Get Off Your Sugar

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Why Sugar Is So Easy to Love and So Hard to Give Up

I’M PROBABLY NOT TELLING YOU ANYTHING YOU DON’T ALREADY KNOW WHEN I SAY that America is in the midst of a cataclysmic health crisis.

More than 100 million American adults—nearly one in three—has diabetes or prediabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control.¹ Nearly half of all American adults have heart disease, per the American Heart Association.² And our kids aren’t faring much better: nearly one-third of American children are either overweight or obese and thus on track to develop diabetes and heart disease at ever earlier ages.³

I’m not including this information here because I want to scare you, because fear isn’t a great motivator for long-term change. Rather, I want you to understand why we are where we are. Because once you understand the root cause, you can address it. And so far, we have been trying to manage symptoms once they appear—lose the weight, fight the fatigue, or lower the cholesterol. And that is the equivalent of snipping the wires to the smoke alarm that’s going off, instead of putting out the fire.

Like any fire, the one that’s destroying our health has many factors that keep it going—stress is the oxygen that feeds it, and environmental toxins are the lighter fluid that make it flame higher. But the fuel that ignites the fire in the first place is sugar.

HIJACKED BY SUGAR

According to the World Atlas, Americans eat more sugar than people in any other country in the world, with the average American eating just over 130 pounds of sugar in a year.⁴ A 2015 study published in the journal Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology found that 74 percent of American food products contain regular or low-calorie sweeteners.⁵ This goes a long way toward explaining why the average American consumes about 20 teaspoons of added sugar a day—more than three times more than the 6 teaspoons a day my colleague Dr. Robert Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist and an expert on sugar’s effects on the body, says is the most your liver can metabolize in a day. Anything above that small amount gets stored as fat.⁶

RECOMMENDED DAILY SUGAR INTAKE FROM THREE DIFFERENT SOURCES

Those 130 pounds a year translate to more than 38 teaspoons of sugar every day, which no matter which source of official health guidance you look to—the US Dietary Guidelines, the World Health Organization, or the American Heart Association—exceeds the daily recommended sugar intake by at least 250 percent and as much as 533 percent.

Why are we eating so much sugar when we know how bad it is for us and when so many of us are already facing ill health effects from it? Is it because we lack willpower? Are we too crunched for time to eat any other way? I know these are common excuses, but they aren’t the root cause. The reason we’re eating so many more pounds of sugar each year than could ever be considered a good idea is simple: we are addicted.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AMERICAN SUGAR CONSUMPTION

A lot of my patients tell me, “Oh, I don’t eat much sugar,” thinking that it comes only in the form of cakes, cookies, and candy bars. Very few people realize just how much sugar is lurking in the foods we eat every single day. Take a look at this typical daily food intake; you’ll see for yourself how easy it is for your sugar intake to be through the roof without your even realizing it.

FOOD: Breakfast

Orange juice (1 cup)

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 26 g

FOOD: Breakfast

Honey Nut Cheerios with milk (1 cup of each)

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 40 g

FOOD: Mid-morning snack

Low-fat yogurt

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 23 g

FOOD: Lunch

Apple juice (1 cup)

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 24 g

FOOD: Lunch

Turkey sandwich from Subway (6-inch on 9-grain bread with lettuce, tomatoes, onions)

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 3 g

FOOD: Lunch

Banana (medium)

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 12 g

FOOD: Midafternoon snack

Protein bar

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 30 g

FOOD: Dinner

Pizza

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 5 g

FOOD: Dinner

Salad (with store-bought dressing)

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 6 g

FOOD: Dinner

Soda

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 36 g

FOOD: Dessert

Ice cream (one cup)

GRAMS OF SUGAR: 28 g

Grand total for one day: 233 grams… which equals 54.6 teaspoons

ADDICTION ISN’T A WEAKNESS; IT’S A NATURAL PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSE

Your body can burn either sugar (in the form of glycogen) or fat for fuel. But because we overconsume sugar all day, every day, and we rarely go more than a couple of hours without eating, your body has become dependent on using sugar as fuel and has lost its ability to burn fat. And because sugar is like kindling on a fire, a couple of hours after eating, your body will tell you that you need to re-fuel, stat. In search of more glucose, you’ll reach for the high-carb, high-sugar foods.

