ONE LUMP OR TWO?
By Valerie Lunden, MA.

Ever considered going on a diet? Any of these sound familiar?

Nutrisystem
Weight Watchers
Jenny Craig
Lindora
Fit for Life
Sommersize
The Zone
The South Beach Diet
Atkins

Indeed, during the last 10 years these and countless other diets have maintained staying power, offering positive results and providing a sense of hope to countless individuals.

Diets have become very popular; why? The answer may be because there are so many people who are desperate to find a solution to chronic ill health, obesity and weight control, and according to dieter testimonials, most of these diets do work.

Unfortunately years later, after dieting and watching the weight come and go (and come back again), the United States is still a very large and heavy population. Even more daunting, our global society also appears to be getting larger and heavier along with us.

Something to consider here is the need for increased food production, which occurred as a result of the Baby Boom era. With more food being needed to sustain a growing population, the variety of foods we now eat has become more creative and nutritionally unsound. A contributor to this may be the role of sugar, which appears on many manufactured food labels in one form or another.

According to the FDA article entitled "Sweetness and Lite," Americans ingest approximately 20 teaspoons of sugar a day, which could be one of the factors leading to increased calorie consumption and subsequent weight gain.
Either real or synthetic (Nutrisweet, Sweet’N Low, etc), sugar is one of the few ingredients that has crossed food boundaries and is now consumed in both savory and sweet foods. This increase in consumption has occurred not only because sugar tastes, well, like sugar, but because sugar is still one of the best food preservatives ever discovered. Where salt has traditionally been used to cure meat, sugar can be used to preserve anything from sausages to hard candy.

Historically, scientists have categorized foods as fats, carbohydrates and proteins. Sometime after World War I, nutritional experts labeled sugar a carbohydrate, making it readily accepted in our diets. As it pertains to sugar cane this might be an accurate classification, but when converted to table sugar or a highly refined preservative (fructose, sucrose, dextrose, etc.), this might be too vague. The question now becomes, in these highly concentrated forms, is sugar still sugar? Also, why on earth would people consume something that has no nutritional value, creates documented weight gain and could be one of the principle causes of obesity and illness?

Without a doubt, most of this sugar consumption is unconscious and all of it is approved by the federal government, which seems doubly disturbing. The following 2 links have been included to offer a broader, more expert perspective.

In closing, perhaps the old mantra “no sweets before dinner’ could be revised to no sweets - just no sweets. Really as a race of people, according to our own blood sugar requirements, we appear to be sweet enough.