Lick the Sugar Habit: Sugar Addiction Upsets Your Whole Body Chemistry Copertina flessibile – 1 febbraio 1988

A Word From the Author

I hope you find the information in this up-to-date edition of Lick the Sugar Habit valuable. We eat a tremendous amount of sugar today—an average of 149 pounds per person per year—and more and more people have health problems as a result of this sugar intake, problems for which they are seeking answers.

The basic premise of this book has changed very little from the original. Homeostasis is homeostasis, from the beginning of time to the end of time, and from the beginning of life to the end of life. I have, however, included new research and added valuable new information about sugar that was not known twelve years ago.

The sad truth is that we, as a nation, are eating much more sugar than ever before. This abuse causes a continual insult to our bodies that eventually results in physical problems. Of course, it is not just sugar that causes upset body chemistry. Other things in our twentieth-century lifestyle can also result in a body out of balance, out of homeostasis. The information presented in this book is designed to encourage you to take control of your life and become responsible for maintaining good health through educated choices.

Nancy Appleton, Ph.D.

Acknowledgment

I would like to take this opportunity to recognize a special debt of gratitude to Bruce Pacetti, D.D.S.

His knowledge of the Body Chemistry Principle along with the willingness with which he communicated it to me as well as to others is the bedrock foundation of my successful effort to regain my health. Many of my ideas in this book come from our many talks and his lectures. Not only did I regain my health, but through his understanding and love, a special friendship has developed.

Nancy Appleton, Ph.D.

Foreword

On what do we place the blame for the poor health of modern man? Diet is surely a major factor.

Eggs, that’s it. Quick, everyone! Switch to sweet rolls and coffee before the eggs clog your arteries! Oh, no—it’s the fat. No more red meat, cut out the butter, watch out for the deadly salad dressing! No, no—salt is the villain. Go for bland, hide the shaker!

Have you noticed that few experts blame sugar? Pure and white, it innocently makes its way into much of our food and into our mouths. If it’s so-o-o-o-o-o good, how could it be so bad? Who would not want to believe that it’s the omelet rather than the ice cream that’s doing us in? Apple pie and ice cream is, after all, the national dish.

Lick the Sugar Habit suggests that sugar eating, our national pastime, is linked to disease, our leading growth industry. We’ve heard this theory before. Never before, however, has it been presented so clearly and without fanaticism. Nancy Appleton is not saying that sugar is the only cause of disease. She is saying that sugar is a major contributor to the disease process. She presents sugar as one of the stress factors that weaken our defenses against illness.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Eliminating sugar from the diet is also reasonable. Have you ever cut out sugar? That’s when life can get very unreasonable. Cold-turkey withdrawal from sugar can bring on the shakes, fever, depression, and headaches. At that point it seems more reasonable to continue the addiction.

Lick the Sugar Habit is a lifesaver, literally. It is a guide to getting unhooked from sugar. Tips on shopping, snacking, supportive friendships, and exercise make this book much more than another synopsis of all the studies on diet and disease.

Even more appealing, Nancy Appleton has been there. Once a sugarholic, she has won the battle against sugar addiction and has been rewarded with vibrant health. The empathy she brings to this subject is genuine. She knows the detrimental effects of sugar.

Are you ready for renewed health and vitality? Will you make the effort to heal and prevent heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and osteoporosis?

The most important effort, for many of us, is licking the sugar habit. Unless that is done, all else may be largely wasted effort. The beneficial effects of exercise are lessened by a sugar diet. The roller-coaster emotions of a sugarholic often wreck supportive relationships. A sugar-dependent person is often too tired to function well at home or at work.

If you are ready to be the best that you can be, this book is for you. Sugar-free may be the missing piece in your puzzle for health.

Shirley Lorenzani, Ph.D.

Preface

Nancy Appleton relates her personal story, and with clear scientific analysis gives an understanding of how disease originates and what one can do about it. She also tells how one can improve and monitor one’s basic health, and how one can enhance the response to any necessary doctoring.

I have spent the last fifteen years of my professional life doing research, clinically applying and lecturing on an obscure biological principle, which is showing evidence of being the common denominator of all disease. It was like a breath of fresh air for me to see how easily Nancy Appleton understood the Body Chemistry Principle the first time I met and exchanged ideas with her. The Body Chemistry Principle is usually not easily understood by health care practitioners.

The Body Chemistry Principle has to do with the functioning of the body systems that depend upon the body’s chemical balances. These systems include the immune system, endocrine system, and digestive system, among others.

Several civilizations have crumbled because of a lack of knowledge about the Body Chemistry Principle. Our civilization is now showing the first signs. Insurance companies are concerned today because statistics show that by 1990, 75 percent of our adult population will have a degenerative disease.

Few Americans today die of old age. Instead, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and diabetes are the usual causes of death. Arthritis, indigestion, influenza, and constipation are also a normal part of our lives. In the future, will coronary bypasses, artificial hearts and kidneys, hysterectomies, reading glasses, PMS, false teeth, and plastic hip joints also be accepted as normal? They need not be. As always, the fittest will survive and live. The fittest now will be those who understand and somehow apply the Body Chemistry Principle. Appleton’s book is a practical introduction to this most vital subject.

Bruce Pacetti, D.D.S.

Introduction

We have heard of the evils of sugar from every writer in the world, except, of course, those from the sugar industry. So what right does Nancy Appleton have to write a book that is going to tell us to stop eating sugar? We’ve heard that old saw before. But wait, gentle reader! There is something in this book of which you are not aware—good and compelling reasons to avoid the sweet stuff.

The biochemical pathway from ingestion to enzyme function decay is traced in such a clear, understandable way that the most confirmed sugarholic will at least cut down on the intake a smidge. How sugar affects the calcium/phosphorus ratio in the bloodstream, how this seems to be the common pathway of stress, and how this stress can lead to degenerative disease are described and documented. I would get a headache, someone else would get migraine, colitis, asthma, eczema, or depression. A method for self-testing at home and monitoring the nutritional treatment is also presented.

Nancy Appleton’s own addiction and recovery give her story a unique viewpoint. She documents the problems stemming from too much sugar and gives self-help techniques and recipes to lick the sugar habit.

A strong case is made for each of us to take responsibility for our own health. Appleton makes it clear that we are responsible for what we eat, think, do, and say. We are not victims of the twentieth-century lifestyle, but many of us do choose a lifestyle that leads to the degenerative disease process.

I recommend this book to everyone who has made personal health a priority, and every person who wants to remove sugar from her or his diet. For sugarholics, Lick the Sugar Habit is an absolute must.

Lendon Smith, M.D.

1

I Was a Sugarholic

When I was a child, a bakery truck used to come regularly to the back door of our house. If my mother wasn’t around, I could buy anything I wanted and charge it—no one seemed to know who had charged what when the bakery bill came. I would buy six donuts, four nut bars, and a couple of coffee cakes, hide them from the rest of the family, and eat them in private. In two days, all of the goodies would be gone, and I’d wait for the bakery truck and more sweet morsels.

Although I didn’t realize it, I was a sugarholic and a chocoholic. Almost from birth I craved the stuff. In my early childhood, I was plagued with bothersome allergies—the signals of an unbalanced body chemistry. My nose ran continually, and so did my eyes. I was constantly sticking fingers in my ears to try to stop the itching, rubbing my fingers over my throat, or even scratching the back of my throat with my tongue for the same reason. Like most people, I misread these body signals and continued my dangerous dietary habits.

My upsetting addiction became worse in my teenage years. I played tennis for four hours a day, every day, and the calories I burned up on the tennis court more than compensated for the calories in the sweets I continued to eat. Therefore, I could consume an incredible amount of sugar and chocolate and not gain weight, even though I was upsetting my body chemistry. After winning a tennis tournament, I would treat myself to two hot-fudge sundaes. When I would lose a tournament, I would eat a whole package of chocolate cookies. Winner or loser, I was a loser. Again, I just wasn’t aware of the connection between my sweet addiction, upset body chemistry, and illness.

All I knew at that age was that I wasn’t fat—just young, strong, and unhealthy. Every tooth in my mouth was eventually filled with gold or silver. My first bout with pneumonia came at age thirteen, and it put me in the hospital for two weeks. During my second year in college, I had a large tumor removed from my chest, which, after a great deal of expensive investigation, turned out to be a calcium deposit. No one told me that my body was unable to digest milk and calcium properly; no one suggested that the sugar in my diet and other lifestyle factors might be upsetting my body chemistry and causing my increasing health problems. I continued to ignore the signals my body was giving me and, in my ignorance, went right on with my unhealthy lifestyle.

