“Checkout Wars” – A survivor’s tale

Yesterday was what has become a typical Sunday for us – early trip to the farmers’ market to buy fresh produce, stop in on the way home at a supermarket to top up with key ingredients not available from the market. After getting most of my groceries at the market, I still needed chiles, cilantro, basil and greek yoghurt.  Whenever I brave a supermarket these days I make sure I go in with a plan and come out only with the items on my shopping list and nothing else.  I have come to understand that “impulse buys” are not a quirk of character on my part, they are very carefully orchestrated by the store’s strategy to prompt me to buy items I neither want nor need.  I now know that if I didn’t want it when I arrived, I am not going to miss it after I leave, no matter how much I may feel I want it in the moment.

The supermarket we use is a major chain in South Africa, with some similarities to Whole Foods in the USA.  One of these being that they sell what Michael Pollan calls “Storied food.”   Storied food is delightful – you can pick it up and read a little adventure yarn about where the food was grown, by who and how it came to be in your hands.  For example, the logo on the milk was a heart with a cow inside.  I was charmed to read that the milk had been produced by “happy cows.”  Not a word on whether those cows were grass or grain fed, and given the omission it is safe to assume that it is the latter.  However, at least the cows were happy about it!  Presumably the farmer took a survey and got a high satisfaction rating from the herd.

But the story telling is not confined to the labels on the products. The store had a massive advertisement at the entrance and again at the exit about their “Organic range” claiming that you could buy organic in everything “from t-shirts to tea bags.”  Given the size of the billboards, I wondered if I would suddenly find a vast array of new organic products on the shelves.  Looking into the history of this store’s relationship with organics, I found this fascinating press release from 2004 that explained their insight that organic was going mainstream and how they had updated their marketing to address this rapidly growing customer base.  How exciting!  Not so fast though, for a store that has understood the appeal of organics for such a long time, I was disappointed at how few items I could locate with the organic label in the fresh produce section.  I found some broccoli and that was pretty much it.  Perhaps the massive signs at the entrance and exit are meant to draw an organic “halo” around everything in the store, even if only a handful of products are actually certified organic?  Surely the marketing team would not be that cynical or have such a low opinion of consumer intelligence?

What is interesting is that there are at least 4 active, well supported farmers’ markets within a few kilometers of this particular store.  The one near my home a little further away does not advertise organics nearly as prominently.  Perhaps because they don’t face the same level of competition from the local food movement?  Least you think I am over-stating my case, the competition is real.  The markets were absolutely packed but there were only a handful of people in the supermarket.  Of course trade will pick up when the markets close, but for a few hours a week at least, this store is losing significant patronage to the nearby markets.

I was standing in the checkout line, looking at the massive “organics” advert overhead and reviewing my purchases to ensure that I everything on my shopping list and nothing else, when another reality thrust itself upon my consciousness.  The store has set up their checkout line so that everyone stands in the same queue and is routed to the next available cashier when they reach the front.  A very equitable and efficient system of queuing, which I greatly appreciate.  What I do not appreciate is the blatant attempt to manipulate my buying behavior in the form of the mouth-watering array of sweets and chocolates that flank the line of shoppers on either side.  What is more, once you enter the queue there is no escape.  There are people in front of you and behind you and your only option is to stand there and look at the goodies screaming “buy me!” for as long as it takes to get to the front of the queue.  Or you can shut your eyes and go to your happy place if you prefer. Those eye-catching candies used to be a source of significant temptation to me.  I would almost invariably succumb, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering husband, who seems immune to advertising of any kind for reasons I do not quite understand. These days I am able to run the gauntlet of the checkout line and emerge unscathed, which is a great relief to me. I now entertain myself by watching the other shoppers to see how many browse the items on display and end up adding a sweet or chocolate to their basket.  I would say it is at least one in 3, although if a young child is involved that likelihood increases dramatically.

It is because of tactics such as this, that I take massive offense at anyone who wants to reduce the diet of children to parental responsibility.  I have witnessed children simply lose it in that situation and have an all-out screaming tantrum.  Glass shatters and eardrums burst and other patrons look on in irritation and disapproval.  I have seen parents just grab a bag of sweets, rip it open and hand it to their hysterical offspring right there in the checkout line! Presumably they plan to pay for it later – in more ways than one!  When this occurs all the onlookers are simultaneously thinking two things: “You are a bad parent for giving in to your child like that – you aren’t teaching them anything!” and “Thank God you just did that and made the yelling stop!” I suspect that the parent is doing their level best and is a pretty good parent in most situations, but they are only human and just want the yelling and the social disapproval to stop.  The kid is freaking out, their head is about to explode, the enemy has them surrounded and all escape routes have been blocked off. Can you blame them?

At least when the harassed parent gets to the checkout they will be asked if they have a “My School” card and if they do a percentage of their purchases will go to support a school of their choice.  Next time you give in and buy that chocolate you had intended to resist, just remember that you are “doing it for the children!”

Would a store that really cares about their customers, the environment, the community and the education of children, deliberately put parents in this untenable situation every time they buy at the store with a child in tow?  If it is all about “consumer choice” and “making healthy choices that are part of a balanced diet” then why is it not good enough to give the sweeties their own aisle just like all the other products? Why do they need to flank the checkout line? Why not place the vegetables there instead?  If someone buys a bunch of carrots on impulse, no harm done, right? I do know that whenever I bought sweets, I would end up not only buying more and more sweets, but more food overall.  Is it possible that the store knows this as well?  As a grown adult I have to make a conscious effort to counteract the store’s strategy and come out with my health and budget in tact. Just watch this marshmallow experiment and you will get an idea of how tough this is on a kid, and the parent responsible for them.

If this video doesn’t tug at your heart-strings you are just dead inside!  Seriously, who would do this to a little kid?  Your local supermarket, that’s who!  Of course the point of the experiment is that ability to resist the marshmallow correlates to greater academic achievement later in life, so perhaps the supermarket exposes kids to an overwhelming selection of sweets in the checkout line to build character and contribute to their education 😛

If you have been paying attention you would know that I was in the supermarket in the first place because I couldn’t get everything I needed at the farmers’ market.  Doesn’t this prove that we still need supermarkets and shouldn’t we be grateful for the array of choices they offer us?  Sort of. I, for one, still need them, but my relationship with them is changing rapidly.  I am hardly ahead of the curve when it comes to issues of health and nutrition.  If I were, I wouldn’t be an obese, diabetic 38 year old!  I used to find people who only ate organic, or shopped at farmers’ markets annoying and thought of them as “alarmist” or “faddish.”  I am now one of those people.  The 2004 press release of my favorite supermarket was prophetic.  In 2013 I finally caught on to a trend they identified almost 10 years ago!  Although I still need the supermarket, I am needing them less and less, because they sell very little of what makes up my daily diet.  At the same time more and more farmers’ markets and co-ops are popping up, they are highly responsive to customer feedback, and every time I visit they seem to supply more of the ingredients I stock up on to ensure that I can continue to offer the menu of my new “home restaurant.”  For the time being I am glad that the supermarket is there although my friendship with them is somewhat strained.  For years I was a willing victim cheerfully guzzling down sodas and salt and vinegar crisps.  Now I only get what I came for, I see through all the marketing and “story telling” and I know not to look directly at the sweets in the checkout line for too long, least they blind me!

I have plans to plant a herb and vegetable garden in the Spring (we are now heading into Autumn) and increase my food independence even more. How long before I am able to end my troubled relationship with the supermarket altogether?  How many more people like me are out there?  Is our food economy changing or is this just a passing trend that will fade  when we return to shopping in the manner to which we have become accustomed?  Time will tell.  However, if the size of the food movement has any correlation to the size of the “Organics” signs in my supermarket then this thing is HUGE, people!

Sugar and Spice – Confessions of a Sugar Addict

A big part of eating a healthy, delicious diet has been figuring out what to do about my “sweet tooth.”  I might as well face it, I love sweet stuff and I am always going to.  However, since the dentist has yet to pinpoint and extract the exact tooth responsible, I am going to have to figure out another plan!

The sweet life: Smoothie and cupcake

Confession time:  I used to consume a terrifying amount of sugar on a daily basis.  If you looked at how much food I ate overall you might have a hard time understanding why I had such a weight problem.  But if you looked at my sugar in-take it would all become clear.

I am convinced that Lustig is correct that a common feature of all successful diets is that they are low in sugar and high in fiber.  I say this both because I find his arguments persuasive but, more importantly, because I find the results of such a diet breathtakingly impressive. See the list of benefits I have experienced here.

Here’s the summary of my current understanding:  Sugar is a problem and needs to be greatly restricted if not eliminated.  Alternative sweeteners aren’t necessarily the answer and caution is needed until further research is done.

In The Skinny Rules, Bob Harper forbids all added sweeteners, including artificial ones (Rule 10).  His reasoning is that the sweet taste is so addictive that any added sweetener exposes us to the risk of relapse.  His goal is to break people of their desire for “hyper-sweetness.”  He might be right, but of all his rules, this is the one I break just a little.  However, I very much agree that we need to dramatically decrease the “sweet” component of our diets, and one of the reasons I think I have done this successfully is that I can no longer stomach any commercially sweetened beverage or food product.  Foods I used to consume in large amounts are now so sweet to me I simply can’t eat them.

But how can I live as a real, sweet-toothed human in a sugar-filled world?  If I’m honest I must admit that I have more “sweet” in my diet than either Bob Harper or Robert Lustig would think prudent.  They are probably right, and maybe I am in dangerous territory, but for what it’s worth here’s my strategy:

 1) No sweetened beverages, either sugar sweetened, or artificially sweetened.  This means soda, diet soda, fruit juice, energy drinks or sweetened iced tea. I am convinced by the arguments that a) there is no fiber in these drinks to buffer the sugar b) our brains seem unable to detect that we have taken in calories in liquid form and therefore don’t compensate by reducing overall consumption following the intake of a caloric beverage c) when our brains taste sweet they expect calories and if no calories are present this sets us up for problems with appetite regulation.  Also, I want to use my “sweet allowance” on more satisfying options, so sweetened beverages are an easy target for total abstinence.

2) Cane sugar: severely restricted.  My only source of cane sugar is my block or two of dark chocolate a day, and because I go for 70% or higher of cocoa, this works out to very little.

3) Coconut palm sugar:  It has some nutritional merit and I love the taste.  Although it is reported to have a low GI (35), I am skeptical as it is mostly sucrose.  I therefore treat it as a sugar and only use it occasionally in baking that contains a substantial amount of fiber.

4) Artificial sweeteners (Aspartame, Sucralose, Saccharin): No thanks – can’t stand the taste and not comfortable with the possibility that they may increase my risk of cancer.

5) Honey, maple syrup, dates, agave:  Again, some nutritional value but all high in sugar and if I use them at all it is in baking with a high fiber content.  They basically belong in the same category as coconut palm sugar.

6) Fruit:  A favorite source of sweetness in my diet, but I am very careful about preserving the fiber by eating the whole fruit.  Berries deserve special mention as an “added sweetener”:  They easily release some of their juice and can be used to sweeten food without damaging the fiber in the fruit (eg: over cereal or in plain yoghurt).  As an added advantage they are low GI and full of anti-oxidants.  Berries are therefore my most “guilt-free” and liberally used “sweetener.”

7) Berry smoothies.  Related to the above but they deserve special mention because they are a bit complicated  Let me begin by saying that my smoothies are so good they should be illegal.  However, smoothies are controversial among those concerned about sugar.  Some say they are fine, others say that the blades of the blender destroy the insoluble fiber in the fruit and they are therefore no different to fruit juice. They are also wary of smoothies as “liquid calories.”  Here’s how I approach it: a) my smoothies are very thick and I find them super filling.  I therefore don’t believe that they suffer from the same “liquid calorie” danger as juice and soda.  They are either barely drinkable or have to be eaten with a spoon. b) The fruit content of my smoothies are from berries, therefore low GI c) I add in additional fiber in the form of Chia seeds and coconut flour so I have both soluble and insoluble fiber covered d) I believe that the protein and fat from the whey, yoghurt and coconut milk also help to buffer the sugars from the fruit.  e) As an added precaution I first blend up the other ingredients (greek yoghurt, whey powder, coconut milk, chia seeds) and then gently muddle and fold in the berries so that some of their juice is released but the whole fruit is still in there without the fiber being obliterated by heavy processing.  Phew, all that effort for a smoothie!  I wonder if Lustig or Harper would give me permission to enjoy it under these conditions.  Maybe not, but I am taking my chances for the time being because they are such a delicious and easy way to get a nutritious breakfast on the run.

8) Whey powder: I use a sweet vanilla whey powder with no added sugar.  However, it is really delicious and sweetens whatever I add it to very effectively, and I can only conclude that the sweetness comes from the lactose, which has none of the dangers of fructose.  I started using whey for protein, and the sweetness came as an added bonus.

