Our Health Journey

So I’m a little behind in my reading - just got around to last Sunday’s USA Weekend supplement that comes with the Sunday paper……and I found an interesting tidbit on the ThinkSmart page (under the tagline EatSmart by Jean Cooper)……..turns out that eating too much sugar can increase your risk for pancreatic cancer - one of the deadliest cancers! That little paragraph was enough for me to do some research on my own, and it took only moments to uncover more about this deadly risk that obviously the food & beverage industry would rather we not know about….

According to data collected over an 8-year period in a study done by the Swedish-based Karolinska Institute, persons who consumed five or more servings of sugar daily had a 90% increase in their risk of developing pancreatic cancer (yes 90%! which is nearly double the risk!). So you think you don’t consume much sugar? Only two servings of soda pop daily is enough to brink about this higher risk level. Just two. And because there is added sugar in many of the common processed foods we eat, it’s likely that you’re getting more than that. Just one small teaspoon of sugar (or a lump if you like those little cubes) is a serving. So you can see that it’s very easy to get five servings a day.

What can you do? I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it - give up soda pop, period. If you really need an afternoon caffeine boost, drink tea - unsweetened tea. Stop adding sugar to your coffee or tea, or morning cereal. It takes only two weeks to retrain your taste buds to not need everything to be sweetened, and for your body to stop craving sweet foods and drinks.

You should know that sugar can (and often is) hidden in our foods using jargon that some of us might not be familiar with……….like “high fructose corn syrup”, “glucose”, “sucrose”, “maltose”……pretty much anything that ends with “ose” is a form of sugar …. in addition there are sugar alcohols sorbitol, mannitol, and zylitol. Watch out if you see any of these near the top of the list which means they contain a significant amount, or if there are multiple forms of sugar that can add up to a significant amount…… and lastly - don’t trust the words “sugar free” or “sugarless” - by law that means only that they cannot contain sucrose, but can certainly and legally contain other forms of sugar, like corn syrup, etc.

And for anyone who thinks “no big deal, I’ll just use sugar substitutes”……the news is also not good - in some cases the substitutes can cause more harm than sugar does.

The only good form of sugars are those that are naturally occurring in unprocessed foods such as fruits and vegetables - those are the carbohydrates that your body can convert to energy in ways that are beneficial to us, not harmful.

Sugar tastes good - I admit it - and once in a rare while I’ll allow myself to indulge in a small amount of chocolate (usually dark chocolate, which has a bit less sugar and at least has a few anti-oxidants in it)……..but if you can manage to give up sugar and sweets on a daily basis, just saving them for the odd special occasion, your body will be much healthier for it.

Want to give it a try? Then I highly recommend this book - Get The Sugar Out - subtitled “501 Simple Ways to Cut the Sugar Out of Any Diet” - by Ann Louis Gittleman.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Health News, The Daily Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.