Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

A New York Times article this week confirmed my worst fears – stress is sending Americans to candy stores in droves.¹

While at first glance this little headline, “When Economy Sours, Tootsie Rolls Soothe Souls” seems amusing, from my perspective it unwittingly brings up two important issues in healthcare today:

1. The simplistic assertion that to manage our weight, all we have to do is control calories in and calories out.

There are many factors that influence our ability to lose weight and keep it off, and this headline is an example of an important one – stress. Stress from economic crisis is doing what we see over and over again in patients at LMI — reducing serotonin and inducing carbohydrate cravings.

So what’s the harm in eating a little candy if you’re stressed? Nothing if you can stop at “a little,” but if you make that stop at the candy bowl too much of a habit, you can quickly undo weight loss and start to increase health risks.

Stress management is such an important factor for long term weight control, I have made it one of the key components of my approach to weight loss.

What is it that separates folks who can stay disciplined with their eating and exercise from folks who feel they “blow it” every 4 weeks?

Is obesity genetic, or is lifestyle is a bigger factor? Over thousands of years, human genetics haven’t changed much; yet over the past couple of decades there’s been an exponential increase in obesity and its related problems like metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that leads to heart disease and diabetes.¹ So, even though it may seem that some people are hard wired to be overweight, the sudden increase in obesity indicates that something more than genetics is playing out.

As it turns out, our genetics can be steered toward obesity, but it is guided by something called our epigenetics, certain behavioral or environmental influences that tell our genes what to do. And guess what? Our epigenetics are heavily influenced by our nutritional intake, including what we eat too much of and what we don’t get enough of.

Let me explain. Everybody is born with a unique set of genes, your hardwired DNA. (That’s called our genome.) Your genes lie there and wait to see if they will be turned on or not as directed by tagging systems that sit on top of genes, called the epigenome. Our genes and epigenetics have been compared to a computer and its software.² Our genes are the hard drive; the epigenetics are the software telling the hard drive what to do.

I have created this checklist out of my personal and professional experience with food addiction.

Having a food addiction does not make you bad or worthless. Food addicts are worthwhile persons who have a problem with food.

Have you noticed over the past several years that people are starting to get comfortable with the idea of carrying around “a few extra pounds?” I see this a lot in my new patients: the thinking that if you can work out “hard” you can be “fat but fit.”

Don’t believe it.

Take a recent conversation I had with one of my patients, who I’ll call Alice. She’s middle-aged. When she came to me she was “a little on the heavy side,” as she put it. I told her she really would have to drop the extra pounds to avoid heart disease and other serious health problems.

What is the addiction that is more difficult to manage and overcome than heroin, cocaine, speed or alcohol?

What addiction has a 95% recovery failure rate?

What highly addictive substance appears daily in the lives of every single American?

Would you buy a product that had a 95% failure rate?

Not one of us would buy a car or a computer that was known to fail 95% of the time. So why then do so many of us pay enormous amounts of money and give hours of our time to diets with a 95% failure rate??

Part 2: How HFCS Super-Sized Us

A number of studies have shown that when we drink our calories (as opposed to eat them), our brains will process information differently. Unlike solid food, liquid calories don’t satisfy hunger because they don’t suppress a hunger hormone called ghrelin which tells us to eat more. In an analysis of the eight-year Nurses’ Health Study II, it was shown that women who upped their caloric soft drink consumption from one soda per week to one or more per day gained weight and had a higher risk of type II diabetes.¹

Sodas are unquestionably linked to obesity, both the adult kind and the childhood kind. Research conducted in 2001 by David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston found that the odds of a teenager becoming obese increased a whopping 60% for each can or glass of sugar-sweetened soft drinks.²

Which brings us back to HFCS. “The low cost of high fructose corn syrup allowed the explosion of 20-oz sodas, Super Big Gulps and the like to happen,” C. Leigh Broadhurst, PhD, a research scientist and nutritionist at the USDA told me.

Part 1: The Results Are In…And They’re Not Good…

If you happened to have been away from your TV for the past month you might not have noticed that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) appears to have a new press agent.

After years of media reports and scholarly articles¹ linking the increased consumption of HFCS with the growing obesity and diabetes epidemics, the makers of this stuff have had enough! They’re just not going to take it any more! For goodness sake, it’s made from corn! It’s wholesome! It’s no worse for you than sugar! What’s the big deal?

Well, as they say, let’s go to the videotape.

Sucrose, plain old table sugar, is a disaccharide, meaning it’s made up of two (di) simple sugars (saccharides) — fructose and glucose — linked together with a chemical bond. Fructose and glucose happen to be the very same simple sugars that make up HFCS. Table sugar is about 50% glucose and 50% fructose, while in most high-fructose corn syrups, the proportion is similar but not identical — 55% fructose and 45% sucrose.

Part 2 of a 2-part series

The use of fat and starch blocking diet aids is insanely counter-intuitive to me. I spend my life trying to get more nutrition into people, not less. Remember, anything that blocks the digestion and absorption of a macronutrient will also tend to block the absorption of micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals.