Most people love the taste of sweet.  Sweet tells us we are ok.  It is a reward for good behavior.  It is a best friend and consoles our sorrow.  It is a celebration for our mouth.  We like it.

In the world of hunter-gatherers slightly sweet almost always says that a food is safe to eat.  Very few sweet foods are poisonous.  Fresh meat has a slightly sweet taste.  Ripe fruits and many vegetables are also slightly sweet during most of the year. 

Once upon a time sweet triggered an automatic hunger response in us that told us to eat till we drop.  In fact it still does.  In a natural non-tropical climate strongly sweet taste only happens in the late summer and autumn as the tree fruits fully ripen.  They get their strong sweet taste from the increasing levels of fructose in them.  That sweetness tells us winter is coming and we better start putting on weight to carry us through the lean times ahead.  The highly sweet fructose causes us to go into a temporary metabolic syndrome to promote fat build-up.  Fat build up equals survival during winter.  We are programmed to not only love the sweet taste, but to over eat when we encounter that strong sweetness.

Interesting studies have shown that when you try to over feed people fats or proteins, they just won't do it.  They fill up and can not eat too much food.  But when you feed them carbohydrates that turn into sugar, they can consume 10,000 calories and still be hungry.  Sugar consumption makes you hungrier.  You are genetically programmed to gain weight when you eat sugar because your body thinks winter is coming and wants you to put on weight to survive.

The physiology behind this is simple.  Sugar triggers insulin secretion which in turn causes the sugar to go into fat cells and be stored as fat.  This takes the sugar out of your blood stream, which then leaves you with not enough blood sugar, causing the brain to tell you that you need to eat right away.  If you eat more sugar or carbs, the cycle starts all over again.

In a natural environment, the availability of sweet fruit is very limited.  It is only around for a couple of months...then winter arrives.  Fruits that are available in the spring and early summer are primarily berries that are low in sugar and low in fructose.  People will say "what about honey?"  Truth be told hunter-gatherers rarely ever found honey, and what they did find they used up immediately. 

So now you know the basic reason everyone is dying from obesity, heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes, and so on.  These diseases are caused by our over using sugar and simple carbs.  We are built to only have sugar a couple months out of the year and it is supposed to pack on the pounds when we do.  So no wonder we have problems when sugar is around all year long.  Our brains are hardwired to not only love sugar, but to get really hungry when we eat it.  We are at the (lack of) mercy of the food producers in this country who love the idea of us eating their products till we drop, because that means monstrous sales for them.  That may seem paranoid, but check this out.

Back on April 8th, 1999 the CEO's of the top food manufacturers in the United States attended a private meeting called by an executive, James Behnke, at Pillsbury Foods at their Minneapolis headquarters. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars.  Behnke was concerned about the growing problem of obesity in America and the mounting evidence that this epidemic was being caused precisely by the food that they were producing.  He was hoping they could all come together and agree to change their formulations to produce less fattening foods before the government stepped in and did something like it had done to the tobacco industry to curb smoking.  The magic combination of salt, sugar, and fat had produced snack foods so tempting that Americans were literally addicted to them.

Startling statistics and presentations showing how the addictive foods were not only triggering and epidemic of obesity, but along with it heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and a host of other obesity inflammation related diseases were presented by a VP at Kraft.  He was looking to become part of a solution.

But the CEO of General Mills, Stephen Sanger, stood up after this presentation and basically shut the conference down by responding from the stance of the consumer. "Don't talk to me about nutrition," he reportedly said, taking on the voice of the typical consumer. "Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don't run around trying to sell stuff that doesn't taste good."  People buy what they like and they like what tastes good. 

He refused to consider altering any formulas at all.  His response was "If we don't supply the consumer with what they want, someone else will."  That pretty much locked up the meeting and everyone left.  NY Times article

So yes, the big food companies know exactly what they are doing.  They know they are responsible for producing food that is killing everyone and they don't care.  At one point this awareness made me mad, but as I thought about it I came to realize that Sanger was right.  You can not stop people from killing themselves eating the wrong foods.  It is not like anyone really thinks sugar is good for them, but they eat it anyway.  Just like there is not a person in America today that doesn't know cigarettes will kill them, but they keep right on smoking anyway.  40 years of a "War on Drugs" has had absolutely zero impact on drug use.  Prohibition had no impact on alcohol use.  People do what they damn well please no matter what the consequences.  As soon as you take out one supplier, two more take their place.

