Grow Youthful: How to Slow Your Aging and Enjoy Extraordinary Health
Grow Youthful: How to Slow Your Aging and Enjoy Extraordinary Health

Weight gain / fat / overweight / obesity

What makes and keeps you fat?

Why is being overweight so easy?

Sugar addiction test

Consequences of obesity

Healing obesity

References

What makes and keeps you fat?

  1. Abuse of sugar makes you fat. The more continually you consume sugar, the more continually your blood insulin is elevated, and the fatter you get. When you stop consuming sugar, you start to lose the fat.

    Sugar causes overweight / weight gain / obesity. In the presence of a continually high level of insulin, your liver converts the sugar in everything you eat and drink into stored fat. Sugar upsets many other hormones (11, 12, 13) including those that make you feel full after you've had enough to eat. (9, 20)

    Sugar is highly addictive. Unfortunately, it is not easy to stop consuming sugar. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 14, 15, 20). Did you know that sugar is as addictive as cocaine, heroin or morphine? (8, 10) Rats fed on a junk food diet for just five days preferred to starve rather than return to their previous healthy diet. (25, 26, 27)

    Fructose is the worst kind of sugar. (16, 18) High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is added to just about every prepared food that you can buy in the USA, because it is addictive and really cheap. (19, 24) In other countries other forms of sugar like beet sugar and cane sugar are the cheapest so they use them liberally instead.

    After you adjust to a diet that doesn't contain sugar and refined carbohydrates, you won't feel hungry or deprived. You won't feel like you're dieting, because you are not. (6) You'll just be eating the way that humans evolved to eat. And you'll have the body shape and size that humans are meant to have.
  2. Vegetable oils made from seeds, grains and legumes are poisonous, sickening, and an important cause of the obesity epidemic. (33) These "Golden vegetable oils" lined up in your supermarket include canola, corn, cottonseed, flaxseed, grapeseed, peanut, safflower, soy and sunflower oils. Factory-made omega-6 polyunsaturated seed oils make and keep you obese, and set you up for numerous other modern diseases and an early death. Replace these toxic vegetable oils with healthy saturated fats from animals like butter, ghee, lard and tallow. (21, 22, 23, 33)
  3. Sleep deficiency. A lack of sleep sabotages your sugar and hunger management hormones. Getting less than 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night causes insulin resistance, makes you feel hungrier than you actually are, and stops the signals when your stomach is full.
  4. Exercise sabotage. If you are having difficulty losing weight in spite of going to the gym several times each week and eating sensibly, the answer is often that you are a high achiever who is not getting enough sleep and the lack of sleep is sabotaging both your exercise and your weight. If you are not getting enough sleep, do not exercise intensively. If you are doing high intensity exercise, interval training, competitive sports, or extensive running or other exercise, it is essential to get 7 to 8 hours of good sleep every night. Sleep is a detoxification process, and with insufficient sleep there will be an increased toxic load in the body, cortisol will be raised, the immune system will be stressed, and insulin will be elevated and less efficient.
  5. Lack of natural sunlight, lack of red light, excess of blue (tech) light, insomnia, causing a variety of hormonal imbalances and damage to the gut biome.
  6. Bromine makes it difficult to lose weight after fat has built up. Bromides react with fat in the body, in effect solidifying the fat and making it hard to lose weight. Bromine is widely used in soft drinks (colas, sodas, sports drinks), food products such as white flour, and many household and pharmaceutical products. The antidote? Iodine.

Why is being overweight so easy?

1. Sugar is addictive (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 20). Once you're hooked, it is the same as being addicted to alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, heroin, morphine or any other addictive substance. Well-meaning parents and family unknowingly feed sugar to small children. Nowadays we start them right at the beginning with apple juice and other sweet baby foods. Processed food manufacturers deliberately add sugar to their foods and drinks to keep you hungry and keep you coming back for more. (19, 24) Most overweight people have been addicted to sugar all their lives. The processed food industry thrives on sugar.

You don't really believe that sugar is so addictive? It is not easy to completely stop consuming sugar - maybe harder than giving up smoking. Breaking sugar's addictive grip on you needs real determination. It's not just giving up something you enjoy; rather it is stopping something that is compulsive.