9) Lacuma or Maca powder:  Nutritious and tasty in smoothies or homemade chocolate or ice cream.  I use these for their health benefits, or as a variation on other sweeteners.

10) Xylitol:  I love using it because it tastes just like sugar and can be used with a 1:1 conversion in baking.  Having said that I always reduce the sweetener on a recipe just because I don’t like things too sweet anymore.  Xylitol is a sugar alcohol found in the fibers of fruits and vegetables and also made by the human body.  Dentists love it because it protects against tooth decay.  You have probably already encountered it in sugar-free gum. But is it ok to use as a sweetener?  The worst thing I have read about Xylitol is that it can cause stomach upsets if you overdo it.  This is because it is not fully broken down during digestion.  The funny thing is, if I buy commercial sweets with Xylitol, Maltitol or Sorbitol I get a violent stomach upset after eating just two or three.  However, if I use Xylitol in my own baking or cooking I have no ill effects whatsoever.  My theories are that either I am using it in sufficient moderation or there is something else that’s nasty about those sweets and causing the mischief.  Xylitol is slowly absorbed and metabolized and has a negligible effect on insulin.  I am not about to go out and eat it by the sack load, but I think it’s ok to use in cooking and baking as I am doing.  I am prepared to take my chances with this one for the time being.

Warning:  If you have dogs, don’t ever let them eat anything containing Xylitol as it is highly toxic to them!

11) Stevia: It has mixed reviews.  I have some in the house and use a little in my herbal teas if I want them slightly sweetened.  Because it is so intensely sweet a little goes a long way.

To sum up, here are my own “sweet” rules:

1) No sweetened beverages.

2) The body expects calories when it tastes sweetness, so give it some.  In other words use sweeteners in cooking or baking of real food, not as a way to “cut calories” .  This approach will actually help you consume fewer calories overall because you aren’t playing tricks with appetite regulation.

3) No artificial sweeteners or “diet” food products – highly processed and bad for you on so many levels, besides just tasting lousy.

4) Require any caloric sweetener to have some nutritional value, not just be empty calories.  However, don’t use their nutritional merit as a way of conveniently forgetting that they are still to be treated with caution, especially if they consist primarily of sucrose and/or fructose.

5) Eat any caloric sweetener with plenty of fiber to slow down the absorption of the carbohydrate.

6) Diversify:  Don’t consume large quantities of any one sweetener, at least until further research is done into its safety.

7) If it’s sweet, make it yourself.  You can then ensure that you use the minimum sweetener and that you buffer it with fiber, protein and/or fat.

8) If you find that you are naturally choosing to eat less rather than more, you’re doing it right.  If you are just swapping one sweet addiction for another, you might need to reassess your approach.

This might seem like an overly complex strategy but it works for me.  I wish I could just go “cold turkey” and cut out the sweet stuff, and I have certainly tried.  It usually lasts for a while and then I regress back into my old ways.  This approach is sustainable, therefore better in my opinion.  I have been doing it for 6 months and I know I can do it forever.  It may work for you or it may not, so find your own way of navigating the sweet stuff in your life.  Whatever works to keep you eating “low sugar, high fiber” is an excellent start!

“No thanks, I’ve had enough” – What’s that about?!

The herb flatbread was delicious.  I made it myself.  I revelled in the earthy feel as I kneaded the fresh oregano, olives and rosemary into the dough.  I enjoyed seeing it take shape under my rolling pin. By the time I rubbed olive oil, sea salt and more fresh herbs on top of the unbaked bread I thought to myself “wow, I am practically a chef!”  The smell as it baked in the oven was intoxicating. By the time lunch was served the stage was set for a bit of bready over-indulgence.

Herb bread: one plain, one with caramelized onions and mozzarella cheese

Bread is a rare treat for me these days.  I have it once or twice a week at the most and only one slice when I do.  Even then it is homemade, slow rising, with stone ground whole grain flour that I get from Eureka Mills.  Let me save you the trouble: no bread that you can buy in a supermarket can be trusted.  Don’t kid yourself with “Low GI”, “High Fiber,” “Seed Loaf” etc.  They are all made with white flour with a bit of bran added back in.  As much as I love good bread, I try to eat more of my grains completely whole (not ground at all) such as whole oats, quinoa, amaranth etc.

But where there is soup, there must be bread and we were having mushroom soup for lunch.  Hence the herb bread experiment.  I dished up 2 slices to go with my soup whereas these days I normally try to stick to one (in the bad old days I could have eaten the entire flatbread without thinking anything of it)  However, the smell of the bread had messed with my head, and hence 2 slices made their way to my plate.

Let me tell you something a bit embarrassing about myself.  On occasion I might manage to resist going for seconds.  But I have a strict “leave no carb behind” policy for whatever is already on my plate! Once the food is dished up, I have claimed it in the name of my kingdom. It will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine!  When it is in front of me I am not one to worry my pretty little head with the annoying thought that maybe I shouldn’t eat the whole thing.

As good as the bread was, the mushroom soup was pretty darned incredible as well, thanks to Jamie Oliver’s easy recipe.  He had this brilliant suggestion of topping the soup with a bit of lemon juice and lemon zest, which made for a fascinating flavor combination.  I was having my fill of surprising and complimentary tastes and textures, which always raises my level of satisfaction with the meal.

There I was cheerfully eating my bread and soup, well pleased with myself for having produced this meal in my very own kitchen, when I reached for that second piece.  Suddenly I had a very strong, but very unfamiliar message from my brain.  Translated into English the message said: “No thanks, I’ve had enough.”  Whaaaat???  This was a piece of freshly baked, fragrant herb bread we were talking about!  I had already decided to eat it.  I hadn’t exactly gorged myself either.  Just one bowl of soup and one slice of bread. What nonsense was this of having had enough?  I regarded the piece of bread.  It looked utterly delicious as before, but suddenly the thought of eating it seemed completely illogical to me.  It ended up in the fridge in a Ziploc bag for future consumption.

I am sure normal people have no idea what I am talking about.  I bet they have this impulse every day and can’t see how it can possibly merit a blog post.  But maybe there is someone else out there who gets it. Sure, I do stop eating when I am full.  It’s just that this usually well past the point of what I should be eating.  Especially when it comes to “cravable” foods like bread.   The reason that this is remarkable to me is that I stopped eating, not because I was over-full, nor was it because I was exercising restraint or “will power.”  I had already decided to have that second slice.  But some other, here-to-fore unfamiliar intelligence, decided otherwise.

