The dietary supervillain starving you while making you fat

I told you this week about an exposé revealing soda manufacturers’ big money contributions to the policy makers who are supposed to be helping us fight diabetes and obesity.

Well I just came across a paper that spells out in detail exactly how bad for you soda is. And it also highlights the fact that we’ve been kept woefully ill-informed about the true dangers it poses.

The paper, which was published in the journal Open Heart — puts forth a new paradigm for understanding the many levels on which sugar and high-fructose corn syrup disrupt our health.

Now, when we were growing up, weight was considered a simple matter of calories-in versus calories-out. But it turns out obesity isn’t a simple math equation.

And sugar is nothing like regular calories.

To understand what’s happening, you need to look at what sugar does to us on a cellular level. And you also need to see obesity as a state of hormonal imbalance. One that causes calories to be diverted to fat tissue instead of being converted into energy we can use.

Storing calories instead of burning them keeps us in a constant state of hunger. But it also keeps us in a perpetual state of nutrient deficit, according to the authors of this new study.

And here’s the kicker: That deficit makes it harder for us to get up and move — thereby keeping us in an ongoing obesity cycle.

Now add sugar to the equation and things start to get even more dire.

Not only do sugary “treats” take the place of healthier foods, they actually may deplete nutrients from the healthy foods we do eat. What’s more, they also sap nutrients from our body’s stores.

But that’s not the worst of it. Consuming too much sugar can also result in what the authors called “internal starvation” — keeping us in a constant state of hunger.

No wonder Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are spending so many millions on keeping us from hearing the truth about sugar.

The bottom line is, if you want to lose weight and be healthy, you have to kick sugar to the curb. No two ways about it.

Source:

DiNicolantonio JJ, Berger A. Added sugars drive nutrient and energy deficit in obesity: a new paradigm. Open Heart. 2016 Aug 2;3(2):e000469. doi: 10.1136/openhrt-2016-000469. eCollection 2016.