2. Sugar is cheap and added to everything. 100 years ago, sugar was rare and expensive. There were almost no obese people, and even fat people were rare. Most people were like string beans by today's standards. Heart disease was a medical rarity. Before World War II, obesity was uncommon in the USA, Australia and England. Most food was prepared at home or in a traditional manner. Sugar was available, but expensive. Sweets, colas, chocolates, pastries, biscuits/cookies and so on were a rare treat for most people. Very few people were addicted to sugar.

Today however, sugar is cheap. It is available everywhere for just a dollar or two per kilo. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the addictive sweetener that is now added to most processed foods and drinks, is virtually a waste product and used by the ton.

If you buy food in supermarkets, you are being trained to have a sweet tooth for every food and drink you consume - breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between. You are being captured and deliberately addicted to sweet foods and drinks. (14, 15, 19, 24) If you are a food manufacturer, the way to beat your competition is to add more sugar to your products than they do.

The weight-loss industry, the various food industries, and the supermarket and drink industries don't want you to know it's so simple. If everybody knew what to do to keep slim, these industries would lose most of their profits and go out of business. So they have a strong incentive to keep you confused with false information (example: eating fat makes you fat, so buy low-fat foods. (7))

3. Snacking. Eating food all day long because food is available effortlessly, all day every day. This is not normal for the human body. We evolved in food scarcity, when it was quite normal and unremarkable to have no food, or very little food.

4. Damaged gut biome. The microorganisms that make up the ecosystem of the digestive tract have nearly always been compromised. Antibiotics, excessive cleanliness, processed food, refined sugar and white processed flours are some of the main culprits in devastating the gut's biome. Obese people nearly always have a smaller number of different bacteria in their guts, and the species that predominate are often pathogenic when allowed to increase beyond healthy numbers. Getting the biome back in balance is often a key to controlling hunger cravings, unnecessary appetite and many digestive issues. This is done by eating plenty of pre-biotic foods as a normal everyday part of your diet, and using probiotics, preferably traditional live fermented foods. A couple of the key bacteria associated with regaining healthy weight include the Bifidobacteria faecalibacterium prausnitzii, a range of Lactobacilli, and Methanobrevibacter. However it is not a matter of getting just these few key bacteria, it is more important to re-establish hundreds of bacteria and other microorganisms forming a balanced and diverse ecosystem.

5. Toxins in foods. Avoid all processed foods, including farmed fish. Genetically modified foods are a cause of obesity. It is important to eat an organic and GMO-free diet.

Sugar addiction test

20 second test to see if you are you addicted to sugar.

  1. Do you ever need sugar as a pick-me-up? Perhaps a sweet snack/chocolate/cookie with your mid-morning coffee? A dessert after a meal? A sweet protein or dried fruit bar after your exercise?
  2. Do you struggle to walk past a sweet treat without taking just one?
  3. Are all your favourite foods sweet rather than savoury?
  4. If you have a whole day without sugar, do you suffer mood swings, headaches or low energy?

If you answered yes to just one of the above questions, you are addicted to sugar.

Your use of sugar is not because you are weak-willed, a glutton, or have a personality defect. It is because you are addicted to a substance called fructose that is hidden in the food supply and has been fed to you for years. An addiction is an uncontrollable, compulsive behaviour, despite the health and social consequences.

Consequences of obesity

There are several different types of sugar (sucrose, glucose, galactose, fructose and others). Fructose in particular is responsible for most obesity and digestive problems today. When you have eaten enough of most foods, your gut or pancreas releases a hormone to make you feel full (satiated). Fructose bypasses the "feel full" mechanism. Instead, your liver rapidly turns sugar into fat. This shows up as a high level of blood triglyceride, which leads to heart disease.

Healing obesity

References

1. Nicole M. Avena, Pedro Rada, Bartley G. Hoebel. Evidence for sugar addiction: Behavioural and neurochemical effects of intermittent, excessive sugar intake. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 32 (2008) 20-39.


2. Nicole M. Avena, Pedro Rada, Bartley G. Hoebel. Sugar and Fat Bingeing Have Notable Differences in Addictive-like Behavior. The Journal of Nutrition, 2009.

3. Corsica, Joyce A.; Pelchat, Marcia L. Food addiction: true or false? Gastroenterology: March 2010 - Volume 26 - Issue 2 - p 165-169.

