CHAPTER 8:
SUGAR, SWEETENERS, AND ALCOHOL
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“I was diagnosed with Lyme disease in October of 2009. My symptoms were stiff neck, headache … I hurt everywhere, I was tired all the time, I could not sleep through the night because I was in so much pain! My doctor told me it could take six months of antibiotics or more to start feeling better. I thought to myself, ‘I do not have six months to wait!’ I found the Whole30 and thought, ‘Let me try it—what do I have to lose?’ Well, I had a lot to lose—like every one of my Lyme disease symptoms, and a few pounds as well! I started feeling better after day three, and I just kept feeling better—to the point at which I feel healthier now than I did before I had Lyme, as long as I stay on my dietary course!”
—Anita H., Albany, New York
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Here comes the part you’ve all been waiting for (or dreading?). This is where we talk about all of the food groups that don’t pass our four Good Food standards. We’re going to use a legend to help explain why.
These foods fail our first Good Food standard: a healthy psychological response. These foods light up pleasure, reward, and emotional pathways in the brain, offering supernormally stimulating flavors without providing the nutrition that nature intended. These are foods-with-no-brakes, promoting overconsumption and the inability to control your cravings, habits, and behaviors.
These foods fail our second Good Food standard: a healthy hormonal response. These foods disrupt your normal hormonal balance, promoting leptin resistance, insulin resistance (and all of the negative downstream effects that follow), disrupting glucagon’s energy-access function, and elevating cortisol levels.
These foods fail our third Good Food standard: support a healthy gut. These foods directly promote intestinal permeability, leading to a less-than-intact barrier that lets foreign substances get inside the body (where they do not belong). Foods that fail our third Good Food standard by default also fail the fourth.
These foods fail our fourth Good Food standard: support immune function and minimize inflammation. By creating intestinal permeability (or directly promoting chronic systemic inflammation), these foods force your immune system out of a healthy balance. This can lead to the development of systemic inflammatory symptoms or autoimmune diseases and is a central risk factor for many lifestyle-related diseases and conditions.
Before we get started, we know that there are some very fun foods in this group; foods that may form the vast majority of your daily diet; foods that may make you close this book, look up at the sky and say, “These people are bananas.”
Before we tell you what they are, we just want to ask you a few simple questions.
Is it just fine that some of the foods you eat are controlling your behaviors, making you crave things you don’t really want to eat, and proving impossible to resist even when you really, truly try?
Do you like energy slumps, brain fogs, insidious weight gain, frequent hunger pangs, the inability to burn fat, and a metabolism that moves slower than molasses?
Can you live with gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal discomfort, fatigue, malnutrition, and food allergies?
Do you welcome an increase in illness, infection, aches, pains, and the signs and symptoms of innumerable diseases and conditions, some of which are irreversible?
We bet you answered every one of these questions with a resounding, “Of course not!”
So do us a favor, please?
Remember your answer to these questions as we move through this section.
At some point, you will have to weigh the fleeting pleasure of a slice of pizza, pint of beer, or frozen yogurt against one or more of these scenarios.
Let’s start with some of the easy ones, just to get the ball rolling.
SUGAR AND SWEETENERS
We’re going to start with at least one thing we should all agree on: Sugar does not make you healthier.
Do you want to argue with that? Can anyone make a case that added sugar contributes positively to our health? *
What may surprise you is that both sugar and artificial sweeteners fail all four of our Good Food standards.
We think of the sweet stuff first when describing foods that provoke an unhealthy psychological response. Because the sweetness of sugar is addictive, eating an excess amount is easy. The more sugar we eat, the more we get acclimated to high levels, and the more we want.
Artificial sweeteners may be even more problematic because they are designed to deliver a sweetness hit that is far beyond what you could ever find in nature.
Aspartame (Equal) and stevia are 200 to 300 times sweeter than table sugar.
Sucralose (Splenda) is 600 times sweeter than table sugar.
