Why Diets Fail (Because You're Addicted to Sugar) (7 page)

A system known as the
glycemic index
helps classify carbohydrates based on how quickly they increase your blood sugar and to what level. Fast carbohydrates are on the high end of the glycemic index and slow carbohydrates are on the low end. Some studies
suggest that a diet rich in high-glycemic-index foods, which cause blood sugar to spike and dip faster than low-glycemic-index foods, may increase your likelihood of overeating
²
and may be linked to heart disease
³
and diabetes.
⁴

What does all of this mean? Based on what we’ve described so far, you would be right to assume that you should eat some carbohydrates as part of a healthy diet, but avoid ones that have empty calories and are fast digesting, as these can lead to you to overeat and then, shortly afterward, feel hungry and irritable. Here is the problem: those fast-digesting carbs made up of empty calories are delicious, and many of us
love
to eat these types of foods. Cutting back on our intake of these carbohydrates can be difficult not only because they are tasty but also because they are cheap, convenient, and readily available. And there is a biological basis for the desire to eat these types of carbohydrates, sugars in particular, which may lead you to become addicted to them and thus hinder efforts to remain on a low-carbohydrate diet. We have an evolutionary tendency to view things that are sweet as being safe. For example, if our ancestors were to come upon a berry patch in the wild, those berries that were ripe and safe berries would taste sweet, whereas rotten ones would not.

Luckily, it is possible to overcome these challenges and cut back on your intake of fast-digesting carbs with empty calories. Understanding why these carbs end up being stored as fat is the first step. In Step 4, we’ll help you begin to reduce these carbs until, at the end of the book, you will have cut them out completely!

The Many Faces of Sugar

Sometimes it can be difficult to understand which foods are actually sugars. Contrary to what we normally think of when we envision a sugar, not all sugars taste very sweet and not all things that are sweet (for example, artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes) are considered sugars.

As you can see from the box on
this page
, there are lots of different sugars and sweeteners out there. While sugars like those on this list are grouped into the same class for the purposes of this book, it is important to underscore that they are not exactly the same. Aside from the obvious differences that some are sweet and some are not and that they are derived from various sources (for example, corn sugar comes from a different source than beet sugar), scientists continue to uncover other intrinsic differences among various types of sweeteners and their effects on the body.

WHERE ARE SUGARS?

As mentioned earlier, our bodies need to make glucose (a sugar) to survive, so sugar plays an important role in our diet and health. However, this does not mean that you need to
eat
sugars to get glucose; your body can break down fats and proteins to make glucose when needed as well.

Most of us eat more sugar than we need, and often this sugar is consumed blindly. We don’t always realize how much sugar is actually in the foods we eat, and foods that contain empty calories are not clearly marked. While we often see food items that are labeled “low-fat” or “fat-free,” we never see a food labeled “nonnutritious” or “junk food.”

The labels are there, but it is up to the consumer to know how to read them. So, in order for you to properly evaluate the amount of sugars contained in a given food, it’s important to understand how to interpret a nutrition label. These labels are often on the back of food packages, but sometimes, as in the case of chain or fast-food restaurants, this information is not readily available, and you may need to request it (or you can usually find it on the company’s website). An example of a typical nutrition label is shown on
this page
; this one is for a package of Skittles candy.

There have been efforts put forth recently to make calorie content and nutrition information more visible to people, in the hopes that providing such information will enable us to make more
informed food choices. Has making this information more accessible worked? Unfortunately, it hasn’t. And this has nothing to do with intelligence or comprehension levels; adults with low levels of literacy and numeracy and those with higher levels of education have both been shown to have difficulty understanding nutrition labels.
⁵

