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Does the Food Industry Have a Dirty Little Secret?

Written by James Gormley, Natural Products Industry Writer

Plus 5 ways a good diet can help us maintain healthy blood sugar levels

Highlights:

  • Americans gobble up over 50 billion pounds of sugar and 14.5 billion gallons of soda every year courtesy of monster food companies!
  • The modern U.S. diet is nutritionally bankrupt and packed with refined sugars, high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats, starches, gums and tons of artificial ingredients.
  • Eating too much sugar contributes to obesity, heart disease, diabetes mellitus, and even cancer.
  • Sugar is a big driver in insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes, and type 2 diabetes.
  • These 5 tips can help you improve metabolism, assist in weight loss, hold on to muscle and help you maintain healthy blood sugar levels.
  • You can complement your new and improved diet and physical activity program with Almased, the low-glycemic and high-protein shake that helps us optimize our metabolic health!

Yes, it does. In fact, these corporations would much rather you didn’t know that the average American eats 152 pounds of sugar every year.

That’s well over 50 billion pounds — or 25,046,484 tons — of sugar every year!

That’s more than the weight of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state!

Being Crushed By Our Sugar Cravings?

To put this in perspective, nearly 200 years ago the average American only ate 6.3 pounds of sugar a year.

Not that a 19th-century menu was ideal — by any stretch — but at least we know it wasn’t loaded with refined sugars, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats, starches, gums and tons of artificial ingredients we have today.

This is to say nothing of the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors from 2.58 million to 10,000 years ago, whose food selections featured fruits, nuts, seeds, fish, tubers, roots, and wild game.

It’s clear that the nutritionally bankrupt U.S. diet — stripped by modern processing of many of its minerals, vitamins and natural enzymes — has gone way off the rails.

And so has our health.

While no food can make up for the modern world’s dietary disasters, there is one powerful, and simple, thing you can add to your diet every day to tip the scales in your favor: It’s Almased, the low-glycemic, high-protein meal replacement and food supplement that you drink in the form of a shake.

More on why low-glycemic is so important, later…. read on!

Sugar: The Culprit Behind All Modern Diseases

And in the place of nutrients, the food fat cats have made good and sure that they’ve replaced wholesome food with the nutritional version of gunk and goop — and at the top of the list is sugar.

In fact, these masters of manufacturing today add gargantuan levels of sugar to up to 74 percent of all food products!

While we do need limited amounts of sugar in our diet — our cells and brain do very much need glucose for energy — the problem is that the U.S. diet has become absolutely perverted into one massive sugar overload.

And if sugars and “badditives” in our food weren’t devastating enough, Americans also down 14.5 billion gallons of sweetened, empty-calorie soda each and every year.

This is especially bad because excess sugar is one of the contributors to diseases like obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even cancer.

Insulin Resistance: When Our Bodies Rebel

One of the main ways that sugar overconsumption is a driver in all of those diseases is because too much sugar causes insulin resistance.

You see, insulin — a hormone produced in the pancreas in response to glucose — is a key that unlocks our cells in order to allow glucose in the bloodstream to enter, be used for energy, and power our metabolism.

Insulin resistance develops, over time, when our bodies get overwhelmed with too much sugar, causing our cells to go into defense mode and to ignore insulin’s unlock “requests,” which spikes our blood sugar levels and heads us down the road to chronic disease.

And insulin resistance can bring on metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes.

Metabolic syndrome, sometimes called Syndrome X, affects 47 million Americans and is marked by elevated blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess belly fat and unhealthy levels of either LDL (low-density lipoprotein, or ”bad” cholesterol) or triglycerides.

Metabolic syndrome boosts your risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 Diabetes: A Disease of Modern Times

If we don’t do anything to combat it, insulin resistance — along with its partners in crime, obesity and physical inactivity — often leads to pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.

Pre-diabetes, which affects 84 million Americans, is the stage right before diabetes, when blood sugar levels are almost, but not quite, high enough to “graduate” our insulin resistance to full-blown disease.

In type 2 diabetes — what used to be called adult-onset diabetes and which is also called diabetes mellitus —your cells become resistant to insulin and your pancreas can’t make enough insulin to overcome this resistance.

Instead of being able to go into your cells, where it's needed for energy, sugar builds up in the bloodstream.

If diet and physical activity changes aren’t made, type 2 diabetes can lead to such serious problems as: heart and vascular disease; nerve damage (neuropathy); kidney damage; eye damage; slow-healing wounds that lead to amputation, hearing loss, skin infections, sleep apnea, and Alzheimer’s disease.

How Sweet It Isn’t? Adopting a Low-Glycemic Lifestyle

One big way we can get a handle on our glucose is to choose foods that are low on a ranking called the Glycemic Index (GI), a rating system for foods that lets us know how fast the body converts the carbs in a food into glucose.

The smaller the number, the slower the food is converted and the lower the effect on our blood sugar.

