By Dr. Greg Feinsinger
Guest Column
Big Food cares about their bottom line, not your health. Like the tobacco companies before them, they hire scientists to figure out how to make their products more addictive. The scientists found that people get hooked on sugar, salt and fat.
Respected nutrition expert Dr. Michael Greger notes that “the food industries bank their billions by manipulating the pleasure centers within your brain, the so-called dopamine reward system — the same reward system that keeps people smoking cigarettes and snorting cocaine.” As with addictive drugs, tolerance to sugar, fat and salt develops and bigger doses are required to obtain the same pleasure. Big Food spends billions marketing harmful products to kids and adults. They especially target minority and financially-disadvantaged neighborhoods, as described in Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s book “Fast Food Genocide.” As the U.S. market for junk food declines somewhat, Big Food now targets low- and middle-income people in developing countries.
Natural sugar in whole fruit is not a problem. Due to fiber and other nutrients, it is absorbed slowly without causing a significant rise in blood sugar, and with the help of insulin it enters cells to use as energy. Added sugar, on the other hand, contributes to the following health problems: childhood and adult obesity, cardiovascular disease such as heart attacks and strokes, prediabetes and Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, tooth decay, inflammation and gout. It also causes toxic hunger — when you consume sugar, your blood sugar rises for an hour. To counteract that your pancreas secretes insulin, and during the second hour blood sugar levels often drop below normal. This hypoglycemia leads to overwhelming toxic cravings, different than natural hunger caused by need for calories.
When you read food labels while grocery shopping, keep in mind that 4 grams of sugar is a teaspoon. Food companies try to deceive consumers by using different names for added sugar, such as natural organic cane sugar, beet sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, fruit nectar, agave, glucose, high fructose corn syrup, honey, malt syrup, maple syrup, molasses, raw sugar and sucrose.
Sugar Sweetened Beverages (SSBs): These are the number one source of added sugar in the American diet. One of the reasons they are so harmful is this: After eating solid food containing added sugar, you have some sense of fullness, and are less apt to eat additional calories. However, SSBs don’t cause fullness, making intake of additional calories more likely, resulting in obesity. Following is a list of several SSBs with number of teaspoons of sugar and total calories for each: lemonade, 3 teaspoons of sugar/55 calories; sports drink, 5/97; sweetened tea, 7/115; energy drink, 9/162; regular soda, 10/155; fruit juice, 10/186; orange soda, 13/195.
Garfield County Public Health and SSBs: In general, the U.S. has a disease management system rather than a healthcare system: we wait until diseases occur and then spend trillions trying to manage them. Local public health systems are an exception — they do what they can to prevent disease through immunizations and other measures.
The Garfield County Public Health Department has partnered with seven other public health agencies in Colorado to reduce consumption of sugary beverages. Their effort is funded through grants using tobacco tax dollars. Since tobacco taxes successfully decreased use of that harmful product, some cities in the U.S. have adopted sugar taxes, with successful drops in consumption of SSBs and the diseases they cause. For more information on local efforts to reduce consumption of SSB’s check out garfieldcountyco.gov/public-health/healthy beverages
SSBs in schools and hospitals: While sugary beverages in schools are now limited by federal guidelines, SSBs continue to be available in most hospitals, including local ones. For example, Valley View Hospital offers SSBs in vending machines, in their cafeteria and at Starbucks. Grand River and Aspen Valley hospitals are no better.