Carbohydrate Addiction is Epidemic........

Carbohydrate Addiction is Epidemic........

And the Food Industry Promotes it right along with the FDA & the AMA!

A staggering two-thirds of Americans are now overweight, and one in four are either diabetic or pre-diabetic.

Obesity rates in children in several states are now above 30%!!!!!!

Carb-rich processed foods are a primary driver of these statistics, and while many blame Americans’ overindulgence of processed junk foods on lack of self-control, scientists are now starting to reveal the truly addictive nature of such foods.

Most recently, researchers at the Boston Children's Hospital concluded that highly processed carbohydrates stimulate brain regions involved in reward and cravings, promoting excess hunger.

As reported by Science Daily:

“These findings suggest that limiting these 'high-glycemic index' foods could help obese individuals avoid overeating.”

While I don’t agree with the concept of high glycemic foods, it is important that they are at least thinking in the right direction. Also, the timing is ironic, considering the fact that the American Medical Association (AMA) recently declared obesity a disease, treatable with a variety of conventional methods, from drugs to novel anti-obesity vaccines...

The featured research is on the mark, and shows just how foolhardy the AMA’s financially-driven decision really is. Drugs and vaccines are clearly not going to do anything to address the underlying problem of addictive junk food.


Brain Imaging Shows Food Addiction Is Real

The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition examined the effects of high-glycemic foods on brain activity, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). One dozen overweight or obese men between the ages of 18 and 35 each consumed one high-glycemic and one low-glycemic meal. The fMRI was done four hours after each test meal. According to the researchers:

“Compared with an isocaloric low-GI meal, a high-glycemic index meal decreased plasma glucose, increased hunger, and selectively stimulated brain regions associated with reward and craving in the late postprandial period, which is a time with special significance to eating behavior at the next meal.”

The study demonstrates what many people experience: After eating a high-glycemic meal, i.e. rapidly digesting carbohydrates, their blood sugar initially spiked, followed by a sharp crash a few hours later. The fMRI confirmed that this crash in blood glucose intensely activated a brain region involved in addictive behaviors, known as the nucleus accumbens.

Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, a pioneer in decoding sugar metabolism, weighed in on the featured research in an article by NPR:

“As Dr. Robert Lustig... points out, this research can’t tell us if there’s a cause and effect relationship between eating certain foods and triggering brain responses, or if those responses lead to overeating and obesity.

'[The study] doesn’t tell you if this is the reason they got obese,' says Lustig, 'or if this is what happens once you’re already obese.' Nonetheless... he thinks this study offers another bit of evidence that 'this phenomenon is real.'”

Previously, Dr. Lustig has explained the addictive nature of sugar as follows:

"The brain's pleasure center, called the nucleus accumbens, is essential for our survival as a species... Turn off pleasure, and you turn off the will to live... But long-term stimulation of the pleasure center drives the process of addiction... When you consume any substance of abuse, including sugar, the nucleus accumbens receives a dopamine signal, from which you experience pleasure. And so you consume more.

The problem is that with prolonged exposure, the signal attenuates, gets weaker. So you have to consume more to get the same effect -- tolerance. And if you pull back on the substance, you go into withdrawal. Tolerance and withdrawal constitute addiction. And make no mistake, sugar is addictive."

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

Previous research has demonstrated that refined sugar is more addictive than cocaine, giving you pleasure by triggering an innate process in your brain via dopamine and opioid signals. Your brain essentially becomes addicted to stimulating the release of its own opioids.

Researchers have speculated that the sweet receptors located on your tongue, which evolved in ancestral times when the diet was very low in sugar, have not adapted to the seemingly unlimited access to a cheap and omnipresent sugar supply in the modern diet.

Therefore, the abnormally high stimulation of these receptors by our sugar-rich diets generates excessive reward signals in your brain, which have the potential to override normal self-control mechanisms, thus leading to addiction.

But it doesn’t end there. Food manufacturers have gotten savvy to the addictive nature of certain foods and tastes, including saltiness and sweetness, and have turned addictive taste into a science in and of itself.

