sugar

  From our earliest days, we as a society have learned how to binge on certain foods.  As hunter-gatherers we had to be opportunistic for certain foods were only available for short periods of time.  Our heritage was to eat whatever was currently available, for it would often disappear shortly. Once there was a period of lack, if a windfall materialized our ancestors would gorge themselves on the windfall.  Although we are not advocating binges and our first priority is to eliminate them from our behavioral pattern if we suffer from them, because binges do seem a natural part of our heritage, perhaps the goal is to learn how to deal with them.

   Today food binges are typically triggered by stress in our lives and can be controlled by regaining control over our emotions and reactions to life events so calmness pervades.   However, this could require a long process of spiritual and personal growth.  Meanwhile, if you cannot seem to avoid weight-gaining food binges, I suggest that you try for yourself a binge with two limits:

1.   eliminating non-binge foods while in a binge (in other words, stop eating other things as well so you limit yourself on calorie intake),

2.   adding low-calorie "rabbit food" at or near the beginning of each binge session.  High fiber is the best choice in that it will help promote satiation so the binge will be significantly shortened.

Sugar is in quite a lot of foods these days that we buy which tend to processed foods mostly. The problem with sugar is it tends to act in your body as a storage mechanism, when your liver is full of something called glycogen the excess is stored as fat.

Think of sugar as a way of saying to your body “hey lets store that as fat we don’t need it now as your not exercising”.

This is why when you're trying to lose weight cutting down on sugar is one of the things that you need to do, as well as the amount of calories that you are eating.

Here are some techniques you can use to cut your blood sugar levels down;

1. At a University in Ohio in the United States , they did a study on various snack bars, to see what effect they would have on blood sugar each of the bars had three different levels of carbohydrates high, medium and low.

During the course of the experiment the participants blood sugar had their blood sugar measured, and compared to when they ate white bread, their blood sugar levels were 71 percent lower. The three snack bars used were, advantage bar, power bar and balance bar.

So if you want a more healthy breakfast avoid having one with high sugar content, the lower the refined carbohydrates the better. Opt for something that has more fibre content as well, fibre helps to slow down the absorption of glucose within the body. So avoid marmalade on white toasted bread for breakfast.

Sugar is a modern day 21st-century problem, we can't help ourselves when it comes to the sweet stuff, one of the particular problems with sugar is it can be addictive as some well-known drugs. Hence a lot of people struggle with kicking a sugar habit.

It’s getting so bad now that obesity levels are rocketing all over the world, because of the amount of sugar that we now consume in our foods which comes about by modern day food processing methods.

The overall problem with this is, carbohydrates get turned into refined carbohydrates hence sugar, the problem is that a lot of foods can taste quite bland without any additional flavouring, and sugar just happens to be one of those cheap ingredients that you can add to a particular product.

In order to make it more palatable to a lot of people they add sugar in order, to make the food taste better otherwise some food can taste quite bland, so people are far less likely to eat it.

It is very easy to become addicted to sweet foods it’s just the taste we just cannot help ourselves. But we very rarely think of the consequences that are involved by eating too much of these particular foods.So what is the overall attraction of sugar and why do we want to eat so much, perhaps many years ago when we had no food processing, and we were foraging for our food in a natural environment.

Try not to be alarmed by the title of this particular post. It isn't as bad as it seems. However, it does contain some relevant information about what drinking fizzy drinks can do to you.

According to some recent research, which was put together in a study If you drink more than two cans of fizzy drink, it may start to affect your liver. What many people may not know is that sugar can actually make your liver expand.

This is something that I read quite a long time ago now.  As regards what sugar can do to you long-term. We normally tend to associate liver damage, with drinking alcohol or if you eat too much fatty food this can cause a similar problem.

Some scientists in Israel found that people in their study that had consumed, a litre of fizzy drink were for more likely to contract. The start of liver disease, what they found from the research, is if you consume a few cans, a day of something like Coca-Cola, or any other soft drink that is high in sugar

Then you're far more likely to, contract diseases like diabetes, possible heart problems, and diseases of the liver. The study, was done in Israel , they had two groups of people. None of which had any traces of fatty liver disease.

When the results came back. Eighty percent of those that had been drinking high sugar concentration fizzy drinks were starting to show signs of slight liver damage.

When it comes to coffee, like many things, I'm definitely no expert but I'm very fussy.

It may not surprise my friends or regular readers of this blog but I don't have much patience for fancy-shmancy pseudo-coffee drinks.

You're likely to get a slightly odd look if you ask me for sugar in your coffee before tasting it - the same way I'll quietly glare at liberal use of salt and pepper before tasting my cooking.

I apologise to the girl behind me in the queue at Velvet the other day who ordered a large skinny decaf with two sugars - yes, I did laugh at you.

So now you see where I stand.  Firmly in the uninformed but self-righteous camp.

Which is why it eventually just wouldn't do to have an automatic coffee machine. While it produced coffee and it was free as it was my father's old machine, we tired of not-quite-good-enough coffee and regular servicing.

Isomac Tea

After a bit of consultation with the friendly people on the coffee snobs forum, a chat with the all-knowing king of self-righteousness himself, Matt from Abstract Gourmet (who will hopefully take that in the good humour with which it was intended) and a friendly tip from baristaapp on twitter, we decided on an Isomac Tea (pronounced Teh-ah).

Thank you everyone who ever cared to comment or rate or do both for part one!  Part one covered: #1. Aspartame (artificial sugar). #2. Flouride content in Water Supply. #3. Mandatory Vaccinations

In this part I will try to cover 3 more Health Myths (or foods)!

#1. Raisins are healthy.

HALF-TRUTH! Although it is true raisins contain a good amount of anti-oxidants, but nowadays it is high in fructose.  Fructose is part of a large-scale commercial sweetener added to processed foods and beverages.

Some Sugar Info You Don't Want to Miss

Fructose itself raises blood levels of cholesterol and fat (triglyceride). It's worse when you take meat because basically all cholesterol comes from meat that have hormones and no anti-oxidants in them.

Wikipedia.com says fructose has been manufactured/used as commercial sugar (nothing natural of it) since 1970s. 

The danger of fructose is also mentioned via Wikipedia,"Unlike glucose, fructose is almost entirely metabolized in the liver. "When fructose reaches the liver," says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose."