Kicking sugar to the curb

We’ve all heard that too much sugar is bad for you.

In the not too distant past, fat was vilified and sugar was actually lauded as good for your health.

Now we know that healthy fats are not only satiating but also necessary for proper nutrient absorption, hormone function, and many other cellular activities.

Sugar is generally consumed as carbohydrates. In your body, the carbs you eat are converted to glucose. This simpler form can be more easily assimilated into your body.

After eating, glucose floats in your bloodstream, raising what’s known as blood sugar. Higher blood sugar triggers release of the hormone, insulin, which tells the cells to pull glucose from the blood and into the cell so that energy can be produced.

When blood sugar remains too high, or is high too frequently, the cell membrane becomes desensitized to insulin, and more and more insulin is required to get the same job done. This leads to insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes.

While we know that dysregulated blood sugar leads to diabetes and other metabolic conditions such as obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and heart disease, we now know that consistently high blood sugar and frequently spiking and falling blood sugar is linked to premature aging, chronic inflammation, and even dementia, which is currently being called “Type 3 diabetes.”

All of this starts years, even decades, before symptoms appear.

When you hear the word “sugar,” you likely picture M&Ms, Sour Patch Kids or a big ice cream sundae. Actually, when it comes to sugar digestion, even pasta, crackers, and rice can raise your blood sugar significantly, and although they are not equivalent nutrient-wise, after converting to glucose, the body reads them all the same way.

Excess sugar is carried in the blood as triglycerides and stored around the body as fat. Fat holds toxins, and when it surrounds your organs as visceral fat, it significantly increases your chances of disease and dysfunction.

Sugar also spurs inflammation and chronic, or long-term, inflammation breaks down tissue, causes pain and fatigue, and also lays the groundwork for most lifestyle diseases.

When it comes to your gut and digestion, high sugar diets feed harmful bacteria, displacing beneficial bacteria and compromising functions as important as immunity hormone activity, and detoxification.

If you have pain, weight gain, poor mobility, and/or energy issues, sugar may be a major culprit.

The good news is, you can take small steps to counteract health issues caused by blood sugar dysregulation.

Here are my top 3 strategies for squashing the sugar habit and keeping your blood sugar as stable as possible:

1) Eliminate ultra-processed foods and foods with added sugars. It's important to cut out the junk first and foremost when trying to kick the sugar habit. This is more obvious when it comes to candy, desserts, and sweet drinks, but a little more involved when it’s in hidden in things like yogurt, sauces, or condiments. Reading labels helps you see how many carbs a food contains and how many grams of added sugars it may have. The more you eat foods with no labels, the better. These are whole foods, unprocessed, and as natural as possible. This brings us to our next tip...

2) Aim for 30+ grams of fiber per day. Veggies and fruit contain vitamins, minerals, fluids and fiber. The fiber you get from them takes effort to digest, and this work helps keep your blood sugar stable. Fiber in your digestive tract helps bind waste and sweep it out for good elimination and detoxification. Fiber also feeds beneficial bacteria, acting as a prebiotic that enables healthy gut flora to thrive. As the bulk of the serotonin in your body is produced in your gut, this impacts digestion, mood, and sleep. Focus on leafy greens, color-saturated veggies, bitter vegetables, and the sulfurous ones in the cruciferous family --broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and kale. Fiber helps with satiety, so it will keep you feeling full longer, eliminating the need for snacks between meals and helping you eat less calories overall. When I find myself craving sweets, sometimes eating sweet vegetables such as beets and sweet potatoes helps scratch the itch.

3) To maintain good energy, eat plenty of high quality protein and healthy fats. If you're reducing the amount of poor quality carbs you're eating, you will likely need to off-set this with foods that don't cause a blood-sugar spike. High quality proteins are wild game (think venison, bison, duck), grass-fed meats (beef, pork, lamb), pastured poultry (chicken, turkey), and wild-caught fish (salmon, anchovies, smelt, sardines). Not only do these meats have a higher ratio of healthy omega 3 fatty acids to omega 6 fatty acids, but they also remain free from chemical-laden, inflammatory, GMO feed, which means you do too. Ask the farmers at your local farmers market how they raise their animals. Regenerative farms not only preserve the land, but have practices that cause less stress to the animals, which translates to less inflammatory factors being passed on to you.

High-quality fats include the fats that naturally occur in the meats we just explored as well as cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil (for lower heat cooking), avocado oil, coconut oil, grass-fed butter/ghee, walnut oil, flax and chia seeds and oil (the last three of which are best consumed raw). High heat and chemical refinement processes damage poly-unsaturated fats, rendering them rancid. This is why seed oils that you commonly find in the grocery stores are actually damaging and should be avoided. This includes canola, vegetable, corn, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, and safflower oils. Also, trans fats made with hydrogenated oils have been proven to cause inflammation and serve as disease drivers, so when you see them as an ingredient in packaged foods, run for the hills.

Both high-quality proteins and fats keep your blood sugar stable and help you feel fuller longer. That's why they're the perfect way to help you break the sugar cycle. Remember that grass-fed yogurts and cheeses as well as small portions of nuts can also give you a fat/protein boost when you need one to round out a healthy meal.

It can take two to four weeks to reset your body from its sugar cravings, which may seem pretty daunting. Take it one week at a time. Celebrate your successes. Let everything else go and just try to enjoy the process.