In a recent New York Times article, Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat, dished the dirt on the processed food industry, revealing that there’s a conscious effort on behalf of food manufacturers to get you hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive to make.

I recommend reading his article in its entirety, as it offers a series of case studies that shed light on the extraordinary science and marketing tactics that make junk food so hard to resist.

Sugar, salt and fat are the top three substances making processed foods so addictive. In a Time Magazine interview discussing his book, Moss says:

“One of the things that really surprised me was how concerted and targeted the effort is by food companies to hit the magical formulation. Take sugar for example. The optimum amount of sugar in a product became known as the 'bliss point.' Food inventors and scientists spend a huge amount of time formulating the perfect amount of sugar that will send us over the moon, and send products flying off the shelves. It is the process they've engineered that struck me as really stunning.”

It’s important to realize that added sugar (typically in the form of high fructose corn syrup) is not confined to junky snack foods. For example, most of Prego’s spaghetti sauces have one common feature, and that is sugar—it’s the second largest ingredient, right after tomatoes. A half-cup of Prego Traditional contains the equivalent of more than two teaspoons of sugar.


Novel Flavor-Enhancers May Also Contribute to Food Addiction

Another guiding principle for the processed food industry is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” Moss describes this as “the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm your brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more.” The greatest successes, whether beverages or foods, owe their “craveability” to complex formulas that pique your taste buds just enough, without overwhelming them, thereby overriding your brain’s inclination to say “enough.”

Novel biotech flavor companies like Senomyx also play an important role.

Senomyx specializes in helping companies find new flavors that allow them to use less salt and sugar in their foods. But does that really make the food healthier? This is a questionable assertion at best, seeing how these “flavor enhancers” are created using secret, patented processes. They also do not need to be listed on the food label, which leaves you completely in the dark. As of now, they simply fall under the generic category of artificial and/or natural flavors, and they don’t even need to be tested for safety, as they’re used in minute amounts.

How to Combat Food Addiction and Regain Your Health

To protect your health, I advise spending 90 percent of your food budget on whole foods, and only 10 percent on processed foods. It’s important to realize that refined carbohydrates like breakfast cereals, bagels, waffles, pretzels, and most other processed foods quickly break down to sugar, increase your insulin levels, and cause insulin resistance, which is the number one underlying factor of nearly every chronic disease and condition known to man, including weight gain.

By taking the advice offered in the featured study and cutting out these high-glycemic foods you can retrain your body to burn fat instead of sugar. However, it’s important to replace these foods with healthy fats, not protein—a fact not addressed in this research. I believe most people may need between 50-70 percent of their daily calories in the form of healthful fats, which include:


1. Olives & Olive oil

2. Coconut and Coconut Oils

3. Natural whole fat butter

4. Organic raw nuts, especially macadamia nuts, which are low in protein and omega-6 fat.

5. Organic pastured eggs and pastured meats

6. Avocados


A growing body of evidence also suggests that intermittent fasting is particularly effective if you’re struggling with excess weight as it provokes the natural secretion of human growth hormone (HGH), a fat-burning hormone. It also increases resting energy expenditure while decreasing insulin levels, which allows stored fat to be burned for fuel. Together, these and other factors will turn you into an effective fat-burning machine.

Best of all, once you transition to fat burning mode your cravings for sugar and carbohydrates will virtually disappear, as if by magic... While you’re making the adjustment, you could supplement L-Glutamine (1,000MG) before each meal and 3,000-6,000 MG at bed time. This will help reduce cravings.

Other tricks to help you overcome your sugar cravings include:

Exercise: Anyone who exercises intensely on a regular basis will know that a significant amount of resistance exercise is one of the best "cures" for food cravings. It always amazes me how my appetite, especially for sweets, dramatically decreases after a good workout. I believe the mechanism is related to the dramatic reduction in insulin levels that occurs after exercise.

Organic black coffee: Coffee is a potent opioid receptor antagonist, and contains compounds such as cafestrol -- found plentifully in both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee -- which can bind to your opioid receptors, occupy them and essentially block your addiction to other opioid-releasing foods. This may profoundly reduce the addictive power of other substances, such as sugar.

