I have a wonderful guest today! Nicolette M. Dumke, author of the health/fitness book, Food Allergy and Gluten-Free Weight Loss: Control Your Body Chemistry, Reduce Inflammation, and Improve Your Health (Allergy Adapt, Inc.), is on a blog tour December 5 – 16 answering questions about nutrition. I am happy to be hosting her today and here’s my question:
“I recently gave up carbonated sodas in my diet and two months later, I lost an astounding 18 pounds. I also gave up sweets during that time but have brought them back to an occasional cookie, etc. I don’t see a weight increase and am continuing with my non-soda diet plus walking 1/2 mile in the morning, although I do drink sweet tea. My question is that I’m wondering what sweets actually do to the body besides taking in excess calories. Do they play havoc with other parts of your insides?”
Nicolette: “Sodas are major culprits in the weight gain battle. A 12-ounce can of soda contains 38 to 40 grams of carbohydrate, or the equivalent of about 10 teaspoons of sugar. A 44 to 45-ounce super-sized fountain soda contains as many as 186 grams of carbohydrate. This is the equivalent of almost one cup of table sugar! If consumed without food, the sugar in a soda enters the bloodstream very rapidly. This causes blood sugar levels to shoot up, followed by a similarly dramatic rise in insulin levels.
The best-kept secret about weight gain and loss is that calories are not the only, or even the major, determiner of weight. Hormones, such as insulin, cortisol, leptin, and others, are what really determine our weight. High insulin levels, which are likely to occur after drinking a soda, affect the enzymes that control fat metabolism. These enzymes tell your body, “Hold on to any food you get,” thus causing weight gain, as well as making it impossible to mobilize body fat for use in physical activity. High insulin levels also make us feel hungry, thus leading us to eat even more food. For more about insulin and other hormones and how you can control them to help you lose weight, see http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com/controlling_hormones.html.
Here is why giving up sodas has produced such dramatic weight loss: Your insulin levels are remaining low and stable much of the time. This allows you to burn body fat and makes you feel less hungry. Because your body is put into a “burn fat” mode by low insulin levels, your morning walk burns body fat very effectively. Other types of moderate exercise, such as gardening, house cleaning, and leisurely bicycling or swimming, would also promote weight loss. However, walkers are the most successful at losing weight and maintaining their loss. Excessive or overly strenuous exercise, especially if done without food, unsettles our weight-controlling hormones and can even promote weight gain or impede weight loss. For more about this see http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com/exercise_right.html.
Sweet tea is a better beverage than soda because it contains much less sugar. If you are adding the sugar yourself, you probably add only one to two teaspoons per glass of tea, or 4 to 8 grams of carbohydrate. If you find your weight loss slowing down, or for optimal health, you might want to sweeten your tea with stevia. The purified white powder form of this herb, especially in “next generation” stevia products such as those made by Protocol for Life Balance™, is a great sweetener for everything from baking to beverages. In addition, health food stores sell flavored stevia solutions to add to tea and coffee. Stevia contains no calories and does not cause blood sugar or insulin levels to rise. On the other hand, studies have shown that artificial sweeteners such as Aspartame™ can cause weight gain in some people, so if you want to give up sugar in your tea, stevia is the healthiest choice.
An occasional cookie, especially if eaten with a protein-containing meal or even a snack of nuts or cheese, is also less problematic than a soda for two reasons: (1) It contains less sugar, and (2) The fat and fiber in the cookie (oatmeal cookies are good for fiber), as well as the protein fat, and fiber in the meal or snack, buffer the impact of the carbohydrate in the cookie on blood sugar and insulin levels.
Although sugar is mentioned repeatedly here, it is not the only culprit among sweeteners. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which has recently been re-branded as “corn sugar,” is as bad or worse. Because the single sugars in HFCS are “free” rather than bonded together in pairs as in table sugar (sucrose), HFCS enters the bloodstream even more rapidly than sugar, causing an even higher insulin response. Sodas are usually sweetened with HFCS, which may be part of the reason they are so detrimental to health. For more about the negative health effects of HFCS, see the 10-1-2008 post about half way down this page: http://www.chemicalfreekids.com/updates08.htm.
Sweets play havoc on our bodies in other ways. Excess consumption of sweets, with the resulting repeated jolts to the pancreas (the organ that produces insulin) can wear out the pancreas, resulting in type II diabetes.
Another problem with sweets is that sugar has a detrimental effect on our intestinal ecosystems of bacteria and other microorganisms. Sugar promotes the growth of unfriendly bacteria and yeast in the digestive system as well as elsewhere in the body. Its ability to encourage yeast of the Candida species can be especially problematic. Thus, diets high in sweets can lead to disordered intestinal flora (called dysbiosis), digestive problems, leaky gut syndrome, and food allergies. People who develop Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease, often have habitually eaten diets high in sweets.
Sweet! That’s what sugar is, but for best health and weight reserve it for occasional treats. The rest of the time, sweeten your goodies with liquid fruit sweeteners such as fruit juice concentrates or Fruit Sweet™, date or coconut sugar, honey, agave, or stevia. Have fresh fruit for treats or dessert and nuts or other protein foods for snacks. Keep up the good work on walking and avoiding sodas, and you will reach your ideal weight more easily than you might imagine.
Nickie Dumke enjoys helping people with food allergies and gluten intolerance find solutions to their health and weight problems. She began writing books to help others with multiple food allergies over 20 years ago and the process culminated in The Ultimate Food Allergy Cookbook and Survival Guide. She says, “This book contains everything I know to help with food allergies,” and it has helped many people come back from near-starvation. Her other books address issues such as how to deal with time and money pressures on special diets, keeping allergic children happy on their diets, and more.
A few years ago, while listening to the struggles of an allergic friend on the Weight Watchers™ diet, she remembered her own weight struggles* many years ago and thought, “There has to be a better way.” This was the beginning of a new quest, and she is now helping those who are overweight due to inflammation (often due to unsuspected food allergies) or high-in-rice gluten-free diets, as well as those who are not food sensitive but want to lose weight permanently, healthily, and without feeling hungry and deprived. Her unique approach to weight and health presented in Food Allergy and Gluten-Free Weight Loss is based on body physiology and reveals why conventional weight-loss diets work against rather than with our bodies and therefore rarely result in permanent weight loss.
* (Nickie’s weight loss story, briefly, is that in her early 20s she could not lose on a calorie-counting diet in spite of repeatedly further reducing the number of calories she ate and swimming vigorously and often. Then she found a diet based on blood sugar control, lost weight without being hungry, and still weighs what she did in her mid-20s).
Nickie has had multiple food allergies for 30 years and has been cooking for special diets for family members and friends for even longer. Regardless of how complex your dietary needs are or how much or little cooking you have done, she has the books and recipes you need. Her books present the science behind multiple food allergies and weight control in an easily-understood manner. She has BS degrees in medical technology and microbiology. She and her husband live in Louisville, Colorado and have two grown sons.
You can visit Nickie’s websites at http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com and http://www.food-allergy.org.
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Karen Simpson is passionate about the craft of writing fiction, the art of quilting, and the discipline of historical research. She received her bachelor’s degree in Animal Husbandry, M.A. in Foreign and International Trade and a M.S. in Historic Preservation. A historic preservationist trained in heritage interpretation and administration, the subjects and themes of her fiction are often taken from the stories she discovers while doing research for museum exhibits. In 2009 Simpson was awarded the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Older Writers Grant. She is lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 
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