I spent my junior year of college studying in Switzerland, land of chocolate. While in Geneva, I phoned a nearby chocolate factory, explained that I was a food and nutrition major, and asked for a tour. What I really wanted, of course, were the chocolate samples at the end of the line. That little trip fed my habit for about a week. This time, however, the weight game didn’t work. Because I was traveling and not playing my usual four hours of tennis every day, I wasn’t burning off the excess calories. I came back from Europe thirty pounds overweight, my sugar and chocolate cravings stronger than ever.

My adult life was plagued with boils, canker sores, varicose veins, headaches, constipation, fatigue, colds, flus, and four more bouts with pneumonia—the results of a lifestyle that promoted an upset body chemistry. Each time I became sick with pneumonia, recovery took longer; my immune system was being weakened continually by my dietary habits and my lifestyle. After my last bout with pneumonia, my cough lasted for six months. Every specialist I consulted diagnosed my problem as chronic bronchitis. “Take antibiotics ten days out of the month for the rest of your life,” I was told over and over. Not one doctor ever asked, “What do you put in your mouth? What do you eat?”

I was forty years old before I realized how little I knew about nutrition, sugar, allergies, or health. Although I still believed that doctors would take care of me, somehow I just couldn’t swallow their diagnoses any easier than I could swallow antibiotics ten days a month for the rest of my life. As my cough continued, I decided to try yoga. I thought that if I stood on my head long enough, the phlegm would come out of my chest. Wrong again. My cough was still there after hours of viewing the world upside down. I hadn’t realize that my chemically unbalanced body would produce excess phlegm whether I stood right side up or upside down.

A Twist Of Fate

A friend suggested that I explore some new ideas on achieving good health by checking out the book section of a health food store. This idea appealed to the book lover in me, and I soon discovered The Pulse Test, by Arthur F. Coca, M.D. The author said it was possible to detect food allergies by comparing one’s pulse before and after eating the food in question. If my pulse increased ten to twelve beats per minute after I ate the food, Coca suggested, I was not metabolizing that food correctly and was allergic to it.1

Being a good do-it-yourselfer, I took my pulse upon awakening and found that I had a resting pulse rate of sixty beats per minute. Remembering that as a child I had suffered from stomach cramps, gas, and allergies after eating ice cream, I drank one glass of milk and took my pulse shortly after. I couldn’t believe it—my pulse jumped from sixty beats to eighty in just a few minutes. I repeated the experiment the next morning, with the same results.*

That was eighteen years ago, and it was the beginning of a new life. I began seeing many different types of clinicians: homeopathic doctors, naturopaths, orthomolecular doctors, and clinical ecologists. These doctors deal with a variety of methods for healing the body other than antibiotics and surgery. They changed my diet, gave me supplements, and offered homeopathic medicines that might heal my body. It took me a long time to realize that there is no magic pill and that even a lot of pills together do not make a magic potion. As long as I was feeding my body abusive foods and continually upsetting my body chemistry, all the pills in the world would not help. It’s like continuously tapping one’s head with a small hammer and wondering why aspirin isn’t getting rid of the headache!

Awareness and change take time, and so does healing. There is no such thing as instant health, and the damage I had done to my body over the course of forty years would not be undone overnight. The more I became in touch with my body, the easier it was to discover what it did and didn’t need. My body was so out of homeostasis (balance) that it was giving me confusing signals; often the foods that satisfy a craving also deepen the addiction and upset. Getting in touch with my allergies, cravings, addictions, headaches, sneezes, and wheezes was a slow, painful process, but it was also enlightening. Although I often had to backtrack, I eventually learned about my body chemistry and what it took to feel well.

Are You a Sugarholic?

Are you a sugarholic? Is your body giving you any signals? The following quiz will help you determine how pervasive refined sugar is in your lifestyle, and what effect it is having on your body. Refined sugar includes sucrose, honey, fructose, glucose, dextrose, levulose, maltose, raw sugar, turbinado sugar, maple sugar, galactose, brown sugar, dextrine, barley malt, rice syrup, corn sweetener, and corn syrup. All of these are simple sugars. They take very little time to digest and get into the bloodstream, where they perform the same disturbance to your body chemistry as table sugar. These substances are found in donuts, processed foods, jams and jellies, ice cream, candy bars, packaged cereals, soft drinks, ketchup, beer, chewing tobacco, chewing gum, and any product that lists sugar among its ingredients.

Answer each of the following questions as truthfully as you can; you’re not going to be graded, and no one is looking over your shoulder. Be honest with yourself—your health depends on it.

