Sugar. It is the subject of extreme controversy, and everyone has a different opinion: “Who cares about sugar? Fat is the problem.” “Sugar is fine in moderation.” “Sugar is the greatest evil.” One thing is true. Kids desire sugar like nothing else. While I do encounter an occasional kid who doesn’t care for dessert, most children can be convinced to do anything for a sweet treat. Sugar has become ubiquitous in food, and it is marketed like mad to children by the food industry.
It’s time to tell the truth about sugar. Let’s start with some facts: Our intake of sugar and other sweeteners has exploded during the past decade. In that time, more than half of American adults became overweight, a quarter of them obese.1 And children, especially teens, are consuming the lion’s share, with some adolescents consuming more than 40 percent of their daily calories as sugar. As a result, kids today now suffer from conditions that used to afflict only adults. Triglycerides, a compound in the blood partly related to sugar and carbohydrate intake, have skyrocketed in children.2 Type 2 diabetes in children, unheard of until a little more than a decade ago, rose 30 percent between 2001 and 2009 alone.3 And the vast amounts of sugar and processed carbohydrates being consumed have led to an epidemic of fatty liver—think foie gras in children instead of geese—in 10 percent of all adolescents.4 Once rare, it is now the most common reason for liver transplants.5,6
How did we get here? A hundred years ago, it took people five days to consume the amount of sugar that is found in a single can of soda today. And many people are now consuming that same amount every seven hours. That adds up to the equivalent of 22 teaspoons of sugar per person, per day. Our intake of drinks in particular—teas, sodas, sport “ades,” vitamin waters, and energy drinks—has increased by more than 30 percent during the last three decades7and doubled during the past decade to 14 gallons per person per year.
Besides contributing to fatty liver and type 2 diabetes, diets high in sugary snacks and fast food can increase the risk of ADHD, behavioral issues, anxiety, and sleep problems.8
Take Gareth, a six-year-old boy who came in with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder/ADHD. Nicknamed the “Tasmanian Devil,” he was in turmoil. In my office, he threw things randomly and also at me, ran his arm along my assistant’s desk to push everything to the floor, screamed uncontrollably, and pinched his mother. He was completely out of control. Yet during the course of several visits, I observed that he’d enter my office in a calm state, then the minute he ate a snack—whether something sugary or some cut fruit—these behaviors began. He spent most appointments detained in a therapeutic hug by his mother. But after he stopped eating sugar—even fruit, for a period of time—Gareth became a regular, reasonable kid. I waited for an outburst for an entire appointment, but he simply colored, read a story, and cut out paper hearts for his mother and me. Having apparently identified one part of the issue, we went on to address his gut health and support his body’s natural blood sugar regulation—ultimately, we wanted him to be able to eat fruit and the occasional sweet in moderation.
Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets. If you’ve considered kicking sugar from your own diet at any point, you’ve probably recognized this. Beginning with that first sip of breast milk, which is high in the milk sugar lactose, our bodies learn to crave sweet tastes. It’s more than the sweet flavor; the body releases endorphins that induce euphoria and reduce our perception of pain. It’s called comfort food for a reason!
SUGAR ADDICTION: COCAINE, HEROIN, AND . . . SUGAR?
Study after study on sugar shows its highly addictive nature—more highly addictive than cocaine. An astonishing 94 percent of rats that were allowed to choose between sugar water and cocaine-infused water chose sugar.9 Even rats already addicted to cocaine quickly switched their preference to sugar given the choice. The rats were also more willing to work for sugar than for cocaine. The researchers speculated that the body’s receptors for “sweet”—which evolved in ancestral times when the diet was very low in sugar—have not adapted yet to our modern ways of high-sugar consumption. Excessive stimulation of these receptors by our sugar-rich diets generates extreme reward signals in the brain, which can override normal self-control mechanisms and lead to addiction. This research found cross-tolerance and cross-dependence between sugars and addictive drugs. For example, animals with a long history of sugar consumption became tolerant (desensitized) to the pain-relieving effects of morphine.