In those moments when your sugar levels are crashing, your brain will sense what’s happening and panic because it knows it needs more glucose to keep running. So, it pushes you into a state of fight-or-flight and cues the adrenal glands to release the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol signals you to eat more sugar so that the brain can keep doing its thing. Stress leads you to reach for sugar, and then sugar keeps you locked in the stress response.

Another issue that makes sugar so addictive is that insulin lights up the brain receptors for dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. Want to know what else stimulates your dopamine receptors? Addictive drugs, such as cocaine and opioids. Really, according to your brain, sugar is no different than drugs. In fact, it’s time we start calling a spade a spade: sugar is a drug, and right now, it’s America’s drug of choice. As JJ Virgin, author of JJ Virgin’s Sugar Impact Diet, pointed out when I interviewed her for my Get Off Your Sugar online summit, said, “Sugar is addictive, expensive, and it plays a major role in disease. The more sugar you have, the more you need to get the same high (or even just to function). Without it, you feel awful, and your brain is in a fog.”

I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that your sugar addiction is not your fault. It’s a hard-wired physiological response. As if that weren’t bad enough, sugar has a strong emotional pull over us too.

Sugar is our first taste in life, whether that’s via breast milk or formula. We associate it from the very start with both survival and comfort. When we are kids, parents use sugar to pacify us, or to motivate us to put our shoes on. And ever since our very first birthday cake, we learn that any milestone is best celebrated with a sugary treat.

It’s 100 percent true that to truly change your relationship to sugar, you will have to find a different means of adding sweetness to your life—to start celebrating with special outings instead of candies and cakes, to let the people you love know you care by giving them something other than a plate of cookies, to nurture yourself through the down moments by reading an inspiring book instead of reaching for the pint of ice cream.

The food industry knows both our physiological and our emotional attachment to sugar all too well and goes to great lengths to exploit them. They have spent millions and millions of dollars to hire consultants, such as Howard Moskowitz, a mathematician and experimental psychologist, to toy with the ratio of sugar, salt, and fat in hundreds of different food products to find what Moskowitz calls the “bliss point,” which means the food is sweet enough to crave but not so sweet that you want to stop eating it. New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss, who interviewed Moskowitz for his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat, told NPR:

WHY WILLPOWER WON’T WORK (FOR LONG)

Over the last decade or two, we’ve come to realize that drug addicts and alcoholics aren’t addicted because they lack willpower; it’s because they have a disease that has taken control of their brain. We are now coming to understand that sugar addiction acts the same way. Which means it’s darn near impossible to just decide you’re going to stop eating sugar and never touch the stuff again. Especially because research has shown that the executive function portion of your brain—which is responsible for things like self-regulation—works less well when you’re hungry, tired, and stressed. And that’s exactly when the quick-pick-me-up of a pint of ice cream or big bowl of pasta is the most irresistible.

You may know one or two people who one day decided to change their diet and that was seemingly all it took, but those folks are outliers. That’s one of the reasons why contestants on The Biggest Loser were nearly all found to have regained some, if not all, of their weight back six years after appearing on the show—even when willpower does work in the short term (and, in the case of these reality TV show contestants, a heaping helping of public accountability and professional support from physical trainers, nutritionists, and doctors), it rarely works in the long term.¹¹ The fact is that the vast majority of people simply cannot quit sugar cold turkey; and those who can feel awful while they’re doing it.

To truly go from stress eating to strength eating, you have to give your body what it needs to break free from the addiction to sugar—minerals to help quell the cravings; healthy fats to encourage the switch to fat-burning so the drive to replenish glucose is lessened; the right proteins to provide long-lasting energy; and lifestyle changes that give you alternative tools to keep yourself feeling fulfilled, rewarded, and relaxed. It’s not like flipping a switch; it’s a slow build where you add more of the good things so that the unhealthy things you’ve been eating naturally start to fall away.