But not everyone is willing to sacrifice his or her health for the sweet embrace of sugar.  Health is a personal choice.  But to be healthy is to say no to an awful lot of things.  Being healthy means you have to be willing to take responsibility for the outcomes in your life.  It also means being willing to feel those consequences moment to moment so that you can learn from them and make better choices.  No one wants to feel the pain of his or her bad choices in life.  That is why we love our "drugs" that block feelings - and sugar is a mighty powerful one of those drugs.  But blocking feelings has its own set of consequences, and the loss of our health is one of them.

So to those of you that want to be healthier, stop eating sugar in any form.  That means no "healthy sugars" either, because there is no such thing.  Honey, raw sugar, maple syrup, agave syrup, fruit sugar, and so on are all poisons.  Just because they may have a few other nutrients mixed in with the poison, does not diminish the poison impact.  The only exception might be eating a lot of fruit just before you plan on taking a long camping trip into the Yukon where you are planning to forage and live off the land.  In that case packing on an extra 10 to 20 pounds might be a good thing.

What about artificial sugar replacements like Splenda, Equal, AceK, and Saccharine?  Interestingly research finds that our bodies react to artificial sweeteners with insulin swings just like it does to real sugar.  So none of the artificial sweeteners are safe to eat. 

Sugar alcohols like xylitol, maltitol, mannitol, do not create an insulin swing, but they tend to produce a lot of gas and diarrhea.  The only exception is erythritol, which does not stay in the gut causing problems, but is passed out through the kidneys without interacting with the body.  That is why I use erythritol in my Double Sugar substitute.

Natural sugar replacements - stevia, lo han, glycerin, and inulin are actually healthy and can help with blood sugar control.  But there is one problem, which I am just recently coming to appreciate.  The taste of sweet, all by itself without any blood sugar impact or insulin change, can and does stimulate hunger.  I don't know if it is just a psychological habit learned by years of association with the sweet taste and the blood sugar effect real sugar has, or if there is some neurochemical trigger, but the impact is real.  When I allow myself to drink stevia sweetened beverages I eat more.  I find myself wanting something to eat even when my stomach is full.  It is as though my primal brain is saying "if you are tasting sweet, then winter must be coming, so eat up and put on those survival pounds while you can."

So if you have extra pounds you want to shed, anything sweet will undermine your attempts to let go of those pounds.  (I believe salt will also do this.)  So for weight loss we want to focus on spicy, savory, sour, and perhaps bitter.  I say perhaps bitter, because bitters are traditionally used before a meal to stimulate digestion.  Better digestion generally means more eating. 

Test this for yourself.  Go a week without eating anything at all that is sweet or salty and see if it affects your hunger.  This experiment will also give you a great chance to see just how addicted you are to sweet and salty.  Some folks will have serious cravings and others won't miss it at all.  I would be willing to bet that the folks that don't miss the sweet or salty probably don't have much of a problem with excess weight.  Remember that any starch at all is considered a sweet, so pasta is a sweet and bread is a sweet and potatoes are a sweet.  They are all straight sugar to your blood stream within about 10 minutes even if they do not taste sweet to your tongue.

Until next time,

How to find us -

Take care,

David            

The forgotten vitamin: K2

Do you get enough vitamin K?  Probably not.  But without vitamin K, all that calcium and vitamin D you are taking to strengthen your bones does no good.  Taking calcium gets it into your gut and vitamin D gets that calcium into your blood stream.  But it is the vitamin K that tells the worker bone building cells to turn that calcium in the blood into good quality bone.  In fact if you are deficient in vitamin k, that calcium might just end up sticking to the walls of your arteries and produce hardening of the arteries.  One reason vitamin K is so quiet is because it is a very slow acting vitamin, so short term studies show no results.  But a recent 3 year study of post menopausal women showed very significant benefits in bone strength and resistance to breakage.  The most useful form of vitamin K is the K2 form which is found in fermented foods like natto.  Some is even formed by the bacteria in our gut - about 10% of what we need.  Yet only 2% of multivitamin supplements have K2 in them.

 

 

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Xanax, Valium cause Dementia
 

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River of light

 "One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is the assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind. "

~ Jean Kerr

About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Dr David DeLapp DC
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Ellen Flowers FGM
Spiritual Life Coach

Sherry Herrera

 

Catherine Cummings

 

 

Jin Shin Jitsu

 

 

Lorena Morales

 

 

Massage Practitioner

 

 

 

 

 Is there a sweet that is not poisonous?  Yes!


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