THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO
BEATING SUGAR ADDICTION!
The Cutting-Edge Program That Cures Your Type of Sugar Addiction and Puts You Back on the Road to Weight Control and Good Health
JACOB TEITELBAUM, M.D.
AND CHRYSTLE FIEDLER
CONTENTS
Chronically exhausted and hooked on quick hits of caffeine and sugar
When lifes stress has exhausted your adrenal glands
Sugar cravings caused by yeast/candida overgrowth
Sugar cravings caused by your period, menopause, or andropause
INTRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW OF SUGAR ADDICTION
Are you a sugar addict? If the answer is yes, you are not alone.
American adults consume about 15 percent of our calories from sugars that are added to foods during processingor 140 to 150 pounds of sugar per person each year! A mind blowing 37 percent of added sugars are consumed in sugar-sweetened beverages, while another 18 percent of our calories come from white flour (which acts a lot like sugar in our bodies)! Its not surprising that we have become a nation of sugar addicts. Like many other addictive substances, sugar may leave you feeling a bit better for a few hours, but then it wreaks havoc on your body and can cause long-term health problems.
The good news? There is a solution that works. In this book, we will teach you about the four main types of sugar addicts. In each type, there are different forces driving the addiction, and in all four types, the excess sugar leaves people feeling much worse overall. By treating the underlying causes that are active in your type of addiction, you will find that not only do your sugar cravings go away, but you also feel dramatically better overall.
Heres more good news. Once you have broken your sugar addiction, your body will usually be able to handle sugar in moderation. This means saving sugar for dessert or snacks where it belongs and going for quality, not quantity. Dark chocolate is especially okay.
We will also discuss how to have your cake and eat it toohow to use natural sugar substitutes to get the pleasure without paying the cost. It is not our goal to eliminate things you love. Our goal instead is to teach you how to get the most pleasure you can, in a way that is healthy for your body and leaves you feeling better. In medicine, we have a simple rule: Never take away something pleasurable from a persons diet without substituting something equally pleasurable. Otherwise, it just doesnt work!
WHY IS SUGAR ADDICTIVE?
For thousands of years, humans ate sugar found naturally in their food. Sugar was not a problem; it was a treat. But now more than one-third of the calories we consume come from sugar and white flour added during food processing. Our bodies simply were not designed to handle this massive load.
Many of you have already noticed that although sugar gives you an initial high, you crash several hours later, and this leaves you wanting more sugar. In fact, sugar acts as an energy loan shark, taking away more energy than it gives. Eventually, your credit line runs out and you find yourself exhausted, anxious, and moody.
THE LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES OF SUGAR ADDICTION
In addition to the immediate fatigue and emotional problems, the research shows that sugar also causes many long-term health problems. For example, according to a study published in the medical journal Diabetologia (2012), drinking just one 12-ounce (355 ml) sugar-sweetened soft drink a day can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by 22 percent. While a study published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine (2014) showed that just one can of soda a day ups heart attack risk by 30 percent. Thats pretty scary stuff.
DANGEROUS SUGAR: HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP
While all excess sugar is detrimental to your health, high fructose corn syrup, a mixture of fructose and glucose, often found in beverages, is the worst for you. In the U.S., the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup has risen 250 percent in the past fifteen yearsand our rate of diabetes has increased approximately 45 percent during the same time period.
High fructose corn syrup is made by food refiners who turn cornstarch into sugary syrups that are then added to sodas, candy, cereal, bread, dairy products, and processed foods. Although the sugar industry sometimes tries to confuse the public by claiming that corn syrup is not sugar, it is a form of sugar as far as your body is concernedand more toxic than cane sugar.
A study in the journal Cancer Research (2010) showed that pancreatic tumor cells actually use fructose, to divide and proliferate. This may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer.
HOW SUGAR CAUSES INFLAMMATION AND CHRONIC DISEASE
Too much sugar, white flour, and other refined carbohydrates in our dietabout 20 percent of our total caloriesincrease inflammation in the body. Inflammation can be acute, from an infection or after a cut or other injury, or chronic and can cause heart disease, stroke, and cancer.
Your immune systems job is to protect you from outside invaders. Antibodies are a type of protein that detects invaders and sees them as other so that immune cells, like white blood cells and natural killer cells, can recognize and kill them. When this happens, inflammation results, which can be a good thing, a protective response by the body that helps you heal.
However, if inflammation lasts too long and becomes chronic, it can actually damage the tissues of your body. In your arteries, for example, your immune system responds to cholesterol as a foreign invader. White blood cells inflame the arterial lining and form plaque. When it becomes chronic, this inflammation is the key factor behind the plaque buildup that causes heart disease and stroke the #1 and #3 killers of Americans.
CHRONIC MEDICAL PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH SUGAR IN OUR DIET:
Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia
Pain of many kinds
Decreased immune function
Chronic sinusitis
Irritable bowel syndrome and spastic colon
Autoimmune disease
Cancer
Metabolic syndrome with high cholesterol and hypertension
Heart disease
Hormonal problems
Schizophrenia
Candida and yeast infections
ADHD
This is the short list. The actual list could go on for pages! Sugar is also a mood-altering substance, causing stress, anxiety, and depression, which is no surprise to anyone with a sweet tooth. For all these reasons, its likely that if sugar growers tried to win FDA approval today, theyd have a tough time getting permission to sell their product.
But the fact is, sugar is everywhere in our diet, and it is dumped into what we eat and drink during food processing. With one-third of our calories coming from sugar and white flour, and the stress of modern life increasing, we are seeing the makings of the perfect storm of medical problems. Eating sugar causes blood sugar to surge, insulin to spike, and fat to get deposited throughout your body. Obesity, often accompanied by diabetes and heart disease, is just one more consequence of our high-sugar diet.
THE VALUE OF SUGAR DETOX
I know the value of ridding the body of excess sugar. For more than thirty years, I have incorporated sugar detox into treatments for countless patients suffering from chronic health problems. I have also seen thousands of people whose chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia were aggravated by a sweet tooth.