Here is more research illustrating sugar’s addictive qualities:10,11
• Sugar stimulates the brain’s reward centers via the neurotransmitter dopamine, like other addictive drugs.12
• Brain imaging (PET scans) shows that high-sugar and high-fat foods work just like heroin, opium, or morphine in the brain, stimulating release of the brain’s own opioids (morphinelike chemicals).
• People (and rats) develop tolerance to sugar—they need more and more of the substance to be satisfied—just as with drugs of abuse like alcohol or heroin.
• A drug called naltrexone—that blocks the brain’s receptors for heroin and morphine—also reduces consumption and preference for sweet, high-fat foods in both normal weight and obese binge eaters.
• Many obese individuals continue to eat large amounts of unhealthy foods despite severe social and personal negative consequences, just like addicts.
• Animals and humans experience withdrawal symptoms when suddenly cut off from sugar, just like addicts detoxifying from drugs.13
Sugar activates our own internal narcotic system. It’s why sugar-containing solutions are used in neonatal intensive care units and newborn nurseries to calm crying babies. Administering a sucrose solution as a pain reliever has been shown to reduce the duration of crying in preterm or term babies undergoing painful procedures.14 (Interestingly, though, some recent studies find that using such a solution repeatedly may be associated with neurobehavioral effects later on.)15 Parents of infants know this as well—a baby who has consumed his or her fill of lactose-rich breast milk or formula will often fall into what looks like a drunken stupor, an activation of the endogenous endocannabinoid system—the same response the body has to taking drugs.
Our bodies contain special receptors for detecting sweetness, found in our mouths, stomachs, and pancreas, which line our digestive tract from esophagus to stomach to pancreas. These receptors communicate with the brain from their outposts in the digestive tract through the nervous system, stimulating our centers for appetite, desire, and reward. And foods containing processed sweet and fat are far more addictive than nonprocessed sweet and fat.16 This makes sense—much of the pleasure that we derive from eating sweet foods begins as soon as sugar hits those receptors. And the less effort needed from our body to convert carbohydrate to sugar, the faster our reward center says “Ahhhhhh.” Simple, processed sugar is a faster, more powerful hit than complex sugar from something like fruit.
Eating sweet foods creates cravings for more sweet foods. In other words, feeding kids sugar strongly builds their desire to eat more sugar. Not an “I’m in the mood for something sweet” kind of desire, but something much more powerful. Research from the 1960s showed that rats would overcome their natural instincts to stay near walls and corners if sweet foods were placed in the center of their cage. When given all the sweets they wanted, those same rats would gorge themselves to the point that they overrode any biological signal to stop.17
Surprised by this? You may be hearing it for the first time . . . but you can bet that the food industry knows this data inside and out.
Exploiting a Weakness
The food industry is well aware of how potently children crave sweet. In the 1970s, its studies showed that children were most likely to crave foods that were salty and sweet.18 Its subsequent research into “bliss point”—the amount of sweetness that makes food and drink maximally appealing—showed that when given the choice, children ages five to ten prefer their food two to three times sweeter than adults do—so industry made its food sweeter.
The industry term for a frequent consumer of its products is “heavy user.” As a former Coca-Cola CEO said, “Your heavy-user base is, by definition, very important to the business.” Food companies are aggressively targeting kids to become future heavy users. Philip Morris—the tobacco company that marketed cigarettes to children for the very same reason—now owns companies such as Kraft and General Foods. It has converted its child-directed marketing strategies from cigarettes to food by way of kid-friendly packaging, cuddly mascots, and misleading claims such as “all natural” (meaningless) and “fortified” (adding in supplements because the food is depleted of nutrients).
