The consumption of sugar is very much in the news at the moment. Consumers tend to be led by the most newsworthy subjects, so everyone will be focusing on sugar. This could be to the exemption of other harmful additives to our diet. It is all about balance. We need a little of everything and much, much less processed foods.
One of the main guidelines to most diets is counting calories. Well, there is something very wrong with the whole calorie theory of weight loss, especially when it comes to improving our health.
Counting calories is our main weapon in the war against weight increase and it is the one the overweight are especially induced to use if they want to reduce their risk of diabetes and beyond that, heart disease.
However, this is all a dietary blind alley according to a leading cardiologist. It is a message that is being pushed by a food industry that is still loading up the foods they sell with processed sugars, while pointing a finger at the high calorie levels in food.
A well-known sugary drinks company recently proclaimed that weight loss had everything to do with more exercise. While this is very much an important part of weight loss, it is also an idea that is fuelled by the calorie theory of ‘energy burn’, which is also supported by the sugar laden drink and foods industry.
We are led to believe that after exercise we need to build up our lost energy with a high sugar drink. Sugar is added to more than 80 per cent of fast foods, and one can of cola alone contains nine teaspoons of sugar. Drinking just one can each day will dramatically increase your chances of developing type 2 diabetes, usually a precursor to heart disease.
This calorie theory leads to the fact that weight loss is all about burning more energy than we consume. So we continue to eat foods that have little or no nutritional value… convinced that calories alone are the measure of health.
This idea has been promoted by the weight loss industry, an industry that generates around $58 billion in revenues per year in the US alone. Despite these huge expenditures, the consumer continues to put the weight back on again at the end of the diet or while continuing it.
Losing weight is one thing, being well and free of heart disease is another
Another factor has to be taken into consideration. The body has a highly sensitive metabolism and any reduction in the amount of food being consumed will cause it to hold onto fat stores and burn less energy to survive; hence the tiredness we feel when we are on strict diets. It is what you eat and not just how much that determines your health.
Surveys among the urban poor in sub-Saharan Africa revealed that between 1992 and 2005 there was an explosion in the rate of people who were obese and overweight because they started to eat cheap, processed foods, high in sugar.
Losing weight is one thing, being well and free of heart disease is another. In a study entitled ‘Predimed’ 7,500 Spanish healthy people, all at high risk of developing heart disease, were eating an unrestricted Mediterranean diet without looking at calories. This resulted in a 30 per cent reduction in heart disease risk compared to controls in those who followed a diet which reduced dietary fat.
Those who lowered their risk did not reduce their weight or total cholesterol or even their ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol levels. Instead, the diet reduced the levels of inflammation, atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and thrombosis (blood clotting or thickening). This was achieved in just three months of starting the diet. Alternatively, the trans fats found in processed foods can rapidly increase the C-reactive proteins (which are the markers of inflammation in the body) within a few weeks.
Malhotra, a cardiologist at Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust in the UK catalogued other examples of how losing weight has little to do with improving heart health, but eating better food does:
• Eating fatty fish reduced their risk of a second or fatal heart attack by 29 per cent.
• Taking just 1 g/day of omega-3 fatty acids, significantly reduced the risk.
• Taking flax seed oil, also rich in omega-3 fats achieved a dramatic reduction in blood pressure levels in patients with high blood pressure.
kathryn@maltanet.net