A Soda a Day Increases Cardio-Vascular Disease by 30%
This comes from a study by the CDC here in Atlanta. One of the scarier findings is that this increase happens independently of total calories, obesity, or other risk factors. One soda. “Our findings,” says Dr. Quanhe Yang, one of the authors, “indicate that most US adults consume more added sugar than is recommended for a healthy diet.”
Do you have any idea how much sugar the average American consumes in a year? 150 pounds!
We’re not talking about cane sugar alone. This includes all forms of sugars used in food-manufacturing today, for example corn syrup, rice bran syrup, date sugar, barley malt, and worst of all high-fructose corn syrup to name a few. These sweeteners are everywhere, even in foods you’d expect to be healthy and good for you, like yogurt, or power bars or juice. Take a look at the label next time and do a little math. Every gram of sugar supplies 4 calories of energy. So do that multiplication and then see what proportion of the total calories are composed of some sort of sugar.
Why do we care?
Because sugar creates inflammation in the body, and inflammation is an underlying cause of our chronic conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and Type 2 diabetes.
What can we do?
Eat fruit instead of drinking juice. Buy plain yogurt and add your own fruit. Eat more protein and vegetables for energy. If you’re a “sweets person,” you are probably hungry, so eat something with protein in it and see how you feel.
Wendall Berry said: “People are fed by the Food Industry which pays no attention to health, and treated by the Health Industry, which pays no attention to food,” so start paying attention to what you eat. We can help.
Ann-Marie Giglio