The vast majority of Americans eat way too much sugar. We are a country comprised of grain eaters and lovers of high fructose corn syrup. The next time you go out to eat, look at the menu and count how many dishes feature pasta or rice. On your next trip to the grocery store, try and buy foods without high fructose corn syrup. You will probably find it is almost impossible because grains and high fructose corn syrup are everywhere. And both turn into sugars.

One of the most important things to be aware of in your diet is sugar. The body has developed a mechanism over centuries to store energy for times of famine. When you eat a diet high in sugar, your body has to over-produce insulin to process the sugar. The extra insulin causes your body to store the sugar as fat. When you eat too much sugar for too long, your cells can become resistant to insulin. This causes your body to store even more extra sugar as fat. While this is an over-simplified explanation of what happens, it exemplifies why it is so important to be aware of what is actually in your food. It is also the reason we will talk later about focusing on complex carbohydrates instead of simple ones.

Have you ever wondered why sugar is in everything? In the 1980s, nutritionists started teaching people that the reason they were gaining weight was because they were consuming high fat foods.

Jumping on the bandwagon, food companies across the nation rushed to create foods that were “low fat”. The shelves of our supermarkets became inundated with these low fat foods. What people did not realize at the time was that in order to maintain good tasting foods, companies were just replacing “fat” with sugar. It took many years for people to wake up and realize sugar is far worse for your health than fat. The low fat craze that replaced fat with sugar actually made us fatter and sicker as a nation.

By simply paying attent-ion to your sugar intake, you can dramatically affect your total calories and the quality of those calories for the better.

This is an excerpt out of Dr. Tim Reynolds’ book.  To read more, click here, or pick-up a copy at checkout.

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