Food manufacturers also dedicate sky-high budgets to scientists who investigate how food can optimally stimulate our pleasure centers and cravings. These food scientists have essentially become specialists in addiction, and their work is used against children to create mini-addicts. Gerber’s chairmen summed up their hypocrisy best when asked to comment on why the company was dropping two highly sweetened baby foods from its lineup in response to public outcry: “We never said they were particularly nutritious. We just said they tasted good.”19
TIP
Calm Kids with Organic Teas
Sugar cravings may be related to anxiety and stress in kids. Adrenal glands are responsible for pumping out stress hormones like cortisol, which can drive sugar (and salt) cravings. Use daily tea blends that include calming nervines like passionflower, linden, lemon balm, and chamomile, as well as adaptogenic, balancing teas made from drinkable herbs like holy basil (tulsi) or astragalus. Throw in rose hips or hibiscus for a huge boost of vitamin C, also in higher demand when the body is under stress. Observe the sugar cravings—and stress—decrease.
Secret Sugar: It’s Hiding in Your Food and Drinks
You might be reading this and thinking, My kid doesn’t eat that much sugar. He doesn’t even drink soda. Great. What if I replaced “soda” with “juice”? Processed juice and soda are in many ways equivalent, both filled with empty calories. Most juice is no longer made from fruit.
The food industry understands how deeply parents care about their children’s health, and it knows that successful children’s products have the veneer of health. To convince parents to shell out for their kids, it created “juices”: Kool-Aid, then Tang, were made almost entirely of artificial colors and flavors and, of course, sugar. Manufacturers added barely half a teaspoon of real fruit juice per bottle and fortified it with vitamin C so they could market it as “healthy.” They pictured fruit on the label and created various artificial fruit flavors and aromas. Parents thought they were cleverly sneaking nutrition into their children with these “fruit drinks.” This industry charade even extended to “real” juice, when the food industry doubted that the natural sweetness of apples or grapes was enough to strike the child’s bliss point; so it added “fruit sugar” to these products, too—without listing it on the label. Finally, a fruit drink that can sit on a supermarket shelf for weeks, months, or even years without spoiling is not likely to retain many health benefits even if there were actual fruit added.
Bottom line: Store-bought juice, Gatorade, and Powerade are hardly better than soda. And let’s not forget Vitamin Water, another brilliant conception that’s duped many health-conscious parents. It’s really just sugar with some synthetic vitamins thrown in.
Dessert for Breakfast?
Cereal was the brainchild of John Harvey Kellogg, a physician with the best of intentions, who ran a sanitarium in Detroit to help people with digestive issues. In 1894, he created a flaked wheat cereal as well as a corn version to serve his patients. Notably, he banned sugar from the sanitarium, believing it was a primary contributor to the nation’s health woes. But in 1908, Kellogg’s brother secretly stole the recipe, added copious amounts of sugar, and began marketing Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes. Eventually, Post joined in with Grape Nuts. General Mills then charged ahead of the pack by releasing its cereal, Sugar Crisps, which was unabashedly coated in sugar. Not to be outdone, the other companies answered with Sugar Corn Pops, Sugar Frosted Flakes, Sugar Smacks, Sugar Jets, and others. Adding sugar made the cereal taste better, take on a golden-brown color, and stay crisp in milk.
By the 1970s, the cereal market expanded as more women began to work outside the home and needed quick breakfasts for their children. By the 1980s, the cereal market was worth $4.4 billion. Sugar had become a primary ingredient in nearly every cereal on the market and was under scrutiny as a trigger for many illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease. Yet the FDA refused to comment on sugar as a threat to public health or to even require companies to disclose sugar content on their packaging.
More alarmingly, investigation by public health advocates showed that cereals with the highest sugar content—as high as 70.8 percent—were the ones most heavily marketed to children during Saturday-morning cartoons. Sugary cereals were promoted as many as four times per half hour on each network. Frequent advertising did, in fact, spur increases in children’s consumption of those products, encouraging activists to speak out. One such advocate, Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer, advocated that cereal be appropriately labeled. “Any cereal containing over 50 percent sugar should be labeled ‘imitation cereal’ or ‘cereal confections,’ ” he said. “And they should be sold in the candy section rather than the cereal section.” Headlines like “Is It Cereal or Candy?” ran around the country. The response? Companies dropped the word “sugar” from their names . . . but not from the cereal itself. Sugar Frosted Flakes became Frosted Flakes, Super Sugar Crisp Cereal became Super Golden Crisp, and so on.