Is it possible that my brain is starting to “see” leptin?  That magical hormone that tells normal people when they have had enough, making them behave, well, like normal people.  The one that many overweight people appear to be resistant to.  If so this is a great relief!  For the past few months I have been free of hunger pangs and cravings, but feeling full enough to stop before finishing what is on my plate is a new experience to me.  My mission is to eat food so delicious that I never crave junk food, so satisfying that I never get hungry, so nutritious that my body gets everything it needs and low enough in calories to steadily and naturally lose weight.  If this bread incident is anything to go by, then score one for The Bold Experiment!

Happy Easter!

Let’s face it: Easter is a chocolate holiday.  You can run from it or you can embace it.  Being the chocolate lover that I am, I chose the latter.

I consider chocolate to be one of life’s great pleasures.  I once owned a fridge magnet that read: “Chocolate isn’t only for breakfast.”  Indeed, I am quite capable of eating chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner and all the snacks in between!  Obviously this is far from ideal.  When I began my most recent weight loss attempt, chocolate got banned along with my other favorite snack foods.  However, chocolate is making a comeback in my diet in a very interesting way.

When figuring out how to eat, I came to the conclusion that foods need to be divided into 3 categories:

1. Total abstinence:  These are not really foods at all, they are drugs and they have to go.  They are the foods that promote addiction and are toxic when consumed at high doses over a prolonged period of time. Foods that you should just have one of at the very most, but you can’t. Soda, french fries and donuts are at the top of my list.  I am sure you have your own.
2. Regular inclusion:  These, for want of a better word, are “whole foods” or “real foods.”  Vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, eggs,dairy and whole grains all make the cut for me.  Of course, you might choose to restrict or eliminate certain whole foods because of allergies or intolerance (gluten, nuts, dairy) or dietary preferences (meat, animal products).  However, they are still real food with health benefits, they just don’t happen to work for you, but can form a healthy part of a balanced diet for someone else.  I would argue that if you decide to restrict one of these real foods, please have a logical, practical and personal reason for doing so.  Don’t do it just because it is the current diet fad, or food phobia that someone has inflicted on you!
3. Moderation and appreciation:  This category is reserved for “the finer things in life.”  Whatever it is that having a little of just makes life worth living for you.  Foods that are relatively harmless, or even mildly beneficial when consumed in moderation, but where over-consumption is problematic.  This is where chocolate fits into my diet.

The secret to moderation in category number 3 is appreciation. You need to be able to have just a little, enjoy it thoroughly and then stop because you have had enough.  How does this work in practice?  Chocolate is a great example for me.  Most commercial chocolate is all about quantity over quality.  If you can consume 100 grams of your favorite chocolate without even blinking, you are doing it wrong!  If you are going to have chocolate at all, I propose that it should be the finest, most expensive chocolate that money can buy.  Chocolate that melts in your mouth, overwhelms you with a burst of complex flavors and leaves you completely satisfied after one or two blocks.  To begin with, this means dark chocolate.  For me milk and white chocolate have been consigned to category #1 because they are high in sugar and hydrogenated fat.  One of the reasons why dark chocolate is often praised for it’s health benefits is that it is consists of 70% (or more) of cacoa and cacoa butter and  only 30% sugar.  Note that the fat in your chocolate must be real cacoa butter, and not cheap and unhealthy vegetable oil.  Sugar should never be the first ingredient as this indicates that the manufacturer has replaced healthy cacao with unhealthy sugar to save on cost. Cacao is considered a “superfood” because of it’s high anti-oxidant and magnesium content, among other things.  It also makes you feel good because of certain brain altering compounds that can ease depression or produce euphoria.  And therein may lie the problem – too much of a good thing is not such a good thing anymore.

I am of the opinion that any “treat” food should have an inbuilt mechanism to limit consumption.  Like my cake experiment.  With the cake the limit is imposed by the high fiber content that makes you feel really full and unable to reach for another.  I have also discovered that the same can be true for chocolate, although for a different reason.  By only eating really good dark chocolate, I naturally only desire an appropriate amount.  I am happy to pay whatever it costs for high quality dark chocolate, because I know it isn’t going to suck me in to addictive eating.  I can no longer stomach commercial milk chocolate which I find ridiculously sweet and devoid of real chocolate flavor.

Producing high quality, self-limiting treat foods is not in the interests of a food industry that wants to sell a high volume of products.  For this you need to seek out artisanal producers who respect the food they are working with and are passionate about quality and taste. Expect to pay handsomely and do so gladly, because you are getting something truly special. My current favorite chocolate in the whole wide world is from DV Chocolates.  (I also love Cacoa Bella in San Francisco, but I don’t live there so need to rely on my most awesomest brother to bring me some occasionally.)  DV Chocolates is an artisanal producer located in the Cape Winelands.  They make 6 varieties of single-origin chocolate and offer tastings and chocolate appreciation workshops.  I love the concept of single-origin chocolate because it allows you to approach chocolate tasting as you would wine tasting.  Instead of eating large quantities for the sugar rush, you eat just a little for the flavor and see if you can identify the different flavor compounds and learn to distinguish one from the other.  DV Chocolates also kindly provides a detailed explanation of the health benefits of chocolate so you can enjoy the experience guilt free 🙂 My husband and I now have a daily ritual where we enjoy one or two blocks of this exquisite chocolate.  This serves a two-fold purpose: satisfies our chocolate craving and kills our desire for all other chocolate. Be warned: when you eat really good chocolate, all other chocolate you eat forever after is bound to disappoint.  If this means eating just a little healthy chocolate and none of the unhealthy commercial kind then this is a very good thing!

DV Chocolates single-origin dark chocolate. One of each!

One of the most interesting benefits of chocolate, currently under investigation, is it’s ability to stimulate the same muscle response as vigorous exercise as a result of a compound called epicatechin.  See “Chocolate as good for you as exercise.”  What is even more exciting than the mouse study referenced in that post is a study done on human patients with advanced heart failure and type 2 diabetes.  After 3 months of supplementing with chocolate, the researchers looked at the abundance and volume of cristae, the compartments necessary for the efficient function of mitochondria:

“The cristae had been severely damaged and decreased in quantity in these patients,” said one of the senior investigators, Francisco J. Villarreal, MD, PhD of UC San Diego’s Department of Medicine’s Division of Cardiology. “After three months, we saw recovery — cristae numbers back toward normal levels, and increases in several molecular indicators involved in new mitochondria production.”  From Science Daily

This study was sufficiently promising that a larger study on the effects of dark chocolate on the exercise capacity in sedentary individuals is currently underway.  Unfortunately I am not one of the lucky participants, so I am conducting my own study at home.  Purely in the interests of science, you understand. I will let you know how it turns out!

