Pure, white - and deadly

By Hyon O'Brien

The other day I came home from a doctor's visit feeling good. My primary doctor told me my glucose level is absolutely normal. What a relief that was! Two years ago, a routine blood test revealed a high glucose level, and I was told to remedy that if I didn't want to become a diabetic.

This was alarming news for me as my father had struggled with diabetes for a long time. The doctor's advice was to avoid everything white. White rice, white bread, white sugar, white pasta, white potatoes. For a person whose main meal is white rice, this was like being confined to house arrest.

It was a hard task to say no every day to my favorite food. Changing to brown rice and to whole-wheat foods was a difficult process. In the end, I began to eat less because everything that was good for me tasted so unappetizing. But my struggle over the past two years to stay away from highly processed food seems to have paid off.

I am exceedingly happy to now have a normal glucose level in my bloodstream. This doesn't mean that I can go back to my previous eating habits. I am pretty much stuck with this new way of eating for the rest of my life.

The YouTube video "Sugar: the Bitter Truth" is a ninety-minute lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco. I was surprised to note that more than 3.5 million viewers have listened to his lecture to date.

I am currently reading his book, "Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease." In his lecture, Lustig recommends the book "Pure, White and Deadly" written in 1972 by British physiologist and nutritionist John Yudkin (1910-1995), who was one of the first scientists to claim that sugar is a major cause of obesity and heart disease.

The focus of the lecture and of the two books is on the danger of sugar to our health. They describe how sugar is damaging our bodies, why we eat so much of it and what we can do to stop. They all mention that sugar is hidden inside our everyday foods (even inside plain organic yogurt) and how it affects our metabolism in an alarming way to make us, in two words, fat and unhealthy. Wow, who would have thought that this innocent looking substance has been a contributing factor to so much unhealthiness around us?

Sugar carries with it a tragic story of human history. Africans were transported as slaves to supply labor in the New World plantations that aimed to produce sugar for vast profit. Sugar as we know it was not available for common people until massive production of sugarcane began with the forced labor of slaves in the big plantations in the West Indies in the 18th century.

That sweet thing called sugar has been the cause of so much human misery. And now it continues to hurt us through our food. Sugar in food is largely responsible for weight gain and subsequent diseases connected to it such as diabetes, heart disease, dementia, macular degeneration and tooth decay.

America's Center for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that during the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States. More than one-third of U.S. adults (35.7 percent) and approximately 17 percent (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2 to 19 are obese.

I noticed that during the 14 years we lived away from the States, many Americans seem to have become huge. Sugar did that. The world produced about 168 million tons of sugar in 2011. The average person consumes about 24 kg (53 lbs.) each year, equivalent to over 260 food calories per person per day. Sugar provides energy but no nutrients ― empty calories.

What should we do then? We need to put back into our diet the fiber that the highly processed food takes out, and avoid processed foods as much as we can. Here is a list of food high with fiber: beans including edamame (soybeans boiled in the pod), lentils, barley, artichokes, oatmeal, bran flakes and almonds. We should eat brown rice, whole wheat products, and more vegetables (if you want to eat only one vegetable, broccoli seems to contain the most nutrients) and fruits (especially apples, raspberries and banana).

And we should exercise regularly. We may desire a long life but a long life without good health may be a torturous existence.

Let's always remember that sugar is pure, white ― and deadly.

Hyon O'Brien is a former reference librarian now living in the United States. She can be reached at hyonobrien@gmail.com.

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