It didn’t end there. After adding cinnamon marshmallows to Apple Jacks, Kellogg’s aired a commercial that portrayed a sugary cinnamon stick as “sweetly protecting” Apple Jacks’ flavor from a surly character named “Bad Apple.”20 And soon after, Kellogg’s advertised a study claiming that eating Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast increased children’s attentiveness by 20 percent. “Keeps ’em full, keeps ’em focused,” the ad said. Turned out that Kellogg’s had designed and paid for the study, and its report of the findings wasn’t quite accurate. Only one in nine children had a boost in attention of 20 percent after eating the cereal, and they were being compared to some kids who hadn’t eaten any breakfast at all. When angry parents took Kellogg’s to task for false advertising and the Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint,21 Kellogg’s created a $4 million fund to refund products as part of a settlement agreement. While Kellogg’s denied any wrongdoing, it agreed to downgrade its claims to say: “Clinical studies have shown that kids who eat a filling breakfast like Frosted Mini-Wheats have 11 percent better attentiveness in school than kids who skip breakfast.”22
The sugar wars still rage. Now even low-sugar cereals like Cheerios have undergone sugar makeovers like Dulce de Leche Cheerios, Cinnamon Burst Cheerios, and Fruity Cheerios. To this day, sugar content for most cereals remains higher than 50 percent.
Savory Sugar?
You’ll also find sugar in many products that are not considered “sweet,” including bread, ketchup, salad dressing, and tomato sauce. Sugar is often the second ingredient in many of these foods. Yogurt, for example, can have as much or more sugar than a can of soda. The food industry loves sugar because we love sugar. It knows that we will buy anything we can’t resist—especially if it’s affordable (and even when it’s not). The industry also depends on sugar to make industrial food profitable and possible—sugar means bread doesn’t go stale, cereal looks golden and stays crispy in milk, and donuts stay fluffier. The food industry is as addicted to sugar as we are.
Stealth Marketing of Sugar
How much sugar we eat is often related to how strongly it’s marketed to us.23
In “Sugar-Coating Science: How the Food Industry Misleads Consumers on Sugar,” the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) urges us to beware of:24
1. Sugary foods with a feel-good health claim. Companies will do whatever it takes to brand sugary food as healthy. Coca-Cola advertised its high-sugar Vitamin Water brand by using buzzwords like “defense,” “energy,” or “enhanced.” General Mills claimed Fruit Roll-Ups were “made with real fruit” when they in fact contain none. Studies find that many products advertised as “whole grain” or high in protein or other valuable nutrients are often more sugary than foods without those claims.
2. Misleading language like “natural” and “naturally sweetened.” Some companies have removed heavily processed sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup from their foods and replaced them with an equivalent amount of another processed sugar.
3. Using brand recognition to market unhealthy alternatives. Cheerios has 1 gram of sugar per serving, but you’ve probably seen more ads for the cereal’s sweeter versions, Honey Nut (9 grams of sugar) and Apple Cinnamon Cheerios (10 grams). Using an established brand with a healthy reputation gives the veneer of health to sugary variants.
4. Using “cause marketing” to sell sugary foods. According to the website for Yoplait, the “Save Lids to Save Lives” campaign has donated more than $34 million to various breast cancer causes. Yet a single cup of Yoplait averages 26 grams of sugar—more than the American Heart Association recommends women consume in an entire day.
Where Is the Regulation?