4. Blumenthal, Daniel M.; Gold, Mark S. Neurobiology of food addiction. Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care: July 2010 - Volume 13 - Issue 4 - p 359-365.

5. Leandro F. Vendruscolo, Aliou B. Gueye, Muriel Darnaudery, Serge H. Ahmed, Martine Cador. Sugar Overconsumption during Adolescence Selectively Alters Motivation and Reward Function in Adult Rats. Open Access, February 2010.

6. Marcia Levin Pelchat. Food Addiction in Humans. Supplement to The Journal of Nutrition, April 2008.

7. We need healthy fats in our diets, and they are NOT the cause of obesity. Low-fat foods and drinks have an immediate appeal to people who are overweight, and are easy to advertise to them. Low-fat diets were based on faulty research by Ansel Keys and others after World War II, are now discredited. Low-fat diets do not help prevent heart disease either. However, low-fat foods suit the processed dairy food industry, and other food industries. See why in my ebook Grow Youthful.

8. Alburges M.E., Narang N., Wamsley J.K. Alterations in the dopaminergic receptor system after chronic administration of cocaine. Synapse. 1993;14:314-323.

9. Avena N.M., Rada P., Moise N., Hoebel B.G. Sucrose sham feeding on a binge schedule releases accumbens dopamine repeatedly and eliminates the acetylcholine satiety response. Neuroscience. 2006;139:813-820.

10. Bakshi V.P., Kelley A.E. Sensitization and conditioning of feeding following multiple morphine microinjections into the nucleus accumbens. Brain Res. 1994;648:342-346.

11. Bray G.A., Nielsen S.J., Popkin B.M. Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity. Am J Clin Nutr. 2004;79:537-543.

12. Corwin R.L. Bingeing rats: a model of intermittent excessive behavior? Appetite. 2006;46:11-15.

13. Curry D.L. Effects of mannose and fructose on the synthesis and secretion of insulin. Pancreas. 1989;4:2-9.

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21. Miettinen M et al. Effect of cholesterol-lowering diet on mortality from coronary heart-disease and other causes. A twelve-year clinical trial in men and women. The Lancet 1972 Oct 21;2(7782):835-8.

22. Dayton S et al. Composition of lipids in human serum and adipose tissue during prolonged feeding of a diet high in unsaturated fat. The Journal of Lipid Research 1966 Jan;7(1):103-11.

23. Pan D A, Storlien L H. Dietary lipid profile is a determinant of tissue phospholipid fatty acid composition and rate of weight gain in rats. Journal of Nutrition 1993 Mar;123(3):512-19.

24. Gitanjali M. Singh, Renata Micha, Shahab Khatibzadeh, Stephen Lim, Majid Ezzati, Dariush Mozaffarian, on behalf of the Global Burden of Diseases Nutrition and Chronic Diseases Expert Group (NutriCoDE). Estimated Global, Regional, and National Disease Burdens Related to Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption in 2010. CIRCULATION AHA. (AHA - American Heart Association) 114.010636. Published online before print 29 June 2015. doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.010636.

25. Paul M Johnson, Paul J Kenny. Dopamine D2 receptors in addiction-like reward dysfunction and compulsive eating in obese rats. Nature Neuroscience 13, 635-641 (2010).

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31. Yumi Hurst, Haruhisa Fukuda. Effects of changes in eating speed on obesity in patients with diabetes: a secondary analysis of longitudinal health check-up data. BMJ Open 2018;8:e019589. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-019589. Published online 12 February 2018.

32. Eloi Chazelas, Bernard Srour, Elisa Desmetz, Emmanuelle Kesse-Guyot, Chantal Julia, Valerie Deschamps, Nathalie Druesne-Pecollo, Pilar Galan, Serge Hercberg, Paule Latino-Martel, Melanie Deschasaux, Mathilde Touvier. Sugary drink consumption and risk of cancer: results from NutriNet-Sante prospective cohort. BMJ 2019; 366 doi: bmj.l2408. Published 10 July 2019.

33. Martin Grootveld, Benita C. Percival, Kerry L. Grootveld. Chronic non-communicable disease risks presented by lipid oxidation products in fried foods. Leicester School of Pharmacy, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, UK. Submitted Feb 25, 2018. Accepted for publication Apr 04, 2018. doi: 10.21037/hbsn.2018.04.01.