If you answered “false” to more than four of these statements, chances are you are sugar-sensitive. You are probably allergic to sugar and also addicted to it—the same way an alcoholic is addicted to alcohol. You crave sugar, have withdrawal symptoms when you don’t get it, and probably feel better for a short time after you’ve eaten it. In eating sugar to feel better, you are actually making your condition worse.

If you answered “false” to four statements or fewer, it doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have a problem with sugar. You may not be addicted to it, but perhaps you don’t quite realize just how much sugar you’re eating.

How much sugar does the average American consume? This question is more difficult than it seems. Until the 1970s, most of the sugar we ate came from sugar beets and sugar cane and was called sucrose. Then in the ’70s, sugar from corn—corn syrup, fructose, dextrose, dextrine, and/or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—began to gain popularity as a sweetener because it was much less expensive than the sugar produced from beets or cane. In order to determine an accurate amount of sweeteners that the average person consumes, it is necessary to combine sucrose and corn sweeteners. Unfortunately, when those in the sugar industry or others with a vested interest in sugar write about sugar consumption, they do not include corn sweeteners. This is deceiving. Many publications have claimed that we are eating less sugar today than we were ten years ago. While it is true that we are eating less sugar, we are consuming a lot more corn sweeteners.

During the 1980s, sugar consumption dropped 33 percent, and corn sweetener consumption averaged 39.6 pounds per person. By 1994, the corn sweetener rate doubled to 83.2 pounds per person. According to the USDA’s Sugar and Sweeteners, a quarterly newsletter, the total consumption of these two major sweeteners, which include sucrose, HFCS, glucose, dextrose, honey, maple syrup, and other edible syrups, increased from 124.4 pounds per person in 1980, to 149.2 pounds per person in 1994.2

One of the problems with regulating sugar consumption is being able to identify the foods that contain it. It’s not always obvious. Many foods, however, do contain sugar. For example, you may be surprised to learn that:

• Many meat packers feed sugar to animals prior to slaughter. This improves the flavor and color of cured meat.

• Sugar (in the form of corn syrup and dehydrated molasses) is often added to hamburgers sold in restaurants to reduce shrinkage.

• The breading on many prepared foods contains sugar.

• Before salmon is canned, it is often glazed with a sugar solution.

• Some fast-food restaurants sell poultry that has been injected with a flavorful honey solution.

• Sugar is used in the processing of luncheon meats, bacon, and canned meats.

• Sugar is found in such unlikely items as bouillon cubes and dry-roasted nuts.

• Sugar is found in beer, wine, and other alcoholic beverages. Champagne and cordials have an unusually high sugar content.

• Sugar is often added to the syrup in canned fruits.

• Peanut butter and many dry cereals (even corn flakes) contain sugar.

• Some salt contains sugar.

• Almost half the calories found in most commercial ketchups come from sugar.

• Over 90 percent of the calories found in the average can of cranberry sauce come from sugar.

It is important to be aware (and beware) of the sugar-laden world around you. Remember, according to statistics, the average person eats over 10 pounds of sugar each month, nearly 41⁄2 cups per week or 30 to 33 teaspoonfuls every day. That’s over 20 percent of our daily caloric intake spent on a refined food that upsets body chemistry and has no nutritional value. Refined sugar is 99.4 to 99.7 percent pure calories—no vitamins, minerals, or proteins, just simple carbohydrates.3

How You Feel Is Up To You

My experience is a classic example of what I call the “degenerative disease process.” All of my ailments were caused by the substances I put into my body. The excess sugar that I ate so obsessively led to a measurable disturbance of the mineral relationships in my system. This mineral imbalance made my digestive enzymes incapable of digesting food properly. I developed classic allergic symptoms due to the toxicity and the undigested food, which was wearing out my immune system.4 Eventually, this mineral imbalance caused the buildup of a severe nonfunctioning calcium excess in my chest. My strong but upset and toxic body manifested one continuous disease process. This process, which started with the excess consumption of sugar, ended in tooth decay, pneumonia, bronchitis, and a variety of other ailments. It was only after I removed the sugar from my diet that my body was able to regain health. I realized for the first time that if I stopped doing to my body what I had done to make it sick, my body would heal itself.

Having shared my health saga with many people, I know now that many of us go through life not knowing what it is to feel well. We are somewhere between health and the disease process most of the time, our symptoms and body signals of toxicity oscillating between not-so-bad and miserable. Since that is all we know, we start believing this is how everyone feels.

Still, it is possible to feel better—and if you really want to, chances are that you can. It is up to you. You can either choose to make yourself sick by ingesting harmful substances, or you can listen to your body’s signals and do what it requires to heal itself.

