I read an article around Easter that let me know about the above YouTube video, written by Tom McGurk in the Sunday Business Post – sorry SBS but I have stopped buying you due to me trying to stop all the bad news getting me down.
Anyway, he normally writes on finance, politics, etc, but that week he talked about this video. I went and watched it, it convinced me that some sugar, (fructose), could be toxic and I decided to put into practice what Robert Lustig argues for. First I started looking at all the food we had in the kitchen, my healthy fruit juices in the fridge to the healthy brown bread. I was amazed at the amount of sugar in all these products, as much sugar in my fruit juice as there is in a can of coke – and I would never draem of drinking a full sugar coke – more on coke and the diet stuff later.
So the next day I stopped taking sugar in my coffee, I stopped drinking the fruit juices, changed the bread we ate, we made a lot of changes. When we went to the supermarket I went through all the ingredients on the packets to see how much sugar was in each item and I was surprised at the percentage of sugar.
In the four weeks after these changes I lost 8lbs. I did not go on a diet, I did not feel like I was eating less and I was just as satisfied after eating as I was before – so 8lbs with no effort.
I have now put on 4 of the 8lbs I lost – however I stopped smoking six weeks ago and have been eating like a horse since – and all the sweet stuff again. I think this weight gain is worth it for not smoking. And to be honest I have never been a light weight and have always had weight problems since leaving my teens.
Diet Coke and other Diet Crap
This part is from memory so some of it might be a little off. I read a long term study during the last week that compared older people of drunk diet coke and those that did not. The results went something like this – the people that drunk one can of diet soda a day had a 70% great waist size than those that did not drink any diet drinks – and stunningly the people that drunk two can of diet crap drinks per day had a waist size of 500% greater than those that did not drink any.
The cause is being put down to aspartame. I had no idea that there was an on-going controversy about this additive.
My Conclusions
I think it appears that where we try to make things abnormally sweeter it seems to cause problems for health. I like my cakes, but I know that if I have a diet that contains a large amount of cakes I am going to have a weight issue – I will be fat. The food that leaves me most satisfied is “healthy food” – like my veg, fish, some meat – proper diners is what I suppose I am saying.
I am a strong believer in taking responsibly for our own decisions – with food it also appears that we cannot trust our governments to get to the truth without vested interested getting in the way, this is a further issue – it is one that I don’t have an answer to right now.
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