As a follow up to Dr. Topouzians article on adding healthy protein to the daily meals, as well as other articles we have posted on hidden sugars, insulin resistance and diabetes, we would now like to bring light to a recent study that is suggesting that there is a corresponging increase of fatty liver disease with obesity and type 2 diabetes.

This study, published in the September issue of the jornal Obesity, is the work of Dr David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children’s Hospital Boston, and collegues.

This study suggests that a diet rich in carbohydrates with a high glycemic index (GI) not only expands waistlines but may also lead ot fatty liver, a condition that results in liver failure and death.

Fatty liver is becoming especially common among children, said Ludwig.  Although many adult cases can be caused by alcoholism, that is not so in children, where between 1 in 4 and 1 in 2 overweight American children are thougth to be affected by non-alchoholic fatty liver disease.

That means millions of children are at elevated risk of getting full blown liver disease in adulthood, said Ludwig, who called it a “silent but dangerous epidemic.”

People, if we need any more confirmation on what the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) is doing to the health of our society, this should do it.

Do we really have to wait until we can call these things epidemics?  Lets make the changes now!

R-n-A

Did you know that the United States is the second largest consumer of refined sugar, second only to Germany.  How often do you hear news stats on our obese society, and morbid metabolic issues such as diabetes and heart disease.

The biggest factor to the metabolic syndrome that we face as a society is insulin resistance.  Insulin resistance is the body’s inability to effectively manage blood sugar through the use of insulin.

One of the biggest factors is this over consumption of refined sugars.  Now, let us begin, refined sugar is not a food and it should not be consumed.  It is only a manufactured poison, a darling of the packaged food industry that is addictive, cheap to incorporate in to faux food products, basically killing our society for profit. 

What we want to address is the hidden sources of sugar that can promote the same dramatic effect on our health.  When you think of sugar, you tend to think of the “obvious suspects”- the table sugar you use in your coffee, candy, soda and deserts.  The reality is, if you eat most prepared food (snack foods, frozen TV dinners, canned soup, packaged cereals, bread, frozen waffles, crakers, tomato sauce, condiments such as ketchup and steak sauce) you are eating sugar.  Once you start reading food labels, you will be amazed to see that various forms of sugar (sucrose, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, fructose, dextrose, turbinado, maple sugar, etc.) are common ingredients in prepared food.  Organic, so-called “natural” sugar or honey is no better.  Some experts estimate that many people may unknowingly be eating between forty to sixty teaspoons of sugar a day in their food. 

What is of major concern is the high rate of consumption of high fructose corn syrup, or fructose, a cheap, very sweet sugar which is finding its way into more and more prepared foods and even nutritional food products (often by leading nutraceutical companies–READ THE LABELS!!)

Although fructose is low on the glycemic index (a misleading tool that rates the conversion to glucose) it can cause serious health problems.  The major problem is that it promotes the insulin resistance mentioned above and promotes FAT STORAGE!  It actually causes more damage inside your body than glucose, which is found in table sugar, though we are not recommending table sugar (combo of fructose and glucose)as an alternative.

Stay tuned for follow up articles on alternatives to sweeten up your life.

 In health,

 R-n-A