Saccharin (Sweet’N Low) is up to 700 times sweeter than table sugar.
Remember the Vegas Strip analogy? Artificial sweeteners are the very definition of “supernormally stimulating.”
Is it any wonder we are slaves to the sweet stuff?
These artificial sweeteners provide taste and reward sensations the likes of which we (biologically) have never before experienced, burning our taste buds (and pleasure centers) out on stimuli that are simply otherworldly. It thus becomes harder and harder for us to experience the same level of pleasure and reward that we did the last time we ate them—and makes it darn near impossible to appreciate the natural flavors found in fresh foods.
Wait—we’ll tell you a story.
At one of our nutrition workshops, after the section on artificial sweeteners, a lovely woman shyly raised her hand and asked, “But if I can’t sweeten my strawberries with Splenda, how do I make them taste sweet?”
Bless her heart.
This phenomenon is all too common in artificial sweetener users.
REMEMBER LEPTIN?
Your hormones may also have a role in this phenomenon. Research suggests that the taste organ (your tongue and taste buds) is a peripheral target for leptin. Leptin resistance (when your brain can no longer effectively sense leptin’s message) may lead to an “enhanced behavioral preference for sweet substances.” When you’re leptin resistant, the taste of sweetness is dulled, which makes you eat more to satisfy your craving. See how that plays right into the supernormally stimulating artificial sweeteners?
Added sugar is one of the quickest and easiest foods to provoke an unhealthy hormonal response. Overconsumption of sugar-sweetened, nutrient-poor processed foods means blood sugar levels rise too high, too often, which promotes a reliance on carbohydrate for fuel. Excess carbohydrate is turned into triglycerides, which, along with chronically elevated blood sugar, contributes to leptin resistance. It also means fat isn’t burned for fuel, which may lead to an accumulation of body fat. Leptin resistance promotes further overconsumption, which means fat accumulates inside cells, leading to insulin resistance, hyperglycemia, and chronically elevated insulin levels. Elevated cortisol levels promote stress-related cravings, which generally means you reach for more sweet foods with lots of added sugar.
It’s a vicious cycle.
EMPTY CALORIES
We’ll hammer yet another nail into sugar’s coffin here. From a micronutrient perspective, sugar provides virtually nothing in terms of vitamins, minerals, or phytonutrients. (No, blackstrap molasses is not a healthy source of iron. Since when we do look to sugar for iron, anyway?) All sugar provides is calories—four per gram. It’s the very definition of “empty calories”—all of the energy with none of the nutrition. And that doesn’t sound very sweet to us.
Sugar also messes with the healthy environment of our guts, specifically altering the delicate balance of “good” and “bad” bacteria. Unfriendly gut bacteria love refined sugars, which means your added sugar intake serves only to promote the existence of the bad guys—and can reduce the population of good guys. This condition (called dysbiosis) can lead to gas, bloating, cramps, diarrhea, constipation, and inflammatory symptoms like fatigue, body aches, headaches, and joint problems. Artificial sweeteners like Splenda may also kill off your beneficial flora, even when consumed in “normal” amounts.
Finally, sugar promotes inflammation in the body two different ways. First, concentrated sugars added to processed foods promote overconsumption, which in turn promotes inflammation via leptin and insulin resistance. In addition, sugar’s effect on gut bacteria and promotion of gut dysbiosis (like when “bad” bacteria are wreaking havoc) is by definition an inflammatory condition in the gut.
NOT SO SWEET?
Numerous reports have associated the use of various artificial sweeteners with various conditions, like cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, migraines, kidney disorders, autoimmune conditions, carpal tunnel syndrome, and neurotoxicity. There have not been enough long-term studies on humans to definitively confirm or deny these associations, but for us, the potential risks represent additional downsides in an already very long list—more than enough justification to avoid artificial sweeteners altogether.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about what we mean by “added” sugars.