SIX BIG TRUTHS ABOUT SUGAR THAT ARE KEEPING YOU FAT, EXHAUSTED, AND MENTALLY DRAINED

Eating sugar makes you fat. The US medical establishment and mainstream media have been blaming fat for making us fat and sick since the 1950s, when Ancel Keys published his first of many studies that examined the diet of countries where rates of cardiovascular disease were low and posited that it was because the people in these countries ate low amounts of saturated fat. Keys’s findings have since been refuted, but in his era he was hailed as a prophet.

This demonizing of saturated fat led to the adoption of many food products that have now been shown to be devastating to heart and total health, including margarine (which was nearly all hydrogenated fat) and foods that have been manipulated to be “low fat.” When you remove the fat, your food tastes like cardboard, so guess what you have to put into foods to make them palatable? Sugar and salt. The war on fat is a primary reason that 74 percent of food products available today have sugar in them.¹²

Even now, with the ketogenic trend, people are still afraid that eating fat makes you fat. But eating fat helps train your body to burn fat for fuel—and when that happens, you can access all those calories that have been stored in your fat cells and you lose weight. Eating sugar, on the other hand, contributes to overeating and storing any extra calories as fat, all the while never feeling satisfied or full and constantly battling cravings for ever higher amounts of sugar.

Eating sugar makes you addicted. As I’ve mentioned, when you eat sugar, your body metabolizes glucose into the bloodstream, which then triggers the pancreas to secrete insulin, otherwise known as your fat-storing hormone. Over time, your insulin receptors get burned out and stop receiving insulin’s messages to lower blood glucose levels, and the only way your body knows to respond in that instance is to pump out more and more insulin, which only exacerbates the problem. High levels of insulin also increase levels of leptin, a hormone secreted by your fat cells that tells your brain when it’s time to eat. The result is that your brain is constantly getting the signal that you need more food. As if that’s not bad enough, glucose lights up the pleasure centers in your brain, and over time, it dulls those pleasure centers so that it takes more and more glucose to elicit the same pleasurable response. It all adds up to the fact that eating sugar makes you want to keep taking bite after bite, and to do it day after day after day. Add to the mix the carefully calibrated blend of flavors used by the food industry to make their products compulsively eatable, with sugar hidden everywhere, and you can’t stop eating sugar, even when you try.

When you eat a lot of sugar, you burn sugar only for fuel, not fat. Your body has the ability to burn two kinds of fuel: sugar and fat. If you are metabolically flexible, you can burn both as a primary energy source. But when you consistently eat a lot of sugary, high-carb foods, you get stuck in a cycle where you never reach the point where you need to burn fat, and over time, your ability to do so weakens. Your body carries around 160,000 calories it can access at any time—5 percent of those calories are stored in the form of sugar, while 95 percent are stored in your fat. Why the big difference in numbers? The sugar-burning system was designed to be used only in flight-or-fight situations (a.k.a. emergencies, to get you out of danger), because sugar burns quickly, like lighting a tissue on fire. Like that tissue, sugar is also a dirty fuel—it leaves a lot of damaging free radicals in its wake, like dark, dirty smoke that then floats throughout your body, causing damage to otherwise healthy cells.

Burning fat, on the other hand, is like burning a big, dry log—it’s a low and slow burn that doesn’t produce a lot of smoke or ash. We’re designed to be able to shift between burning fat and burning sugar—fat for when we are settled into normal daily life and sugar for those rare times when we need quick energy to run away from or face a threat. With our chronic stress levels, and our carb- and sugar-rich diets, most of us of have been in sugar-burning mode for so long that our bodies have forgotten how to burn fat. This makes it harder to lose weight and change our eating habits, because if we eat sugar, we burn sugar, and if we burn sugar, we’re going to crave sugar to keep the fire stoked, because our bodies will burn through those 5 percent of calories in a pretty short time.