For more than three decades, federal officials have exempted sugar from recommended maximum limits that they’ve set for two other major players in processed foods—fat and salt—even though the data for sugar are more damning. Manufacturers are not obligated to differentiate how much sugar they add to their products from natural sugar content—only the total amount in the product. In 2009, the American Heart Association (AHA) took a stand and recommended that adults ingest no more than 5 to 9 teaspoons per day—the equivalent of half a 12-ounce can of Coke, one and a half Fig Newtons, or a half-cup of Jell-O for the entire day—with the thought that industry would be pressured to reduce added sugar in its products. But 5 teaspoons is a drop in the bucket when it comes to processed foods. For instance, a half cup of Prego tomato sauce alone has more than 2 teaspoons of sugar—equal to a tube of Go-Gurt or two Oreo cookies. Industry fought the AHA recommendation quickly and thoroughly. Nothing changed.
So What Should You Do?
While the medical fury about out-of-control sugar consumption is justified, demonizing all sweeteners is misguided. The problem is not the ingredient itself, but how we’ve changed it. Unprocessed maple syrup, honey, even the original sugarcane plant have health benefits when consumed in small amounts. We’ll focus on them in Chapter 15.
How to Spot Secret Sugars on the Ingredients List
Use this easy trick to spot secret added sugars on the ingredients list: Anything that ends in “–ose” is sugar, and so is anything with “sugar” or “syrup” after the name. Here are some of the different names for sugar:
Agave nectar
Barley malt
Beet sugar
Brown rice syrup
Brown sugar
Buttered sugar
Cane crystals
Cane juice
Cane sugar
Caramel
Carob syrup
Castor sugar
Coconut sugar
Corn sugar
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup
Corn syrup solids
Crystalline fructose
Date sugar
Dextrose
Evaporated cane juice
Fructose
Fruit juice concentrates
Glucose
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Invert sugar
Lactose
Maltose
Malt syrup
Molasses
Muscovado sugar
Natural sugar
Rice bran syrup
Rice syrup
Sorghum
Sorghum syrup
Sucrose
Syrup
Turbinado sugar
SUGAR UNMASKED: A CHEAT SHEET
Here’s a list of products where secret sugars are typically found:25
• Condiments and sauces such as ketchup, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce, plum sauce, or other Asian sauces
• Low-fat or fat-free salad dressings and marinades
• Dips and spreads
• Side dishes from the supermarket deli (macaroni or potato salad, or coleslaw)
• Canned biscuits and pizza dough
• Takeout, especially pizza and Chinese food
Secret Sugars in the Freezer
• Frozen entrées (low calorie or otherwise)
• Processed meats (sausage, hot dogs)
• Frozen veggies prepared with sauces
• Breakfast sandwiches
• Mini pizza bagels or pizza rolls, or pocket sandwiches
• Frozen bread and rolls
• Potpies
Secret Sugars in the Pantry
• Pasta sauce
• Rice mixes
• Instant or flavored oatmeal
• Granola or fruit-and-grain bars (whole-grain varieties included)
• Cereal bars
• Sweetened corn bread mix
• Whole-grain cold cereals
• Bread, whole grain/white/pita
• Baked beans
• Trail mix
• Whole-grain crackers
• English muffins
• Tortilla wraps
• Taco shells
• Yogurt, fruity or flavored
SUGAR’S SIDEKICKS: HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP AND ASPARTAME
The food industry is constantly in search of “magical” ingredients—inexpensive substances that are “too good to be true.” High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and aspartame are the reigning king and queen of this category—HFCS delivers super-sweetness cheaply and efficiently, and aspartame packs intense sugary flavor without calories. Both of these substances exploit our preprogrammed love for all things sweet, hooking even the savviest of us.
High-Fructose Corn Syrup
High-fructose corn syrup is literally liquid sugar: easy to add to all sorts of products and cheap. Manufacturers use vast amounts of it for mere pennies in all kinds of food products: cereal, breakfast bars, breads, lunch meats, yogurts, soups, and condiments. All of this sugar wreaks havoc on our bodies.