I have one other way I sometimes like to enjoy chocolate – making it myself.  In this panel discussion Michael Pollan suggests that one way to limit overconsumption of foods that should be enjoyed as occasional treats is to make them yourself.  The idea is that the effort involved will act as a deterrent against indulging too frequently. His example is french fries, but I find them too easy to make and would cheerfully make them every day, so in my case that is a terrible idea.  I do like the principle, however. Chocolate is challenging enough to qualify. I find making my own lots of fun, but a totally exhausting all-day affair so I can only see myself doing it once in a blue moon. An added advantage of making my own is that I can use xylitol instead of sugar as the sweetener.  I found organic, raw cacao and cacao butter from Soaring Free Superfoods.  I then treated myself to a wonderful recipe book by raw food dessert chef, Heather Pace: Raw Chocolate Dream. (Heather, here’s some free advertising for you: “You must buy it, you must buy it now!”)  I replace the agave syrup (which is essentially the same thing as High Fructose Corn Syrup) with a xylitol syrup that I make by melting xylitol in a little water on the stove.  I also reduce the amount as I find it too sweet otherwise.

Since it is Easter I thought it was the perfect time to try out my budding chocolatier skills.  I did pecan and cranberry squares, puffed amaranth blocks and filled chocolates using the Moonie Mint Pie recipe from “Raw Chocolate Dream.”  I currently have a thing for puffed amaranth and I read that it is made into chocolate candy as a traditional treat in South America, so I just had to give that a try! The amaranth blocks were my favorites from my latest chocolate adventure because the crunch inside the chocolate is like a party in your mouth.  As you can see, my chocolate bunnies need practice as their minty insides are coming out a bit along the sides.  Did I mention that making your own chocolates is incredibly difficult?  However, for better or worse, here is my Easter basket:

Homemade Easter chocolates

Whatever the celebrations of your culture and religion, if they involve food, this is meant to be enjoyed heartily with family and friends.  We had some good friends over for a wholesome meal involving Jamie Oliver’s mushroom soup, come crusty whole wheat herb bread and loads of delicious fresh veggies. For dessert we brought out some homemade Easter chocolate.  Because if you can’t enjoy chocolate for Easter, then what’s the point?

Diet and Children – Is it all up to the parents?

I recently heard someone who opposes the regulation of sugary food argue for “personal responsibility” and when asked “what about children?” the response was “well, that’s parental responsibility.”    Articles such as this one argue much along the same lines: Junk Food Studies Ignore Parent Responsibility. Really?!

When I hear stuff like this I am grateful that I don’t have kids, because I know that getting them to eat right would be a challenge that I would not be equal to!  However, it has lead me to reflect on my own childhood, the diet I was raised on and the diet I ended up with.

I can’t say enough about my late mother and her understanding of nutrition and the immense skill and patience with which she tried to raise my brother and myself to eat a healthy diet.  I often smile when I think about how much of the “eat real food” advice I am embracing now is exactly the principle that governed cooking and meals in our home.  So much so that I am even digging up her old recipes, and going through boxes in the garage to find old appliances that I used when I learned to cook as a child and later inherited for my own kitchen.  (I have her electric mixer that is older than I am and still works like a dream.) Never was there a mother more committed to giving her kids “the best start in life.”  Although I wasn’t exactly paying conscious attention at the time, I am told that she ate the best possible diet while she was pregnant with me.  She was lean and healthy at the start of her pregnancy and remained that way until shortly before her death.  I was, it goes without saying, breast-fed.

Once I started on solid food my mother tried, with the force of a thousand angels, to keep 2 things out of my diet: sugar and meat.  We’ll get to the meat bit in a moment, but she was up against it from the start when it came to sugar.  I am told that a nurse fed me sweetened condensed milk while I was in the neonatal unit, unbeknown to my starry-eyed 22 year old mom.  When she found out about this she was near hysterical with outrage, and she got to take home her first baby with streaming diarrhea, most likely as a result of the ministrations of this nurse.  I am not sure who told her, but my mother seemed well aware that sugar at high doses is toxic, especially to newborn infants!  However, she got a hard early lesson in just how much “parental control” she would get to exert over the diet of her first born daughter.

Once she had me safely at home, I am told that there was no more sugar for the first few years of my life.  Until a certain someone named granny arrived on the scene!  You know how grandparents are.  The dote on their grandkids and want nothing more than to make them happy.  So granny dearest snuck me my first chocolate and it was love at first bite.  Again, I was later to learn that this was the cause of considerable tension between my mom and my gran.  My gran, however, did not cease and desist from supplying the choccies, she would just slip them to me with the admonition “Don’t tell your mom.”  I was only about 3 years old, but I was eager to play along because I understood that secrecy was key to my continued chocolate supply, and to this day I can’t help but feel that we would have got away with it, had she not made the fatal error of giving me Smarties (candy coated chocolates like M&Ms).  As I clutched the precious treasures in my 3 year old fists, the food coloring came off in my hands, and was later transferred all over my cherubic visage, so when my mom arrived to take me home, gran and I were literally caught red handed!  I will confess that when asked by my mom who had given me the Smarties, I ratted out granny without a moment’s hesitation!

So my theory is that despite my mom’s best efforts, between the nurse and my grandmother the damage was done, and I have been engaging in drug seeking . . . uhm . . I mean sugar seeking behaviors ever since.  My mother began allowing occasional treats at home in the hope that she could prevent my rebellion by not depriving me completely, but alas, these treats were merely in addition to the ones I was obtaining elsewhere, not my total intake. There were the kids at school who I would do lunch trades with, the other kid’s parents who would ply me with candy when I played at their house, and of course, the school tuck shop where I could just blow my pocket money on the cheapest sweets available.  What’s more, when it came to anything containing sugar I was highly susceptible to advertising.  If a new chocolate came onto the market, I simply had to try it.  And then try it again a few more times to confirm that I really liked it as much as I thought I did 🙂  I remember thinking that eternal bliss and happiness would be mine, if my mother would only succumb and buy me Froot Loops instead of that 7 grain porridge she would lovingly prepare at home and cajole me into eating.

