addictive products in an earnest attempt to improve their recipes, we could understand that and expect them to correct their mistake. But these foods happen by design, not by accident.

Big Food spends millions on food science and hires “craving experts” to ensure that its customers will become addicted to deviously developed drugs, all of which are hidden in cleverly disguised delivery vehicles for sugar, fat, and salt. Think heroin lollipops.

You might think I’m paranoid, overstating the case. But in his book
Salt Sugar Fat,
Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Michael Moss pulls back the veil on Big Food, using meticulous firsthand interviews and research into secret company documents to reveal just how strategically Big Food has altered our food supply to our detriment. Moss points the finger at virtually all the big boys in Big Food and their products, including Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestlé, Oreos, Cargill, and Capri Sun. (About twelve companies control almost all of the $1-trillion food industry. Frighteningly, they have now also bought up most of the natural and organic food companies.)

Big Food markets the foods just the way Big Tobacco marketed cigarettes, making them “healthier” with come-ons like low tar and nicotine. They might label foods as low-fat or low-salt, but they are hardly healthy, and most still qualify as addictive Frankenfoods. Don’t be fooled. Even a serving of Prego tomato sauce has two teaspoons of sugar, more than two Oreo cookies.

The leading food companies target kids, who can’t tell the difference between a TV commercial and a regular show until they are around eight years old. The average two-year-old who is still just learning to talk can cry out in a supermarket for specific brands he or she has seen on television ads. That’s scary, because most of the cereals marketed to kids are three-quarters sugar, even the “whole-grain” ones. It is not breakfast. It is dessert! The cereal manufacturers just added “whole grains” when the government recommended we eat more whole grains. Good marketing doesn’t make bad food better. It’s still a
wolf in sheep’s clothing. The food is intentionally manipulated to create cravings and addiction. The industry even refers to those of you who buy a lot of their products as heavy users. They know their products are addictive. Now you do, too.