"The Dirty Dozen" #7

6. White Sugar: by Jordan Rubin

Ill bet you that any food with enriched flour also contains sugar or one of its sweet relatives-high fructose corn syrup, fructose, and sucrose. Youll find these sugars among the first ingredients listed in candy bars, pastries, snack cakes, cookies, and ice cream. You will also find plenty of sugar in foods you might think are healthy, like "natural" breakfast cereals, energy bars, raisin bagels, certain whole wheat breads, hot dog buns, salad dressing, steak sauce, ketchup--the list is endless.

Sugar is so omnipresent that most people dont realize they eat sugar with every meal: their breakfast cereal is frosted with sugar; break tim is soda or coffee mixed with sugar and a Danish; lunch has its cookies and treats; and dinner could be sweet and sour ribs, sweet potatoes covered with marshmallows, a garden salad doused with artificially sweetned dressing, and a sugary parfait for dessert. Talk about adding a sweet exclamation point to the day! A US Department of Agriculture study reavealed that we eat an average of 31 teaspoons of sugar a day--- with 17 teaspoons coming from High Fructose Corn Syrup, and 14 tsp coming from cane or beet sugar(sucrose). This adds up to more than 500 calories daily!!!!

If youre looking for a guilty party to blame for the bellies hanging over beltlines, then look no further than King Sugar, which takes sugarcane or sugar beets from the fields and processes it 99.9% before its dumped into 5 lb bags of bleached white sugar. (Im sure research scientists are working over time to remove the last one-tenth of 1 % in sugarcane thats healthy.)

According to Ann Louise Gittleman, author of "How to Stay Young and Healthy in a Toxic World," "Sugar is not an innocent substance that gives us pleasure and causes no harm. Quite the contrary; there is perhaps othing else in the diet that promotes disease and aging more over the long term than excess sugar." She says that more than 60 ailments, ranging from allergies to yeast infections (candidas overgrowth, which feeds on simple carbs), have been associated with this dietary demon.

"Without a doubt the biggest change in our diets has been our sugar consumption...refined white sugar known as sucrose, brown sugar, corn sweetners, High Fructose Corn Syrup, dextrose, glucose, lactose, and maltose," said Gittleman. "Over the past 2 centuries, we have literally shocked our bodily systems with outrageous and ever growing amounts of nutrient robbing sugar. At the end of the 1700's, sugar consumption was less than 20lbs per person a year. By the end of the 1800's, sugar consumption had risen to 63lbs annually. Now, 100 years later, the average American eats over 170lbs of sugar each year."

ATTENTION: all that sugar makes for a pounding headache when you cut it out from your diet. When you change your diet and cut out drastic amount of sugar, you can expect to experience withdrawl-like symptoms like less energy, gyrating mood swings, and monster cravings. (Just an FYI)