So you get the picture: Mom doing everything right, offering whole foods and occasional treats, encouraging healthy eating every which way she could think of.  Me, the addict, sourcing my own supply through skilled manipulation of well-meaning relatives, an illicit sweet trade with friends, and, when I entered the free market as the proud owner of a monthly allowance, through my own buying behavior. I therefore put it to the journalist who argues that “junk food studies ignore parent responsibility” that he has failed to consider a child’s resourcefulness!  Radford writes:

But parents, not fast food chains, have near-total control over what their kids eat. If parents can’t say no to little Billy when he says he wants a Happy Meal, that’s not McDonald’s fault; that’s poor parenting.

He can argue this only because he asserts that the parent is the only person who feeds a child and that children are only able to obtain food from parents.  From this I can only conclude that he is either not a parent, or his kids are remarkably maleable and compliant! I, on the other hand, employed my resourcefulness, not only as an older child, but from the moment I could bat my eyes and look cute.  Family legend has it that as a toddler I would wander around restaurants taking french fries off the plates of other patrons, much to my parents’ horror.  When they tried to intervene and teach me some manners, the other patrons kept reinforcing my bad behavior by offering me more, because I was a cute kid.  You can imagine how easy it was to get me to eat my vegetables with so many more appealing options available to me!

Earlier I mentioned that in addition to a low sugar diet, I was also raised a vegetarian.  Now given my track record on sugar consumption, what do you think my level of compliance was for avoiding meat? Was I scoring cheese burgers on the side? Was I taking a bite out of grandpa’s steak or spending my lunch money on hot dogs?  Given the lengths to which I would go to obtain a food item I craved, would it surprise you to learn that my compliance on the meat issue was 100% and has been to this day?  This notwithstanding a huge amount of social pressure to eat meat, ample opportunity to do so behind my mother’s back and just as many willing accomplices eager to slip me a chicken wing as there were pushing candy my way.  I was having none of it.  No way, no how, not interested, not now, not ever, take your meat as far away from me as possible thank you very much!  I could detect meat at 100 paces and would go to any lengths to avoid it, with or without parental supervision.

The purpose of this post is not to argue the merits or demerits of a vegetarian diet, but this story from my upbringing is fascinating to me and makes me think “parental responsibility” isn’t a simple answer to the problem of childhood obesity.  Here we have the same parents, the same kid, and the same set of circumstances.  And yet on the meat issue their parental authority achieves 100% sovereignty and success, but on the sugar issue they score exactly 0%?  Of course we know that babies come out of the womb craving sweet stuff, so in an environment where sweet stuff is readily available, who seriously rates parents as having a decent chance of keeping their children’s intake at acceptable levels? People who have never tried, that’s who! Especially in a world where not everyone in the child’s social circle is on the same page about what kids should eat, and a massive food industry actively markets sugary food to kids at every turn!

You need to consider when people other than my parents gave me the bad stuff, my parents were in a position of not only having to discipline me, but they had to navigate their relationship with the other adult, and this adult was often a person they respected and wanted a good relationship with, and also needed me to respect because that person was also a carer who had charge over me for at least some of the time (grandparent, teacher, friend’s parent).  An unenviable situation, I am sure you can understand!

I know there are many parents out there who are doing an amazing job, and I look on in awe!  Neither do I presume to offer any parenting advice, as I am not qualified to do so.  All I am saying is that, after reflecting on my own upbringing, given their best possible efforts, there was nothing more that my parents could have done to prevent me from becoming a sugar addict.  And even if there are other parents who are having greater success, it is way harder for them than it should be.

While I am not denying that parents have a pivotal role to play, the food industry, government, schools and society should not get to get a free pass and simply cry “leave it to the parents!”  They should not call for parental responsibility and then use this as a license to be grossly irresponsible themselves! No responsible adult would get away with giving a toddler alcohol, and any reasonably sane person would grab bleach out of a kid’s hand before they could chug it.  But not everyone will respect the wishes of a parent not to have their child fed cookies and flavored milk!  And let’s not be naive, the food industry actively, deliberately and expertly strives to undermine parental responsibility at every turn.  So yes all you, “parental responsibility” advocates out there, if a parent is willingly buying their kid large quantities of junk food, clearly that is a problem.  But it is a massive error of logic to assume that if the parent is not doing so the child will eat their vegetables, stay off the junk and grow up healthy!  For that to happen we need a paradigm shift in society, reform in our schools, regulation of the food industry and appropriate government legislation.  Because as my former self, the sugar-loving 3 year old, with candy smeared all over her pretty little face,  can tell you:  “It ain’t going to happen any other way!”

I took my money – and I left!

Fresh, organic produce from the Blaauklippen and Route 44 Markets in Stellenbosch

You know how it goes when two kids play together.  It is all fun and laughter until one child accidentally (or intentionally) hurts the other child.  Then the injured child bursts into tears, grabs their toys and runs home. That is pretty much how I feel about my play-date with the food industry.  For decades I enjoyed my milkshake and french fries until I ended up as an obese type 2 diabetic.  There were definitely some tears and, instead of toys, I took my money . . . and I left!  Or, in the epic words of South Park’s Eric Cartman: “Screw you guys, ima going home!”

I left because I finally understood with shocking clarity that anyone who sells a substance meant to be ingested by humans, that alters mood and perception, affects behavior and creates dependence is a drug dealer.  Any time you consciously try to get people to eat, drink, inject or sniff more of whatever you are selling, that is exactly what you are doing. More and more we are beginning to understand and accept that segments of the food industry should be regulated like the alcohol and tobacco industry, precisely because we are finally recognizing that they deal in substances that are toxic at high doses, create addiction and are prone to abuse in a percentage of individuals. Of course not all drugs are, or should be, illegal, but we should at least be given all the information to recognize them for what they are and, if we decide to use them at all, do so appropriately and responsibly and at our own risk. Which means they cannot be marketed to children and should not even be sold to children.

Given this understanding, supermarkets are starting to annoy me more and more. Not just because of the constant price increases, crowded aisles and long queues.  They annoy me because they sell drugs mixed in with food items! This may sound melodramatic and over the top, but after reading books like Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss and The Compass of Pleasure by David Linden, and after personally experiencing the addictive power of refined and processed foods, there is no doubt in my mind that this is exactly what they are doing!  But the worst part is they are marketed in a context that makes them seem “safe,” “innocent,” and even “healthy”.  To score some heroin you would have to seek out a dealer, to buy alcohol you would have to produce ID, cigarettes carry prominent warnings and even when you go through a drive through you are well aware that the food you are buying is not particularly healthy for you.  But when you make your way through the cereal aisle in a supermarket, trying to discern the difference between a genuinely healthy whole grain cereal and a sugar bomb is not as straightforward as you might think.

