Sugar Busting Plan
This is the plan to use if you like sugar a lot, if your day simply isn't complete without a couple of chocolate bars, if you regularly crave sugary foods or drinks or if you just use sugary foods to fuel your day's energy dips and would like to stop.
About sugar
If you're a sugar addict, you're not alone. House-hold surveys in the US and Britain have found that the average American citizen eats 30kg (64lb) of sugar a year, while Britons each eat 9kg (201b). In France, eating cakes is seen as one of the best ways to make yourself happy (53 per cent of the population say they do it), and 36 per cent of Europeans eat chocolate to deal with stress. It may even be programmed into us to like sugar; it's well known that babies actually taste amniotic fluid in the womb, and when scientists put sugary substances into that fluid they taste it a lot more often.
There's a lot about sugar to like. It boosts your mood by producing the happy hormone serotonin in the brain, it can provide a temporary energy boost and it tends to come wrapped up in tasty treats like chocolate, cakes or ice cream. When you're feeling down or fatigued, or even feeling like you did a great thing today and you need a treat, reaching for something sugary is a natural and happy reaction, and a lot cheaper than retail therapy.
Therefore, bearing all this in mind, the following is not going to be good news: most of us do need to cut down our intake. The truth is that sugar is rapidly shaping up to be one of the major food toxins, with researchers at the New York State University in Buffalo, USA, recently naming it the number one ageing food. Other health experts claim it's one of the major promoters of poor health in the 21st century.
There are a few reasons for this:
- Sugar increases the levels of toxic free radicals. In fact, eating 300g (lOVfoz) of sugar boosts free radical numbers by 140 per cent.
- Sugar affects immunity. When it needs to, the average white blood cell can gobble up about 14 germs in an hour (someone really has measured this), but when exposed to 10Og (3'/?oz) of sugar this number falls to only 1.4 germs, and, furthermore, stays that way for two hours.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, a safe level of sugar is about 40g (1 Vtoz) a day. If you can reduce your intake to this, or below, you'll dramatically improve your health. In fact, you'll have more energy than ever before, you'll be ill less often, you'll find it easier to control your weight and your skin will be less likely to get wrinkles.
The Solution
What to and not to Eat
Suggested Eating Plan
Cravings Strike
Living the Detox Life