In the way that MSG packs a punch with free glutamate, HFCS consists of unbound molecules of fructose and glucose, which allows them to be rapidly absorbed by the liver all at once. Glucose triggers big spikes in insulin—the body’s major sugar regulating, fat-storing hormone—increasing inflammation that can lead to weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and fatty liver. Normally, increased insulin levels modify our food intake by inhibiting appetite with leptin release, which tells us we’re full.26,27,28,29,30 Meals high in high-fructose corn syrup, however, can reduce circulating insulin and leptin levels,31 contributing to increased hunger and weight gain. Fructose intake does not generally result in the degree of satiety that you would feel with an equally caloric meal that contains glucose or sucrose.
Unlike naturally occurring fructose that is part of fruit, free fructose from HFCS demands high energy to be absorbed by the gut and depletes the body’s energy stores of ATP. As a result, mitochondria are under greater stress to produce the energy necessary to maintain the integrity of the intestinal lining. Normally each intestinal cell membrane has a tight junction with its neighbors, which prevents food, toxins, bacteria, and the like from “leaking” across the intestinal membrane and triggering body-wide inflammation. But high doses of free fructose can punch holes in the intestinal lining, allowing undesirable substances into our bloodstream.32 This is part of what triggers an inflammatory response that promotes conditions like asthma, seizures, autism, ADHD, obesity, diabetes, and cancer.
High-fructose corn syrup also contains measurable amounts of mercury due to contamination from processing. In 2009, almost half of the tested samples of commercial HFCS contained mercury, detected also in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient.33 Worse, the government was aware of the contamination and attempted to cover it up.
In 2004, Renee Dufault, an environmental health researcher at the FDA, stumbled upon an obscure Environmental Protection Agency report on chemical plants’ mercury emissions. Some chemical companies, she learned, make lye by pumping salt through large vats of mercury. Since lye is a key ingredient in making HFCS (it’s used to separate corn starch from the kernel), Dufault wondered if mercury might be contaminating the ubiquitous sweetener that makes up one of every ten calories Americans eat. Dufault sent HFCS samples from three manufacturers that used lye to labs at the University of California–Davis and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The labs found mercury in most of the samples, and the UC Davis scientists believe it is likely organic mercury—the most neurotoxic form.
In September 2005, Dufault presented her findings to the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and was shocked by what happened next: “I was instructed not to do any more investigation,” she recalls. The FDA claimed its decision against further investigation was because it wasn’t convinced “that there was any evidence of a risk.”34 It subsequently removed her from fieldwork. No risk, except that individuals could be ingesting up to 200 micrograms of a neurotoxin per week—three times more than the amount the FDA deems safe for children, women who are or plan to become pregnant, and nursing mothers. Of course, the Corn Refiners Association disputed the study, stating it had used mercury-free versions of hydrochloric acid and caustic soda for years. Then it hired ChemRisk—the consulting firm whose scientists testified on behalf of a polluting utility in the lawsuit portrayed in Erin Brockovich—to attack Dufault’s report. It worked.
We may never know exactly why these peer-reviewed studies detected mercury because the production process remains top secret. But at a minimum, four plants in the United States and hundreds of plants abroad still use the chloralkali process that requires mercury. Industry continues to use HFCS with no obligation to disclose how it is produced.
High-fructose corn syrup isn’t just wreaking havoc on our bodies’ internal terrain. It’s also hurting the external terrain of our environment. HFCS is derived from industrially raised corn, grown in a way that depletes soil, requires high pesticide use, and burns fossil fuel energy to truck it to where it can be processed. The kicker? You’re paying for it, thanks to the Farm Bill, which heavily subsidizes our country’s overplanting of crops like corn, wheat, and soy. Your tax dollars are subsidizing cheap, often GMO corn to be made into sugar that damages your family’s health. As long as the government incentivizes this practice by footing the bill and refusing to ask questions, industry will continue pumping these foods into the market.
My advice: Read labels and avoid HFCS.
Aspartame (also known as NutraSweet, produced at one time by Monsanto) is an artificial sweetener used in more than six thousand products, including soft drinks, chewing gum, candy, desserts, and yogurt, as well as in more than five hundred pharmaceutical products, including syrups and antibiotics for children.