First, we’re not talking about the natural sugars found in whole foods, like fruit. Remember, we don’t practice food reductionism—fruit is not sugar, fruit is food! There is sugar in fruit, but as we’ll soon discuss, that sugar comes in a micronutrient-dense package of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, fiber, and water. That kind of sugar is not the stuff we’re cautioning you against.
Added sugar is any form of sugar or sugar alternative added to foods or beverages when they are processed or prepared. It’s the raw sugar you put in your coffee, the honey you add to your tea or the agave syrup that sweetens your ice cream. We don’t discriminate between the source or the form, and we don’t care whether it’s “all natural” or “unrefined.” As you’ll learn in this chapter:
Sugar = Sugar = Sugar.
There are some metabolic differences between specific forms of sugar (glucose, fructose, lactose, etc.), but they all have one thing in common: a sweet taste that promotes overconsumption, and no significant nutritive value. Empty calories. Which means there is nothing special or “better” about honey, or maple syrup, or agave, or blackstrap molasses.
NOT NATURAL
The same goes for artificial sweeteners. Nutra-Sweet, Equal, Splenda, stevia—none is any more “natural” than the shoes you are wearing on your feet right now. Some are derived from nature, but after chemical processing, Splenda has more in common with pesticides than table sugar. (And stevia isn’t any better. We dare you to find a stevia leaf and chew on it for a while. It ain’t that sweet. At least, not until it’s refined into white crystals in a laboratory somewhere.)
So in summary, sugar and artificial sweeteners fail all four of our Good Food standards and do not make you healthier. And yes, we know you’re dying to ask a question right now. “But if I am going to eat sugar, what form of sugar is the least bad?”
Let’s save the answer for after the next section.
ALCOHOL
This section is going to be short, because alcohol has no redeeming health qualities. We don’t care what you’ve heard about red wine or agave tequila or gluten-free beer—the common denominator of all these beverages is the alcohol, and the alcohol is the primary problem. (We’ll address some of the marketing claims to make booze appear to be a less-guilty pleasure later.)
Alcohol fails all four of our Good Food standards. First, in terms of a healthy psychological response, alcohol is addictive. Not just the colloquial definition of “addiction”—it’s actually addictive in the clinical definition: promoting desire even in the face of negative consequences, tolerance to the effect of the substance, and withdrawal symptoms when use is reduced or stopped.
Regularly consuming things that are known to be clinically addictive doesn’t sound super healthy to us.
But for those of us who are merely social drinkers (and not worried about addiction), alcohol still promotes an unhealthy psychological effect.
Alcohol inhibits our inhibitory mechanisms. Which means that when you are under the influence, you are more likely to make bad decisions.*
Consuming something that is going to blunt your judgment—leading to late-night splurges on pizza, ice cream, or an entire tube of cookie dough—does not facilitate your success in making good food choices. Furthermore, it takes only a small amount of alcohol to impair inhibitions and decision making—and the effects on the brain carry over until the next day. Which means that a drink or three on a Friday night may lead to a weekend’s worth of poor food choices.
You may know what we’re talking about.
From a hormonal perspective, alcohol consumption interferes with glucose function in the body and with the actions of regulatory hormones like insulin and glucagon. Even in well-nourished people, alcohol can disturb blood sugar levels. Especially when combined with sugar (Jack and Coke, anyone?), alcohol increases insulin secretion, which pulls too much blood sugar out of the bloodstream, causing temporary hypoglycemia. Furthermore, alcohol can impair glucagon’s normal function, leaving your blood sugar levels too low for too long—a very stressful situation for the body.
EMPTY CALORIES TIMES TWO
Ready for some math? If sugar is “empty calories,” and alcohol has almost twice as many calories per gram as sugar, then isn’t alcohol the mother of all empty calories? It’s got more than enough energy to mess up your hormones, but doesn’t provide a lick of valuable nutrition. Lose-lose.