If you choose to ignore the signals of upset and toxicity that your body is sending, you will force doctors to use stronger and more dangerous techniques, and relegate yourself to the role of victim. Doctors are accustomed to treating conditions that have progressed to a point at which there are serious complaints (severe pain, heart palpitations, swollen joints, or rapid weight loss). They see these drastic conditions and they take drastic measures.

Sugar—The Sour Facts

Now, I don’t eat any sugar, and I know many others who don’t, so many of you must be getting more than the 149 pounds that the average person consumes in a year. Your body needs only two teaspoons of blood sugar at any time in order to function properly. This amount can be obtained easily through the digestion of unrefined carbohydrates, protein, and fats. Even if we ate no glucose or refined sugar at all, our bodies would still have plenty of blood sugar. Every extra teaspoon of refined sugar you eat works to throw your body out of balance and compromise its health.

Ironically, the initial damage done by excess refined sugar makes it that much harder to give up the sweet stuff. Refined sugar is made up of two simple sugars, glucose and fructose. When a person eats sugar continually, the body becomes inefficient at manufacturing glucose from complex carbohydrates, protein, and fats. The mechanisms in the body that perform this task shut down from disuse, causing the blood glucose level to drop. The cravings, perspiration bouts, shakes, and depression that commonly follow send the sugarholic running for the nearest candy bar or cookie jar, and the vicious cycle continues. These sweets may bring the blood sugar back to normal for the moment, but the body chemistry is still being upset. When the individual gets to the point at which his or her body chemistry cannot rebalance, health breakdowns result.

Refined sugar, as tempting as it may be in all those cakes, candies, and cups of coffee, is, in fact, more of a pharmaceutical drug than it is a nurturing food. The minerals needed to digest sugar—chromium, manganese, cobalt, copper, zinc, and magnesium—have been stripped from the sugar during the refining process. This, in turn, forces the body to deplete its own mineral reserves to process the sugar.

Sugar-Coating the Truth

Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Obviously Lincoln hadn’t been trying to get information about sugar from the government.

In 1977, the United States Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs issued a report entitled “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The report was highly critical of “America’s eating patterns,” which, it declared, “represent as critical a public health concern as any now before us.”1 Forcefully, the Committee related the American people’s excess sugar consumption with tooth decay, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease and called for a 40 percent reduction in sugar intake. The senate never issued another report on nutrition. And this 1977 report is hard to come by—negotiated out of print.

In 1986, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a report on American sugar consumption and its possible ill effects on health. The conclusions in this report were based largely on information that had been published in medical journals, not on the FDA’s own scientific research. One conclusion indicated that the consumption of sugar in large quantities—anywhere from 25 to 50 percent or more of one’s caloric intake—could result in one or more of the the following complications: diabetes mellitus, glucose intolerance, hypoglycemia, hyperglycemia, cardiovascular risks, behavioral changes, excess calcium secretion in the urine, gallstones, and mineral deficiencies. However, the report went on to say that Americans need not worry about such medical problems (with the exception of tooth decay) because sugar consumption in this country is not that high.2

The report further stated that the figure of 124 pounds of sugar, which was believed to be consumed by the average American in 1985, actually indicated the amount of sugar manufactured in the United States in 1985, not consumed. According to the report, the average American ate only 40 pounds of sugar per year (about 8 to 12 teaspoons a day). So what happened to the extra 84 pounds of sugar that was allegedly manufactured but not eaten? Supposedly, some of it was used in pet food, some was exported or stored, and some if it was lost during shipping and processing.

Unable to take the FDA’s word for it, I started doing my own research. Shortly after the report came out, I telephoned the FDA and spoke to Dr. Hiltje Irausquin, one of the authors of the report. When asked how she and the other researchers arrived at the figure of 40 pounds of sugar as the average person’s intake per year, she admitted the FDA’s method was neither scientific nor sound. Conclusions were based on a questionnaire that had been sent to 5,000 people who had kept a weekly diet diary. Dr. Irausquin assured me that in the future, a better method would have to be used.

