Category Archives: fat

In other words, sugar makes you want to eat more food. (Why you don’t feel full.)

food ratsSo the food industry only provides what people want. Right? And people want, time after time, what they crave. So sugar is sinking America’s health.

To be sure, there are many culprits — more sedentary lifestyles (read: gaming), for example. Also of surety, sugar is a huge villain.

That two of three adults are chubby? Um, yes.

Are we surprised that 30% of boys and girls under 20 are overweight in 2019 — up from 19% in 1980?

Is it any wonder that 160 million Americans are obese?

Sugary foods represent a double whammy for health. First the calories add on the fat. Then the overeating, induced by sugar, brings on the fat.

Consider a college grad student named Anthony Sclafani who was only being nice to lab rats under his care: As a treat, he’d give them Fruit Loops.

But then Sclanfani noticed they really loved the sugary cereals. So he started conducting experiments in the 1960s: Would rats abandon their wall-hugging rambles to venture into the dangerous center of the room for Fruit Loops? They did.

(And so do our teenagers.)

When he needed to fatten up mice for another experiment, he found the critters stayed slender no matter how much chow he gave them. They ate to satiety — feeling full — and no more. He remembered the Fruit Loops and quickly got fat rats.

Still more experiments. They loved sugar — even when they couldn’t taste it — and never stopped scarfing it. Sclafani has made a lifetime of studying sugar-indulging  rodents and his findings are frightening: sugar suppresses satiety.

The implications? The food industry has made lab rats out of us all.

What now?

Excess body fat leads hypertension, high LDL cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, cancer, mental illness and depression, and body pain.

It’s easy to slam the food producers. They fill up the supermarket with sugary items — up to 73% of grocery store items contain added sugar. Because we reward them for it.

So what is to be done? Read the rest on Medium:  how the food industry made rats of us with sugar.

Escape death at the supermarket

instant food blood streamTo those readers who ever eat food, a simple formula: Instant= very bad. Usually.

Once upon a time, some chemist guy named Al Clausi traded time for good health and dropped some pyrophosphate and orthophosphate molecules into some organic food matter and out came instant pudding. General Foods noticed, then brought Jell-O brand instant pudding to market and scorched any and all dessert food competitors. Clausi became a mad scientist legend.

But a Pandora’s Box was opened.

70 years on from Clausi’s chimera, the American public remains hooked on convenience which is corresponding to skyrocketing rates of cancer, Diabetes and heart disease.

So supermarkets are now chemistry storehouses. We can’t turn back history. Living on an organic farm is not really viable. So we are limited to damage control. Since chemical “processing” is the great evil of nutrition, the lesser processed food we buy, the better.

Here are the rules of thumb to buy healthier for those of us who don’t possess a PhD in nutrition science. Biology, not chemistry:

> Easier/Quicker — Convenience kills. Inorganic compounds kill. Eat instant foods and snacks and you’re letting stray chemicals stay rent-free in your blood stream. Hard to evict them and healthy nutrients get pushed aside by processed molecule squatters.

Solution: Try buying food that takes a little longer to prepare. Make large quantities and divvy it up into plastic containers for the next days.

> Tastier — To entice repeat buying, processed food manufacturers load in sugar, salt and fat, all of which are killers. Be suspicious of foods that tantalize the taste buds like coke and sugary cereals. Read the rest of Practical Cancer Control Diet.