Nutrition 101 Part 3 What is a Carbohydrate?

Nutrition 101

Part 3

What is a Carbohydrate?

What are carbohydrates?

Yesterday I defined what a calorie was and that it did not display nutritional value, calorie measurement marks the energy units in foods. Once you break foods down they go into 3 categories Fat, Proteins and Carbohydrates. Within each of these three groups there are a numbers of subset groups in each. Today we will focus on one category and that is Carbohydrates.

The simplest way to understand carbohydrates is to break down what they do for us. Our bodies break down carbohydrates in order to make glucose. Glucose is a sugar that our body uses to give us energy. Carbohydrates generally provide us with fiber, vitamins and minerals.

What Are the Different Kinds of Carbohydrates?

There are two kinds of carbohydrates: simple and complex. We get our simple carbohydrates from foods such as milk, milk products, fruit or table sugar. Complex carbohydrates, on the other hand, come from starches like whole grain-cereal, whole grain bread, beans, potatoes, and starchy vegetables.

As I stated before there are subset categories in each of the three nutrient groups. Simple and complex is a basic subset yet we can further break these groups down into the types of sugars these foods contain. We can also measure them on a ratio scale like the Glycemic Index Ratio. This scale measures the speed at which the carbohydrate is broken down into fructose and glucose in the body. The higher the number the faster the carb converts to sugar in the body. The lower the number the slower the carb converts into usable energy. Too high of a number is typically found in simple carbs and the lower numbered carbs are typically found in the complex carbohydrates.

The trick to staying lean is to keep your blood sugar normal all day long by eating complex carbs based on your activity levels for the next 3 hours. By keeping blood sugar levels in normal range your body can not store fat and makes it difficult to burn muscle fiber.

That is why it is so important to understand what type of carbs you need throughout the day.

As I have already mentioned there are many subsets in carbohydrates so I will briefly give you the description of these different catagories. Carbohydrates may be classified into monosaccharides, disaccharides, oligosaccharides, polysaccharides, and heterosaccharides. The most fundamental type is the simple sugars called monosaccharides, such as glucose, galactose, and fructose. These simple sugars can combine with each other to form more complex type. The combination of two simple sugars is called disaccharide whereas carbohydrates consisting of two to ten simple sugars are called oligosaccharides, and those with a larger number are called polysaccharides.

Carbohydrates are produced in green plants by photosynthesis and serve as a major source of energy in animal diets. They also serve as structural components, such as cellulose in plants and chitin in some animals. Their derivatives play an essential role in the working process of the immune system, fertilization, pathogenesis, blood clotting and development.

Bottom line is understanding carbohydrates can be made very complex. Each and everyone of us eat or have eaten carbohydrates on a daily basis. However simple carbs have become the general populations worst enemy. The introduction of fructose and in particular high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has become societies number one problem. You see our bodies are not designed to eat high amounts of the sugars and the proof is in the population. HFCS can be compared to crack rock cocaine in its ability to cause addiction. It triggers L-Dopamine response in the brain the exact same way as cocaine or a number of illegal and legal prescription drugs do. HFCS triggers the pleasure center in the brain and it shuts down the production of Leptin (a protein hormone that controls hunger). The more HFCS you consume you more damage you do to your body and its functions. The list of damage HFCS is far too long to list here in this article,

Fact: Obesity is at an all time high, diabetes and cancer are also at epidemic levels. 50% of all Americans are now overweight! Obesity rates in some states are passing 30% of the population.

Fact: Look back in history and you will see a distinct relationship between disease and sugar consumption. The history goes back several hundred years. However HFCS is the new kid on the block and disease and obesity have exploded since it entered our food supplies.

I will be posting a 5 part series on the history of Sugar and the health damages it causes.

Why you should NEVER EAT JUNK FOOD AGAIN!

Why you should never eat processed foods again!!!