The fault for all of this, we are told, lies with consumers, not the manufacturer or the merchant. We hear things like: “Learn to read food labels” – the implication being that if you don’t make good food choices you are either negligent or illiterate .  Except that I would cheerfully read the complete works of Shakespeare before breakfast before I will try to decipher some food labels!  The lists of ingredients are long, often unpronounceable and many of them I have never heard of, let alone have any idea what they are and how they affect my body.  “Make healthy choices”  we are advised.  Again, I made my best effort and the closest I could come was the fresh produce section.  But even there I don’t know where the food comes from, how it was grown, how far it travelled and how fresh it is. Furthermore, in my supermarket the fresh produce section is right next to the bakery, which, let’s face it, might as well be a crack house!

These days, trying to score a bit of food in a supermarket feels like picking up bread and milk at 11 at night in a bad neighborhood.  The best approach is “don’t make eye contact, walk swiftly and purposefully, get in and get out!”  Although I do still pick up the odd item at the supermarket, that is pretty much how I approach it.  When I go I know what I am there for, I get it quick, pay and leave.  No casual browsing in the biscuit section, no picking up boxes in the cereal aisle searching for the “healthy kind” and definitely no eye contact with the sweeties in the checkout line designed to solicit “impulse buys.”

For the rest I order food online from The Ethical Co-op, get a few items from health shops, or visit the farmers markets and artisanal food producers in my area.  I then prepare everything from scratch at home.  I make my own coconut milk instead of buying the canned variety.  I bake my own slow-rising whole grain bread and, more latterly, I have turned my kitchen into an ice cream factory.  Because let’s face it, you’ve got to have ice cream!

I am discovering the most amazing insights from the best thinkers we have today on this subject.  Yesterday I was spellbound by this panel discussion between Michael Pollan, Robert Lustig and Andrew Weil. Well done to whoever got those 3 on the same couch, you couldn’t ask for better!  It is interesting to me that the discussion took place in 2011 and I just watched it in 2013.  Does this mean that it took roughly this long for these issues to reach public consciousness?  If so that would still be fast, but thanks to the internet I think it is actually almost happening in real time.  The fact is I wasn’t interested in this topic in 2011 so I wouldn’t have watched it then.  Also, the presenter mentions that this forum had been taking place for 7 years and members of the public were present along with health care professionals.  I am really playing catch up here.  It seems that there has been a ground-swell of public awareness and dissatisfaction for some time with the current state of our food supply, both in the USA and the countries to which they have exported their diet – my country, South Africa, being one of them.

The ones who will most likely be the last to catch on will be the mainstream food industry.  They are famous for saying that they are “just giving the public what they want.”  Well, in response to that I would like to say that I am Average Jane Public.  I am as lazy, complacent and mainstream as they come when it has to do with issues of diet.  I would choose taste and convenience over health every time.  Until my health got so bad that this was no longer an option.  The food industry should be alarmed that in the last few months someone like me has not only rediscovered cooking, I am making everything from scratch using ingredients I only recently heard of and they don’t supply.  This is a dramatic revolution in the life of one person that is being replicated across the globe, as the diseases that result from our diet catch up with more and more people.  So now the supermarket, who used to just sell me what they convinced me I wanted, has a whole lot of stuff I don’t want, and very little that I do.  For example they don’t carry amaranth, chia seeds or coconut oil and I need all three just for my breakfast!

In the Q&A section of the panel discussion, someone from the audience made an interesting point about “a tipping point of consumer rejection.”  What exactly the tipping point is, seems to differ from product to product.  I wonder if we are approaching that tipping point for high sugar, refined carbohydrate products, because if so that is a lot of products!  I really hope, however, that we engage our brains and don’t just go “low carb,” thereby just creating the next marketing angle for Big Food.  Instead we need to go for whole food, as it grew out of the ground, because that will mean real change.

Michael Pollan said something beautiful right at the end that I would like to close this post with: “There are people like you and your neighbors who are building an alternative food system now.  And that’s politics too.  That’s voting with your fork.  Not giving your money to multi-national food companies but building an alternative economy.  People want an alternative even if they can’t even express exactly why” – Michael Pollan

That’s the alternative I am looking for, and it is right on my doorstep.  I’ll be playing there until further notice and will only consider visiting the food industry again when I am sure they are not going to hurt me anymore.  I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.

More about calories: They do count, but not the way I thought

When I started caring about calories, I was unprepared for how complex, and at times confusing, my exploration would become!  Yesterday I wrote about some myths (or at least gross oversimplifications) around calories and weight loss.

I was particularly hard on health professionals that perpetuate these myths.  In their defense, I know that the real experts do understand the complexity but are faced with the challenging task of trying to modify behavior in their clients, and therefore find oversimplifications like “calories in, calories out” a useful starting point. And this may work well for some people.  I just haven’t met them yet, and I am definitely not one of them!   Instead of starting me down the road to health and lean living, this dictum is apt to send me round and round in circles, chasing my tail until I inevitably end up collapsing in a heap under a great big pile of food!  My problem with “calories in, calories out” is that it sounds like a judgment-laden injunction to simply try to “exert a cognitive inhibition over a biochemical drive that goes on every minute of every day of every year. ” (Dr Robert Lustig)  I have finally had the sense to realize that, for me anyway, this is: Just. Not. Possible!

I am not looking for an easy way out of this, believe me.  In fact I would LOVE it if there was a simple formula for me to follow that would result in guaranteed, permanent and sustainable weight loss.  If anyone discovers one, I will be the first to sign up! But so far it has proved to be anything but simple.  Therefore, for my own benefit, I thought I would use this post to summarize my current understanding of calories and where they fit in to nutrition and weight loss.  Anyone reading this, please take note that this is a lay person’s understanding and subject to re-evaluation and further learning on my part.  Also, I think that everyone should study and understand this topic for themselves, examine how the issues around calorie intake play out in their own lives and reach their own conclusions.  I am open to correction and further guidance, but this is what I currently believe:

1. There is such a thing as an “energy balance” in which a healthy, lean individual takes in the right amount of food to support their energy requirements. In simple terms: they eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full.  However, calculating exactly what that energy balance is, is not achieved by a simple equation that a primary school child could understand (Calories in = Calories Out).  It is infinitely complex, highly individual and achieved most successfully by the workings of the body’s own hormones that regulate appetite and fat storage: leptin, ghrelin and insulin.  When these hormones are in balance and functioning correctly, and the brain is sensitive to them, then the individual knows intuitively how much they should eat.  When they are out of balance, or the brain is resistant to them, then the individual is incapable of an appropriate caloric intake regardless of how much theory they know and how much will power they attempt to exert.
2. From #1 it therefore follows that the first objective of anyone concerned with weight loss, be it: the overweight individual, doctor, dietician, personal trainer, therapist or researcher should NOT be trying to control behavior and somehow getting the starving fat person to “eat less.”  Instead, it should be figuring out how to bring those hormones back into balance and to restore sensitivity to them.  A great deal of research is going on in the area of leptin resistance in particular and I am following this with great interest.
3. The continual, ready availability of calories is possibly one of the greatest environmental challenges that modern humans have to navigate. We evolved and adapted to an environment of scarcity and now live in one of abundance and excess.  In other words, we are hard-wired to take in as many calories as possible during times of plenty and store excess for the coming famine.  The fact that the famine never comes is irrelevant.  To be human means that if you are hungry and food is available, then sooner or later you will eat.  If you did not have this drive then your ancestors would have died out long ago and you wouldn’t be here to have this conversation!  The disaster is that if you are always hungry and food is always available you will become obese and the very drive that would have ensured your survival in an environment of scarcity could be your undoing in an environment of abundance.
4. The source of the calories matters as much, or more, than the calories themselves.  In other words you can eat a 2000 calorie a day diet that will promote metabolic syndrome, addictive eating, excessive hunger and obesity, as well as making you disposed to eat more and more calories over time.  Or you can eat a 2000 calorie diet that promotes health, a lean body, balanced hormones, appropriate appetite and a consistent calorie intake over time.  Because a calorie is only a calorie when you are burning food in a bomb calorimeter.  As soon as you put it in your body, however, the source of the calories matters very much indeed! I would even go so far as to propose that the first goal of any weight loss program should not be calorie restriction but calorie replacement.  In other words if you simply try to get the fat person to eat less they will yo-yo diet for the rest of their lives (how much more proof do we need of this?) but if you get them to eat different (whole foods instead of processed junk food) it may be possible for them to gradually move back towards an energy balance, appropriate food intake and a leaner body mass.

Anyone still with me?  You’re a hero!  Given my current thinking on calories, I actually do keep a food journal and I do (sort of) count calories.  But not in an effort to force myself to stick to a daily calorie limit by pure discipline.  I do it to observe which eating behaviors result in the most consistent, economical overall intake that promotes gradual, healthy weight loss.  Not the way I intended to approach this when I started out at all!  I started out by trying to figure out the least number of calories I could eat to lose the greatest amount of weight in the shortest possible time. The outcome was:  I couldn’t keep it up long enough, I felt miserable and, worst of all, I stopped losing weight! I have now wrapped up that experiment and stored it away in a large box marked “FAIL”    I have started a new strategy, as outlined in my post A Bold Experiment.  So far so good, check back in a year or two for the thrilling conclusion 🙂

A Bold Experiment

If you have read through my ramblings on food, addiction and hunger thus far, you deserve a medal!  This post is going to be short and to the point and strive to answer the burning question:  “So where do I go from here?”

The picture is pretty bleak, truth be told.  At the ripe old age of 38 I am spectacularly disillusioned with my ability to lose weight by dieting, much less keep it off!  What’s more I now understand that there is a biological reason for this.  In the words of Dr Lustig: “No one can exert cognitive inhibition over a biochemical drive that goes on every minute of every day of every year. It is just not possible.”  So where does that leave me?  Am I destined to die young and die fat?  I really hope!  In an effort to avoid this fate, I am have devised a bold experiment that seeks to determine whether it is possible to eat a diet:

1. So delicious that I never crave junk food.
2. So satisfying that I never get hungry.
3. So rich in nutrition that my body gets everything it needs for health, energy and well-being.
4. Sufficiently low in calories that I am able to reach and maintain a healthy body weight.

I also want to achieve all of the above by:

1. Avoiding extremes.  No deprivation and no bingeing. The “weight loss” phase of the plan needs to be as similar as possible to the “maintenance” phase.
2. Not demonizing or deifying any of the macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat).
3. Not using any means to artificially suppress my appetite  (no pills or potions!)
4. The concept of a dieter’s “Cheat Day” must be rendered meaningless by every-day delicious and decadent eating!

As Dr Phil would say: “It’s a good deal if you can get it!” Of course I realize a deal this sweet will come at a cost.  In order to achieve the above, I will commit to:

1. Continually educate myself on the subjects of health and nutrition.
2. Learn to cook and prepare my own meals from scratch.
3. Do everything within my power to source the healthiest versions of all the foods I consume on a regular basis.
4. Engage in regular physical exercise and strive to lead a generally active life.

The experiment will be deemed a provisional success if and when I have achieved a healthy weight and maintained it for one year, on the understanding that I would then need to commit to the plan for the rest of my life.  This blog will chart my progress for the purpose of accountability and for my own interest and entertainment.

Anyone who chooses to follow my journey:  Welcome and thank you!  Feel free to comment, offer suggestions and encouragement and ask any questions you may have about what I am doing and why.  I will try to answer to the best of my ability.

Fat people are hungry – The Science!

When I wrote that fat people are hungry I had no idea that I was shortly to discover the science to back this up.  I had read bits and pieces and was already aware of the problem of leptin resistance, but last night I was aimlessly browsing around YouTube, looking for some random entertainment and I found a series called The Skinny on Obesity, thanks to YouTube’s ability to suggest content that you are interested in.

I was absolutely riveted and watched the whole series in one sitting.  Dr Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist, takes us through his research on sugar and it’s effect on the body.  The “Skinny on Obesity ” is a great introduction, and Dr Lustig’s full lecture “Sugar – the Bitter Truth,” will change the way you think about food, diet and exercise forever! Watch for yourself, but in summary he explains scientifically what I already know to be true experientially!

Here are some key quotes from the “Skinny on Obesity” series:

“No one can exert cognitive inhibition [will power] over a biochemical drive that goes on every minute of every day of every year. It is just not possible.”

“Everyone wants to tell people to eat less.  I wish I could tell people to eat less.  But they can’t.”

“Our drive overrides our volition.”

“Currently in the store 80% of the food has been laced with sugar. That limits consumer choice. If you have no choice, how can it be personal responsibility?”

The conclusion?

“Public health officials consider regulation when 4 criteria are met:
1) Unavoidablity
2) Toxicity
3) Abuse
4) Negative impact on society

All the criteria for societal intervention are met.”

Is soda a drug?  Should it be regulated?  Watch and judge for yourself.