Finally, as a special bonus hormonal effect, acute and chronic alcohol consumption have been known to inhibit testosterone production.
Ouch.
Numerous studies also show—rather conclusively, in fact—that alcohol directly promotes intestinal permeability and overgrowth of gut bacteria, contributing to a leaky gut and all of the downstream inflammatory effects. But that’s not the only way alcohol affects your immune system: both acute and chronic alcohol use impair cellular immunity, leaving your immune system even less prepared to deal with inflammatory consequences. Alcohol is also pro-oxidative, meaning that it contributes to oxidation in the body: it reduces antioxidant levels by increasing free radicals, which (as we’ll detail soon enough) contributes to chronic systemic inflammation.
DANCE WITH ME
Even in moderate amounts, alcohol is acutely neurotoxic. It alters the normal activity of your nervous system, may cause damage to nervous tissue, and can disrupt or even kill neurons, the cells that transmit and process signals in the brain and other parts of the nervous system. In layman’s terms, it’s why a few drinks makes you stumble, slur your words, and think you’re a really good dancer. Other neurotoxins include mercury, lead, insecticides, formaldehyde, and biotoxins like botulism. But no one ever asks for a mercury daiquiri, now, do they? We don’t think things with neurotoxic potential are a healthy choice.
Let’s discuss the arguments in favor of certain types of alcohol—like “heart healthy” red wine. First caveat:
These claims come from the people who manufacture and market alcohol.
If you sold a product that was generally deemed unhealthy in the scientific literature, wouldn’t you want to find one thing about your product that might make it sound less bad? Of course you would! So if you were Mr. Red Wine Producer, you might read (or fund) some studies on the heart-healthy effects of certain antioxidants, like resveratrol,* realize your wine contains tiny amounts of this healthy compound, and start marketing your wine as “heart healthy.”
We can hardly blame him. After all, Mr. Red Wine Producer isn’t looking out for your health—he’s looking out for his profits (nothing wrong with that; he’s running a business, after all). Finding something healthy about his product is very, very good for business.
The problem is, it’s a technicality. A fluid ounce of red wine averages 160 micrograms of resveratrol (with a wide range of variability between bottles and sources). Most research on resveratrol has been done on animals, not people—and to get the same dose of resveratrol used in the mice studies, a person would have to drink more than 60 liters (that’s 80 bottles) of red wine every day.
Seriously?
The other thing that Mr. Red Wine Producer doesn’t mention is that the resveratrol in red wine actually comes from the skin of red grapes.
So ... just eat the darn grapes.
You’ll get all of the potential (reported) benefits of resveratrol and none of the downsides of the alcohol. Win-win, except if you’re Mr. Red Wine Producer.
The argument is the same for 100 percent agave tequila or gluten-free beer. Just because manufacturers have found a way to make their products “less bad” doesn’t mean they’re good for you.
We are not interested in “less bad.”
Our mission is to present you with optimal.
THE GOOD NEWS
Hear us out, now. We are not saying you can never eat any sugar or drink any alcohol ever again. We simply want you to make educated decisions about foods. We don’t want you justifying your choices with marketing pitches or telling yourself that because it’s gluten-free, low-carb, or heart-healthy, it’s a perfectly fine choice.
Why go through all that self-deception, when the fact that [fill in the blank] is just plain delicious is a good enough reason all by itself to indulge?
We’re not food robots. We like to indulge from time to time, just like the rest of you. But we’re honest about our reasons, and we want you to be honest too: “This food/drink is not making me healthier, but that’s OK, because it’s delicious/special/culturally-relevant/emotionally-significant.”
We fully support those reasons.
When it comes to less-healthy foods, understand that the less (and less often) you indulge in them, the healthier you’ll be. Where you draw that line is totally up to you.
We’ll talk a lot more about this later. We just wanted to mention it now, so you could stop wondering if we are trying to ruin your life.