Still unconvinced that the average American consumed only 40 pounds of sugar per year, I phoned the Soft Drink Association. I spoke with Irene Melvin, who sent me a report entitled “Estimated Annual Production and Consumption of Soft Drinks.” The report showed that in 1985, the average person in the United States drank the equivalent of approximately 486 12-ounce cans of soft drinks, 100 of which were sugar-free.3 Each sugary soft drink contains approximately 10 teaspoons of sugar. Multiplying that 10 teaspoons by the 386 cans of sugared soft drinks consumed that year meant that the per capita consumption of sugar from soft drinks alone was 11 teaspoons per day. So if we believe the FDA’s claim that the average American consumed 40 pounds of sugar in 1985 (12 teaspoons per day), then we must also believe that only 1 teaspoon per day came from items other than soft drinks. Hardly believable when you think of all the cookies, candies, cakes, ice creams, jams, jellies, fruit yogurts, and other sugary foods we eat!

I believe the FDA made a gross error. Other sources I have read state that the average American consumed more than 120 pounds of sugar in 1985. The University of California’s Berkeley Wellness Letter estimated a whopping 133 pounds per year, accounting for 20 to 25 percent of all calories, and 500 to 600 calories per person per day in 1985!4

As I mentioned earlier, recent government research shows that in 1994, sugar consumption averaged 149 pounds per person per year. Yet the government doesn’t seem concerned; and the seemingly vague position it currently holds regarding sugar makes it difficult for the American public to obtain accurate information. It seems the less we know about how much sugar is contained in our diets, the less we have to worry about. With the skyrocketing costs of health care and the increasing incidents of degenerative conditions, we all have a lot to worry about.

Glucose, as high in calories as refined sugar, is actually a predigested food that undergoes no processing at all in the stomach or intestines. Yet there is no law requiring that glucose be listed with other ingredients on the label of any package! And the food industry commonly uses glucose as a cheap filler. Since glucose is not as sweet as sugar and, therefore, unrecognizable, many people consume large quantities of it unknowingly. If you eat foods such as packaged cereals, commercial baked goods, and processed meats, chances are you’re getting more hidden refined sugars than you bargained for—maybe 149 pounds more per year!

This high sugar consumption hasn’t always been the case. It is only in the last two centuries that sugar has become a staple of the American diet. In colonial America, table sugar cost $2.40 a pound, as compared to today’s cost of $.35 a pound. Sugar was an expensive luxury then, and a cube of sugar in a Christmas stocking was considered a real treat. In 1795, a large-scale method of granulating sugar was devised, and Louisiana farmers began growing sugar cane as a major crop. Sugar prices went down, availability went up, and Americans began eating too much of it.

The history of sugar consumption was easy to document until the 1970s. Virtually all of our sweeteners came from sugar beets or sugar cane until that time; and they were called sugar or sucrose. After that time, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was introduced, first in the United States, then in Japan, and then to the rest of the world. In the United States, more than 50 percent of our processed sugar comes from HFCS. For clarification in this book, the term “sugar” refers to all sugars that come from cane, beets, and corn.

Human evolution has not yet caught up with the sugar industry. For many thousands of years, mankind ate no refined sugar at all. Early man ate meat, some vegetables, fruit, seeds, and nuts. The past two hundred years of sugar is merely a moment compared to this, and our bodies have not yet evolved mechanisms to cope with this glut. Therefore, our bodies are not able to metabolize large amounts of sugar on a daily basis. In compensating for the excess, our glands and organs become overworked and exhaused, and eventually they malfunction. This scenario is an initiator of the degenerative disease process.

Listen to Your Body

If you’re a sugarholic, as I was, your body is telling you quite bluntly that sugar is causing problems. Addiction is closely related to allergy; the body has become so accustomed to compensating for the presence of the allergenic substance that when the substance is removed, withdrawal symptoms occur. Your sugar cravings are a direct indication that sugar is at work destroying your body.

There are many other ways in which a sugar problem can manifest itself. You may become allergic to other foods (see Chapter 3). You may experience headaches, joint pains, gas pains, bloating, fatigue, and other ailments that are not easily traced to sugar. For this reason, many who are not necessarily sugarholics, who do not feel cravings for sugar or a need to indulge their sweet tooth, refuse to believe that sugar could be the cause of such physical problems. They continue their dietary indiscretions, and their disease process is allowed to advance.

Therefore, it’s important to understand exactly how sugar, even a little sugar, starts this chain reaction. The pages that follow represent a step-by-step journey down this pathway to degenerative disease. You’ll learn how refined sugars throw the body out of balance and can cause food allergies, endocrine problems, hypoglycemia, diabetes, tooth decay, osteoporosis, arthritis, cancer, and many other degenerative diseases. You’ll discover concrete self-help techniques to help rid yourself of these problems. Following these techniques can lead you to a philosophy of responsibility instead of one of helplessness in health matters.