A word on sugar

We all know that sugar is found in chocolate, soda and candy — but did you know that it’s also in yogurt, ready-made meals, potato chips, marinades and salad dressings, sushi, ketchup, mayonnaise, granola bars, “healthy” snacks including “baked” or “low-fat” crackers?

Yeah.

Why is this? If you think back to the origins of the fallacy that dietary fat is “bad” for us… back when Ancel Keys introduced the idea that fat contributes to high cholesterol and heart disease… well, a bunch of food manufacturers immediately began removing all saturated fat from their food products. They replaced it with unsaturated fat (cheap, unstable cancer-causing vegetable oils), and sugar.

Because what happens when you remove tasty fat from something? It tastes worse. What makes everything taste better? Sugar, of course.

Sugar also leads to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, chronic weight gain and inflammation, and cancer. There are hundreds of thousands of clinical data points that prove this.

And even if we think we are avoiding sugar because we don’t drink pop and we don’t have a sweet tooth… we’re likely still consuming up to 3x the daily dose that our body can handle through things marketed to us as “healthy snacks.”

You know, things like:

• Baked Cheez-Its (ugh, my kryptonite!)

• Wheat Thins

• Any kind of yogurt other than plain Greek yogurt

• Granola bars

• Nutri-Grain bars

• Frozen waffles and pancakes

• Bread — all the bread

• Pringles

• Goldfish crackers

• Fruit snacks

• All cereals (and I do mean all)

So please — I beg you, for your health and your future — read your food labels before you buy something. Watch out for these names, which are really alternative labels for sugar. If you see them, think twice and maybe skip the item altogether.

• Fructose

• Dextrose

• Glucose

• Galactose

• Lactose

• Maltose

• Sucrose

• Agave nectar

• Barbados sugar

• Barley malt

• Beet sugar

• Blackstrap molasses

• Brown rice syrup

• Brown sugar

• Buttered syrup

And the list goes on. Unfortunately.

I’m not saying we should never have sugar ever. But when food companies “hide” it in foods that we believe are healthy for us, and we are therefore unknowingly ingesting multiples times the amount of sugar that we think we are, we need to be more informed and avoid those processed foods that are hidden dangers.

The bottom line: When it comes to your health and diet, if you only apply two changes consistently, I hope for your long-term well-being that it is a reduction in added sugars and an elimination of vegetable oils from your diet. These two modifications alone can slash your risk for ANY type of cancer by up to 80%.