The Battle: Sugar vs Fat
posted in Health News, The Daily Diet byI was reading one of my other favorite blogs yesterday - written by a friend of mine, Donna Adinolfi, who writes mostly about spa vacations and also about health & nutrition, and on her blog she referenced a recently posted article at another site about “Sugar vs Fat: Which is Worse?”…….it is a very lengthy article and although it’s an interesting read, it boils down to the same message I’ve been shouting about for years, which is that sugar is one of the only [food] substances found in nature which our bodies do not need - you won’t find it on the FDA Food Pyramid - and although we like the taste of sugar, it really has only detrimental effects on us.
To really understand this sugar vs fat debate, it’s important to understand how we got here - to the debate to begin with.
For the past decade or so, those focused on weight-loss have tried to tell us that we must cut down on the fat in our diet - which is one of those “yes but…” suggestions - because it’s true that we get way too much fat in our diets (the ‘wrong’ kind of fat that is - trans fats, saturated fats, etc.) so cutting down is good, BUT our bodies DO need some fat. It’s best if we can get that from “good” fats like olive oil, avocados, nuts, rather than the bad fats, but we need fat for digestion and elimination of wastes, as well as keeping our skin and hair soft and healthy. However, in response to people trying to stop eating high-fat foods, the food industry began mass-producing products that were (and still are) advertised as “low fat”, “lite”, or “fat free” and in order to make up for removing the good-tasting fat, they substituted sugar. Lots of sugar. Then people started watching calories and as we all know, sugar adds a lot of calories. Which begat another shift in what consumers wanted - low calorie foods. The result of that was a boom in the use of artificial sweeteners, especially the new ‘improved’ artificial sweeteners - to try to make processed foods taste good without as many calories.
What most people don’t really understand though, is that your body reacts to artificial sweeteners in the same way that it reacts to sugar. It releases insulin to convert [what it perceives as] sugar into energy - so you still get the same sugar-induced rush followed by the insulin-induced crash. I call it the “sugar roller coaster” and it can be a wild ride. And because artificial sweeteners are, well, “sweet”, we develop that sweet-tooth that keeps us coming back for more. Between the sugar cravings and insulin-induced low-blood-sugar, we wind up eating more than we really need, without really feeling satisfied by what we’re eating, and the end result is that we gain weight. Wondering which one won the “which is worse” debate? Sugar. By a knockout.
So what to do? The answer is surprisingly simple, and yet it’s one that most of us have trouble with. Stick with the Food Pyramid (you can build a customized Food Pyramid based on your age, weight, and activity level). Don’t be afraid of Fat, just be sure you’re getting healthy fats in your daily diet - it’s the type of fat that’s important. Oh and when your building your personal Pyramid look at it closely - you’ll notice there are no daily servings of sugar.
