Fat fighting Fudge

Don’t assume that you have to give up desserts when you start eating Paleo-style. There are plenty of ways to eliminate carbs and sugars and replace them with healthier alternatives.

In fact, by including healthy fats in your diet, such as those included in the recipe below, some desserts can actually help you lose weight!

Although conventional wisdom has assumed that dietary fat causes weight gain and other health problems, recent studies have shown that eating fat can actually provide the benefits of both satiating hunger and reducing body fat.

According to the findings of a recent study at the University of California at Irvine, fatty foods work in the body to curb hunger by triggering a substance called oleoylethanolamide, which sends a message to the brain that the body is no longer hungry.

Although many people experience cravings for sugar and refined carbohydrates when they first start to transition to the Paleo diet, adding healthy fats to the diet are a great way to keep the cravings under control.

Here’s a recipe that includes ingredients that can help keep those cravings under control and satisfy your sweet tooth!

You can get the ingredients listed from most grocery stores, but if your local grocery store doesn’t have the organic product available, no worries. Just be sure that you get a product that is labeled “no added sugar” or ”unsweetened”.

Also, you can substitute the almonds for other nuts such as brazil nuts, cashews, hazelnuts, macadamias, or walnuts, if you prefer.

Coconut Chocolate Almond Fudge(Serves ~12)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup organic coconut or almond milk, unsweetened
• ¼ cup raw almond butter
• 4 oz. unsweetened baker’s chocolate
• ½ tablespoon pure vanilla extract
• small amount of stevia to taste
• ½ cup chopped nuts
• Optional: top with toasted coconut flakes.

Directions:

1. In a medium sized saucepan, warm coconut/almond milk over medium-low heat, and add broken chocolate pieces. Stir with a wooden spoon, melting them completely. This should make a chocolate cream.
2. Add vanilla extract, almond butter, and stevia.
3. Stir until velvety and smooth.
4. Add nuts.
5. Next, transfer the fudge into a baking dish lined with wax paper, and cool in your fridge overnight, or until it hardens to a “fudge like” consistency.
6. After cooling, cut fudge into ~12 small squares and enjoy!

That’s it…pretty simple right?

Nutrition Facts: Serving size: 1.5 oz. (40 g) Calories 162 Total Fat 16g Carbs 6g Protein 4g

Mark Harris, PhD

Exercise Physiologist/Nutritionist

TexasMetabolics@gmail.com

Texas Metabolics

New Study Shows Sugar in Diet Will Help Cancer Thrive in Your Body

Do you have a sweet tooth? If so, your dietary habits could be significantly adding to your risk of developing cancer. New research published in the journal Nature Medicine has confirmed that processed sugar is one of the primary driving forces behind the growth and spread of cancer tumors, so much so that the future of cancer screening could rely on scanning the body for sugar accumulation.

Scientists from University College London (UCL) in the U.K. made this discovery after experimenting with a new cancer detection method that involves utilizing a unique form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). After sensitizing an MRI scanner to look specifically for glucose in the body, it was revealed that cancer tumors, which feed off sugar, light up brightly as they contain high amounts of sugar.

"The new technique, called 'glucose chemical exchange saturation transfer' (glucoCEST), is based on the fact that tumors consume much more glucose (a type of sugar) than normal, healthy tissues in order to sustain their growth," explains a recent UCL announcement, noting that tumors appear as "bright images" on MRI scans of mice.

Traditionally, cancer screenings have involved the use of low-dose radiation injections to identify the presence of tumors, which makes sense as radiation is another known cause of cancer. The things that trigger and promote cancer development and spread, in other words, can also be used by doctors to detect it inside the body. And now sugar can officially be added to this list.

"The method uses an injection of normal sugar and could offer a cheap, safe alternative to existing methods for detecting tumors, which require the injection of radioactive material," says Dr. Simon Walker-Samuel, lead researcher of the study from the UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI).

Interestingly, it was also noted by the study's senior author that the amount of sugar in "half a standard sized chocolate bar" is all it takes to effectively identify the presence of tumors using the glucoCEST method. This is astounding, as it suggests that even relatively low amounts of sugar have the potential to promote cancer proliferation.

The UCL study is hardly the only one to have identified a connection between processed sugar consumption and diseases like cancer. Other research, including that being currently being conducted by Dr. Robert H. Lustig, M.D., a Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), confirms that the bulk of chronic illnesses prevalent today are caused by sugar consumption.

As far as cancer is concerned, hormones produced by the body in response to sugar consumption also feed cancer cells. This means that every time you down a soda or eat a piece of cake, your body produces certain chemicals that tell cancer cells to not only start taking up sugar, but also to grow in size and spread.

"What we're beginning to learn is that insulin can cause adverse effects in various tissues, and a particular concern is cancer," says Dr. Lewis Cantley, head of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) at Harvard University, as quoted during an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes.

"If you happen to have a tumor that has insulin receptors on it, then it will get stimulated to take up the glucose that's in the bloodstream," he adds. "So rather than going to the fat or to the muscle, the glucose now goes into the tumor, and the tumor uses it to grow."

This link is a full length movie that will explain what sugar dose to the body and how it is the cause of the obesity epidemic

Mark Harris, PhD

Exercise Physiologist/Nutritionist
TexasMetabolics@gmail.comTexas Metabolics