A good rule of thumb when trying to figure out what foods to choose and what foods to generally lose is to look at their GI: 55 or less is low (great); 56–69 is medium (good); and 70 or higher is high (or bad).

Here are some examples:

The Glycemic Index (GI) of a Selection of Foods*

 

Low-GI Foods

Medium-GI Foods

High-GI Foods

Non-GMO soybeans (16) Potato chips (56) Unleavened wheat bread (70)  
Kidney beans (24) Muesli (57) White rice, boiled (73)
Chickpeas (28) Pineapple, raw (59)  Whole-wheat bread (74)
Barley (28) Honey (61) White bread (75)
Lentils (32) Wheat roti (Indian flatbread) (62) Watermelon, raw (76)
Apple (36) Sweet potato, boiled (63) Rice porridge/congee (78)
Milk (37-39) French fries (63) Potato, boiled (78)
Carrots, boiled (39) Pumpkin, boiled (64) Instant oatmeal (79)
Chocolate (40) Couscous (65) Cornflakes (81)
Yogurt with fruit (41) Millet porridge (67) Instant mashed potatoes (87)
Dates, raw (42) Brown rice, boiled (68) Rice milk (87)
Spaghetti (49)   Rice crackers (87)
Ice cream (51)    

 

*Source: Glycemic Index for 60+ Foods. Harvard Medical School. February 2015. Available here.

While this list is a helpful reference, there are two main things we need to keep in mind when trying to convert this into a shopping list:

  • Just because something is low-GI or medium-GI doesn’t mean it’s good for us (for example, ice cream and French fries).
  • Listings of these foods doesn’t help us figure out what main food groups or nutrients we need more of, such as protein.

Topline, we need more high-quality protein in our diet from multiple sources and much fewer foods such as refined sugars, high-fructose corn syrup, sodas, sweetened juices, refined carbs, deep-fried foods, and partially hydrogenated (trans) fats.

Here are 5 things we want to include in an overall metabolism-enhancing lifestyle approach to metabolic health:

1. Get more protein and amino acids.

Certain foods can increase our metabolism through something called the thermic effect of food (TEF), which is caused by the extra calories needed to process some nutrients.

Protein gives us the biggest boost in TEF, increasing our metabolic rate by 15–30 percent.

It also makes us feel fuller, which makes us less likely to overeat, too.

And when we’re trying to lose fat, protein helps keep our metabolism primed so we can hold onto our lean muscle mass.

Making sure that we’re getting high-quality amino acids, the building blocks of protein (such as taurine), is just as important.

Fortunately, Almased, the low-glycemic, high-protein meal replacement and food supplement, provides us with not only a whopping 27 grams of protein per serving but also separately provides us with nearly 15 grams of essential amino acids.

And published research backs up the metabolic and healthy blood sugar benefits of Almased.

A 2012 study by Dr. Daniel König and colleagues tested Almased in a group of 11 overweight or obese men in a trial called “The Breakfast Study.”

The results? The authors saw several metabolic improvements, including significantly reduced levels of the hunger hormone, ghrelin, and a potential increase in something called protein YY, a peptide that makes us feel more full food-wise. The researchers saw benefits even up to several hours after breakfast, after lunch, a benefit known as the “second meal effect.”

The authors believe that the low-glycemic effects of Almased are due not only to the special amino-acid ingredients but also to healthy compounds, called, isoflavones that come from the product’s non-GMO soy ingredient.

2. Drink more cold water.

Drinking more water is a great idea, partly because we’re then downing H2O versus all kinds of carbonated sodas and sugar-jacked juices.

But drinking an extra 17 ounces (about 2 cups) of cool, freshwater each day also boosts our resting metabolism by 10–30 percent for up to one hour.

And drinking water 30 minutes before a meal helps us feel more full, too, so we can eat less.

3. Get physical.

Stands to reason, but the benefits of increased exercise show up all over, including improvements in sugar metabolism and decreased insulin resistance.

Whether we’re using weights or doing high-intensity interval training (HIIT) classes — or both — we burn more fat, keep more muscle and hold onto our strength.

4. Drink tea.

It’s hard to come up with an easier “done for you” addition to our metabolic health program than drinking more tea but, yes green tea and oolong tea improve metabolism by 4–5 percent.

They also can increase fat burning by 10–17 percent and can help with overall weight loss.

5. Get more Zs.

We’ve mentioned this before, but it can’t be stressed enough: Get more sleep!

Not getting enough sleep is linked to obesity, increased blood sugar levels, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

So there you have it.

We’re wise to the food corporations’ dirty little tricks, and we know we don’t have to settle for a processed and empty-calorie packaged diet that’s bursting at the seams with sugar, trans fats, and artificial ingredients.

Starting out with these 5 tips that will help us eat better and be more active — we can add Almased’s diabetic-friendly, low-glycemic and high protein shake to the mix, maximizing our pathway to metabolic health!

Don’t be crushed by the food industry sugar tsunami. Include Almased in your new healthy eating and exercise lifestyle!

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