Resisting the urge to drink that soda pop or eat those chips can be tough, especially if you have grown accustomed to eating these highly addictive foods as part of your normal diet. But once you understand a little bit more about how these and other processed foods affect your mind, body, and even your soul, it becomes easier to make healthier food choices that enrich your being rather than sap it. Here are nine motivating reasons why you should cut processed foods from your diet for good:

1) Processed foods are highly addictive. Your body processes whole foods much differently than it does refined, processed, and heavily-modified "junk" foods. Processed foods tend to overstimulate the production of dopamine, also known as the "pleasure" neurotransmitter, which makes you crave them constantly. Your body ends up not being able to resist the temptation to continue eating junk foods in excess, which can lead to obesity and other health problems.

2) Processed foods often contain phosphates that destroy your organs, bones. Many processed foods contain phosphate additives that augment taste, texture, and shelf-life. But these additives are known to cause health problems like rapid aging, kidney deterioration and weak bones, according to the Rodale Institute, which makes foods that contain them far less attractive to those in the know.

3) Fresh foods are actually cheaper than processed foods. People with junk food addictions often claim that fresh, healthy foods are too expensive. But according to numerous studies and assessments, whole foods made from scratch end up costing less per serving than their unhealthy, processed equivalents. According to Rodale, a single serving of 100 percent organic chili made with fresh ingredients and grass-fed beef, for instance, is about 50 cents cheaper to make than buying a can of chemical-laden, microwaveable chili from the grocery store.

4) Processed foods cause chronic inflammation. One of the leading causes of chronic illness today is inflammation. And studies continue to show that refined sugars, processed flours, vegetable oils, and many other nasty ingredients commonly found in processed foods are largely responsible for this inflammation epidemic. So the next time your body craves a candy bar or a box of cheese crackers, consider the fact that heart disease, dementia, neurological problems, respiratory failure, and cancer have all been linked to the chronic inflammation caused by processed food consumption.

5) Processed foods ruin digestion. Because they have been stripped of their natural fibers, enzymes, vitamins, and other nutrients, processed foods tend to wreak havoc on the digestive tract. Chronic consumption of such foods can throw your internal ecosystem off balance, harming beneficial bacteria and exposing your system to infection. So you can basically think of those gummy bears and that piece of cake as literal poison for your system, which may help deter you from eating them.

6) Processed foods destroy your mind. If you suffer from chronic bouts of brain "fog," or have difficulty concentrating and thinking normally, chances are your diet has something to do with it. And a recent study out of Oxford University lends credence to this possibility, having found that junk food consumption can cause people to become angry and irritable. Nutrient-dense whole foods, on the other hand, can help level out your mood, sustain your energy levels, and leave you feeling calmer and more collected.

7) Processed foods are loaded with GMOs. The basic buildings blocks of most processed foods on the market today are derived from laboratories, not nature. Genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), which have been linked to infertility, organ damage, gastrointestinal disorders, and cancer, are prolific in processed foods. Excess consumption of these poisons promotes weight gain, acidifies your blood, and can even permanently alter the composition and function of your intestinal flora.

8) Processed foods are loaded with pesticides. In order to effectively grow the GMOs used in processed foods, conventional farmers have to apply Roundup (glyphosate) and other pesticides and herbicides, many of which end up in the final product. According to data compiled by Rodale, breakfast cereals alone have been found to contain up to 70 different types of pesticides, including warehouse fumigation chemicals and other residues.

9) Processed foods are not actually food. One of the ways you can assess the nutritional value of food is to see how animals, insects, bacteria, and fungi respond to it. Real foods will actually rot or grow mold, for instance, while fake, processed foods remain largely the same in appearance and shape no matter what their age. As we reported recently, processed food is essentially synthetic, and the industry that produces it admits that heavy tampering and crafty modifications are necessary to make it taste real, even though it is not.

I know it's so easy just to pop food into a Microwave or drive though a fast food line at McDonald's many of us use the excuse that we don't have time to cook.
Well let me ask you this,"Do you have time to deal with cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure or a host of other diseases caused by eating these toxic foods?"

In the long run these foods are VERY EXPENSIVE, they ruin your health, and you spend a fortune trying to fix the damage caused by eating the toxic foods.