Put another way, running on sugar is a little like being a car with an engine that makes a lot of noise, never seems to shift into a higher gear, and leaves a cloud of dirty exhaust in its wake, whereas burning fat is more like being an efficient electric car that can recharge itself as it goes and leaves no emissions in its wake. You have to ask yourself, do you want to run like a Model T or a Tesla?

All sugars are not created equal. To be clear, all sugars, whether they are naturally occurring, such as those found in fruit, or added during processing, such as those found in packaged foods, trigger the same hormonal cascade that keeps you hungry, fat, and foggy. But a 2015 review of numerous studies, published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, concluded that one type of sugar—fructose—is harder on the body than others.¹³ The digestive tract can’t absorb fructose as well as it can glucose, sucrose, and other forms of sugar, meaning more of it gets sent to your liver, where it then contributes to a whole host of chronic diseases, including insulin resistance, fatty liver disease, triglyceride production, and type 2 diabetes. It’s like thinking you’re going to take a nice, manageable little swim in an ocean of sugar, and instead you get swept away in a tsunami.

The study also found that added sugars are more harmful than naturally occurring sugars. For example, fructose is often found in fruit, but when you eat a piece of fruit, you also get a healthy dose of fiber to slow the absorption of the sugar, as well as an array of phytonutrients and minerals that can counteract some of its harmful effects in the body. When you drink just fruit juice, however, that fiber is stripped away and you can consume in one small glass of orange juice, the amount of fructose found in four oranges. It’s glorified sugar water. To make matters worse, the food industry has latched on to high-fructose corn syrup as a primary ingredient in sodas and processed foods, and it is 55 percent fructose. When it comes to sugar, nobody does it better than nature.

There are multiple sources of sugar in our diet. Three other categories are raising our blood sugar levels and keeping us stuck in burning sugar while also decimating our gut health (which I talk more about in Chapter 2). I call them weapons of mass destruction because their first letters spell out WMDs: wheat, meat, and dairy, and of course the s at the end stands for sugar—which all of these foods end up being metabolized into. These three mainstays of the American diet are typically grown using tons of chemical pesticides and fertilizers (in the case of wheat, as well as the grains that are used to feed the cows, pigs, and chickens we then consume) in addition to antibiotics and hormones (in the case of meat and dairy). Dairy is high in lactose, a sugar that 65 percent of the population has trouble digesting; if you overeat meat, the excess protein gets converted into glucose in your liver via the process known as gluconeogenesis; and wheat is high in carbs, which means it’s high in glucose. Each of these foods keeps you trapped in a cycle where you eat sugar, burn sugar, and crave sugar. To make matters worse, these foods are metabolized into acid—wheat to sulfuric acid; meat to sulfuric, phosphoric, and nitric acids; and dairy to lactic acid. Your body needs minerals to neutralize these acids, causing further mineral deficiency and more cravings for sugar. As a result, we typically eat so much of these foods that they crowd out most of the mineral-rich vegetables in our diet. The WMDs are the number one reason you are still getting too much sugar in your diet, even if you don’t eat typical sugar-filled sweets.

QUIZ

HOW SUGAR-ADDICTED ARE YOU?

Instead of asking about your sugar consumption, this quiz asks you to assess the physical and mental symptoms of sugar addiction you may be experiencing. It is designed to help you clearly hear what your body is trying to tell you.

For each question, give yourself a score of 0 through 10, with 0 meaning “absolutely not, never ever” and 10 being “absolutely yes, all the time, and a lot.” Because you can’t change a habit you don’t know you have, it’s important to be honest when answering the following questions, as they can help you see how bad things really are. At the end of the quiz, add up the numbers you gave for answers and check your results against the ranges listed at the bottom of this quiz.

0–25 points: Doing Great

According to this quick symptom assessment, you likely aren’t addicted to sugar. The Get Off Your Sugar program can absolutely still help you optimize your health; you just won’t have the big hurdle of sugar cravings to get in your way.

26–50 points: Facing a Crossroads