A Sugar by Any Other Name …

Agave nectar

Barbados sugar

Barley malt

Beet sugar

Blackstrap molasses

Brown sugar

Cane crystals

Cane juice crystals

Cane sugar

Caramel

Carob syrup

Castor sugar

Confectioner’s sugar

Corn sweetener

Corn syrup

Corn syrup solids

Crystalline fructose

Date sugar

Demerara sugar

Dextrose

D-mannose

Evaporated cane juice

Florida crystals

Free-flowing brown sugar

Fructose

Fruit juice

Fruit juice concentrate

Galactose

Glucose

Glucose solids

Golden sugar

Golden syrup

Granulated sugar

Grape juice concentrate

Grape sugar

HFCS

High-fructose corn syrup

Honey

Icing sugar

Invert sugar

Lactose

Malt syrup

Maltodextrin

Maltose

Mannitol

Maple syrup

Molasses

Muscovado sugar

Organic raw sugar

Panocha

Powdered sugar

Raw sugar

Refiner’s syrup

Rice syrup

Sorbitol

Sorghum syrup

Sucrose

Sugar

Table sugar

Treacle

Turbinado sugar

Yellow sugar

Part of the problem is that these labels are meaningless if we don’t understand how to interpret them. Also, as you will soon see, the way that the information is presented on the labels can be misleading. So, let’s dissect a label piece by piece so you can understand what all of this information means.

PERCENT DAILY VALUE (%DV)

The upper right of the label reads “%DV*,” meaning the percent daily value based on a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet. In essence, the numbers that are listed under this heading indicate how much a serving of that food contributes to the overall recommended daily intake of a particular category, whether the category is total fat, total carbohydrates, or a certain vitamin. For example, the label above shows that one serving of this item contributes 13 percent of the recommended daily intake of saturated fat that is suggested by the FDA.

In addition to the %DV, the nutrition facts also tell you how many grams of fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrates, and protein are found in one serving size of the item. This label indicates, for instance, that one serving of Skittles contains 56 grams of carbohydrates, 47 of which are sugar. These two items, the number of grams of carbohydrates and the number of grams of sugar that come from carbohydrates, are both important when trying to determine if a certain food fits with your goal to reduce your sugar and carbohydrate intake. However, to make food-intake decisions easily (and without a calculator), we’ve compiled the Sugar Equivalency Table for you (see
this page
), which will help you easily identify how much sugar is contained in a food and whether or not that food fits with your diet plan. We will explain in greater detail how to interpret and use this table in upcoming chapters.

SERVING SIZE

When using nutrition labels, determining the appropriate serving size can also be a tricky thing. Just glancing at a nutrition label can be misleading and dangerous. If you down an entire package of cookies thinking it is one serving, and it turns out the package contained four servings, then you just consumed quadruple the number of calories, carbohydrates, and sugars you thought you did. Some labels will tell you how many servings are in the entire package. Others will tell you how many pieces are in a serving size. This package tells you one serving is 61.5 grams. Do you know off the top of your head how many Skittles would equal a 61.5 gram serving? (In case you’re wondering, it’s approximately sixty-two Skittles.) Most people don’t walk around with scales and weigh out every morsel of food before they eat it. The point is that nutrition labels aren’t always very user-friendly, and you often have to do some quick math in your head in order to get a realistic assessment of how much of something you’re actually eating.

INGREDIENTS LIST

Below the nutritional information on a label is a list of ingredients. Importantly, these ingredients are listed in order of the amount contained in the product, with the ingredients contained in larger amounts listed first. In this example, you can see that sugar is the primary ingredient in Skittles. Sugar is often one of the first few ingredients listed on the nutrition label. If the word
sugar
isn’t there, in its place might be another one of the many terms used to describe different types of sugars (see the box on
this page
), such as high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, fruit juice concentrate, maltose, and dextrose. All of these terms can be confusing and difficult to remember. However, an article published in the
Journal of the American Dietetic Association
offers some helpful tips for determining whether added sugars are contained in a food or beverage (see sidebar). Also note that “sugar” can appear more than once in the list of ingredients. For example, on the Skittles label, you actually get “sugar” from the majority of the ingredients (sugar, corn syrup, apple juice from concentrate, dextrin, and modified corn starch).