I recently became a moderator on the Stop SUGAR SHOCK! ning network. I just started a new discussion about "Making It Stick", and I want to paraphrase my story for you.
There are essentually two types of sugar-free people: Those who are *struggling*, and those who *used to struggle* but suddenly seem to get it. I've been on and off sugar for years, struggling, knowing that I should but always able to rationalize eating it -- until recently. I had an epiphany!!! Suddenly, going sugar-free is a no-brainer for me, it's a definitive choice, no longer a struggle.
Before this magical moment happened, despite all the reading and learning about sugar and its negative effects from authors such as Bennett, Perricone, Fallon, Enig, Schwartzbein, Clower, and even Suzanne Somers, I could ALWAYS find a rationalization to eat sugar until I watched this:
Sugar: The Bitter Truth, Dr. Lustig, UC Berkeley
Connie Bennett has also blogged about this lecture.
The moment came for me when he talks about cholesterol. He describes in biochemical detail how sugar, not dietary fat, is to blame for the rise in heart disease. He scientifically discredits the study on which all Low-Fat diets are based. This particular arguement did it for me:
Fat raises LDL in the body, and LDL clogs arteries. WRONG. Dietary fat *does* raise LDL -- but it raises the type of LDL that's too big and light to clog our arteries. However, Glucose is processed in the body like a fat, and results in LDL too -- small, dense LDL that slips under the cells in our arteries and causes clogs. The process is **the same as a steak carmelizing on the grill - if you open a person up, you can actually see carmelization of the arteries as caused by sugar (fructose).**
Sugar is a POISON. It just happens to kill much more slowly than arsenic. I need to watch the video again to get in my head also how sugar slowly kills the liver much like alcohol. I'm no biochemist, but I can take away this:
Sugar, Not Fat, Is The Cause Of My Family's Deadly History of Heart Disease!!!!
That scares the crap out of me. That's all I needed -- it's the last nail in the sugar-rationalization coffin in my brain.
If you watch the video, you can shorten it by watching until he starts on the biochem analysis (he'll tell you when that happens) and then skipping to the last 15 minutes. A friend of mine who is a PhD in Biochem has vetted this for me (Hi Mel!) as has the E.P., who is not a scientist but works with scientific papers at science journal of well-known repute.
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