Aspartate, a major component of aspartame, acts similarly to glutamate as an excitotoxin. Animal studies show that it crosses the blood-brain barrier straight into the sanctuary of the brain and even alters frontal-lobe activity in measurable ways.35 Aspartame breaks down to aspartate, phenylalanine, methanol, and diketopiperazine, a known carcinogen that converts to neurotoxic formaldehyde in the cell.36Like glutamate, phenylalanine competes with many necessary amino acids for transport into the central nervous system, which can limit the brain’s access to other building blocks.37 Rats fed 5 percent aspartame in their diets for only two hours had significantly lower brain levels of serotonin—which modulates well-being, anxiety, and sleep—when compared with controls.38 Phenylalanine and aspartate both can promote cancer,39 as can prenatal exposure to aspartame.40
Human studies also demonstrate health problems from aspartame. Drinking artificial sugar does not keep us thin. “Non-nutritive sweeteners” like aspartame replicate the very same cravings and addictive behaviors as sugar41 and drive weight gain. A two-year study involving 166 schoolchildren found that the more diet soda they drank, the more weight they gained.42 The Growing Up Today Study, involving 11,654 children ages 9 to 14, also reported that boys drinking diet soda gained weight. For each daily serving of diet beverage, their BMIs increased.43 Another study of almost one thousand children found diet soda drinkers had significantly elevated BMI and waist circumference.44 Worse, a 2014 study on artificial sweeteners including aspartame, Splenda, and saccharine showed that they all induced glucose intolerance by altering gut microbiome.45 Our guts and flora play a critical role in modulating diabetes.46 Yet diet sodas and foods filled with aspartame are frequently recommended as good replacements for sugary foods for diabetic kids—even though these foods may worsen their issues.
Clinically, several studies have linked aspartame consumption with disrupted electrical activity in the brain as well as other health issues including headaches and various kinds of cancer including brain.47,48,49One study in Neurology showed that ten children newly diagnosed with epilepsy spent 40 percent more time in spike-wave activity after a dose of aspartame than one of sucrose.50 Some studies in adults had similar results.51,52,53 Aspartame also has been shown to be a migraine trigger in susceptible people.54,55,56,57
And if that isn’t bad enough, when NutraSweet is flushed out of the body and down the toilet, data show that water-treatment plants don’t remove chemical sugars from sewage effectively—so now they pollute our waterways.58
My advice: Avoid all artificial sweeteners, and never look back.
TAKE HOME
1. Children are eating massive amounts of sugar in many forms from treats and sweets to “healthy” foods like bread, yogurt, and sauce.
2. Sugar can be listed under many names in processed foods—or not listed at all—so it can be hidden in plain sight. Avoid high-fructose corn syrup and all “corn-based sugars.”
3. Beware of high-sugar foods with a veneer of health: cereal bars (or power or protein bars) are particular offenders, as are “healthy” drinks like Vitamin Water or Snapple. Claims like “no added sugar” are a ruse.
4. Compare carbohydrate and sugar content in any processed foods you buy to get a sense of the playing field—tomato sauce, bread, yogurt, even ice cream. Organic brands may or may not add less sugar.
5. Cooking for yourself with the basic ingredients means you control much of what’s in your food. This doesn’t mean you need to can your own tomatoes—you can buy tomatoes canned in glass jars (free of BPA!), add olive oil, garlic, and spices, and simmer your sauce while you prepare the rest of the meal.
6. Diet sugars are not the answer either; quite the opposite. Instead, try to minimize your need for sweeteners altogether, especially in beverages.
7. Even standard white sugar is best avoided. I don’t keep any in my cupboard. When you need sweet, always go for the natural ones: raw honey, real maple sugar, date sugar, stevia leaf, and blackstrap molasses. They will satisfy!
8. If your kid craves sugar, helping your child’s body to feel nourished and relaxed will help relieve those cravings and make the transition off sugar easier. Try calming teas, plenty of foods high in vitamin C, more sleep, and other activities that promote relaxation and joy.