In the sugar-free world, butter, oil and lard are not the bad guys in the diet. These products contain no natural sugars and no sugar is added to them by food manufacturers. Of, course, these foods have calories from fat, and that’s what supposedly makes them so undesirable. What’s not generally recognized or valued is the fact that the calories from butter and oil are highly satisfying and flavorful, two important and essential qualities that are typically ignored by the health and weight loss communities. When your food tastes good and satisfies you, you’re not constantly gnoshing around for something more or something else. Also, as most people know, the Mediterranean style of eating, which includes an abundance of olive oil, has been proven to be one of the healthiest diets in the world. Here’s some basic information about butter, oil, large and the most popular butter imitation spread (I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter). 

Butter:
100 calories per tablespoon: 63% saturated fat; 26% monunsaturated fat; 4% polyunsaturated fat.

Olive Oil:
120 calories per tablespoon: 14% saturated fat; 73% monounsaturated fat: 11% polyunsaturated fat.

Lard:
115 calories per tablespoon: 39% saturated fat; 45% monounsaturated fat: 11% polyunsaturated fat.

Spreads:  I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter
50 calories per tablespoon; 20% saturated fat: 30% monounsaturated fat; 50% polyunsaturated fat

Like most spread products,  I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter is made with vegetable oil.  This recipe features a blend of soybean oil and canola oil.  The appeal of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter  is that it has 1/2 the calories of butter and a lot less saturated fat.  Through the magic of legislation, the food manufacturer can legally claim the food is trans fat free, but when you look at the ingredients list you’ll see words like “partially hydrognated” and “hydrogenated.”  This is the big clue that the product has trans fats.

All scientists everywhere universally agree that man-made trans fats are a real killer in the diet. No exceptions.  The hydrogenation process hardens the oils into a spread, and these hard molecules are unrecognized and harmful to your body. It wouldn’t be so bad if you ate these foods once in a while, but spreads are something you eat day in and day out. I read a quote once that jokingly referred to spreads as “one molecule away from plastic.” Think about it. In the name of 50 less calories, do you really want to put plastic in your body?  This recipe also contains artificial flavors and other additives.    

Spread products without trans fats do exist, but you have to find them.  Ignore whatever it says on the front of the package, and go straight to the ingredients list.  Safe/tasty choices tend to have higher caloric values (around 80 to 100 calories per tablespoon).  These include Smart Balance Omega Plus, Olivio Spreadable Butter with Canola & Olive Oil and Earth Balance Margarine Natural Buttery Spread Lactose Free. 

From a sugar-free perspective, it makes no difference whether you use butter, oil, lard or immitation oil spreads.  That said, my personal vote is for butter and olive oil.

At long last, the scientific “establishment” is starting to understand that it’s the sugar, stupid!  At long last, they’re starting to relay the important message that sugar (and all caloric sweeteners) are the major cause of obesity and health problems in our country and in our world.   “Sugar is toxic beyond it’s calories,” say researchers from UC/San Francisco.  ”The public’s excessive consumption of sugar not only is contributing to a global obesity pandemic but also is critically altering people’s hormones, metabolism and blood presssure and causing significant damange to the liver.” 

An article entitled “The Toxic Truth About Sugar” was published by the scientists in Nature, a journal.  The article draws attention to the unhappy fact that consumption of sugar (and all caloric sweeteners including HFCS) has triped worldwide over the past 50 years and contributes to 35 million deaths each year.  The biggest problem to be corrected is the false but popular belief that caloric sweeteners are relatively harmless because they’re just empty calories.   Of course, sugar has no fat, which also makes it seem harmless.  We’ve all been relentlessly brainwashed to believe that fat is the culprit in our diet, when it’s been sugar all along.  People simply don’t understand that sugar is toxic and addictive.  For one thing, excess sugar consumption mimics the effects of drinking too much alcohol, which of course, is made from distilling sugar!  Also, as mentioned above, caloric sweeteners have a dramatic impact on metabolism, your body can’t handle the chronic overload.   They raise blood pressure, disrupt mineral absorption,  alter hormonal processing, and overload  liver function.   How bad is that! 

The scientists recommend making sugar consumption slightly less convenient by imposing a licensing requirement to sell sweetened drinks and snacks in schools and in the workplace.   This would control access in the same way that access is controlled to alcohol and cigarettes.  In other words, it makes products loaded with concentrated doses of caloric sweeteners slightly more expensive and restricted.  We’ll have to see what the food manufacturers. lobbyists and libertarians have to say about that!  It won’t be pretty. 

The bottom line is that this is really good news.  This research is a tiny but hopeful chink in the low-fat, low-calorie message that has led us down a very long and wrong path for the past 50 years.   Hooray for the Sugar-Free Miracle Diet Sytem that’s been extending this message a full 5 years ahead of the power curve!  Listen up out-of-control eaters and sugar addicts!   It’s absolutely essemtial to get caloric sweeteners (and foods that quickly convert to sugar)  out of the diet!   Eating sugar is like giving an alcoholic a drink.   For get all the psycho talk, and do something practical with the way you eat.

I’m not sure how to react to celebrity chef Paula Deen’s delayed announcement of contracting diabetes. Do I give full vent to the same schadenfreude as when I learned that many tobacco executives die of lung cancer? I don’t think I can pull off kicking that woman when she’s down with a straight face.

Ms. Deen bakes with sugar on the Food Network. We would seem to be natural enemies; the sugar lady with a signature recipe for Key Lime Pie vs. the anti-sugar lady who had to stop baking her mother’s recipe for Christmas coffee cake. If you’d ever tasted that coffee cake, you’d understand and forgive if I might be a little snotty about other people’s enjoyment of sugar. Truthfully, sometimes I’m exactly that person.

Ms. Deen even before her announcement had always hedged her bets telling her audience to practice moderation. I wonder if moderation can be taught by people who don’t look like they walk it like they talk it. I have never expected total abstinence and a life without a little chocolate or Key Lime Pie in it makes you extremely boring. So does this make her the food TV equivalent of a professional football player willing to spend the rest of her life in extreme pain in return for fifteen years of gridiron glory as an example for the rest of us? She doesn’t score touchdowns or do funny endzone dances, so I don’t think her fans will give her the same free pass for the apparent stupidity of wrecking your body for other people’s entertainment.

As soon as she let her diagnosis of Type-2 diabetes into our collective headspace, the media wolf pack circled for the kill. Some reports went right at the “southern comfort food” on Ms. Deen’s show enjoying with straight up vicious glee the irony that a chef promoting a diet rich in butter and sugar would suddenly contract diabetes, an apparent poetic justice. Fellow celebrity chef/travel host Anthony Bourdain weighed in calling her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Well, maybe she could be if a person actually ate her dishes at the rate at which Ms. Deen presents them on her show.

News shows found pictures of Ms. Deen posed with stacks of butter and suddenly scrutinized every meal. Oooooooooooh! She had a cheeseburger and fries! I’m not going to defend that plate as healthy, but no one eats perfectly. I still occasionally bust out the real whipped cream for the once a year pumpkin pie. I pay for it a few days later and go back to my normal regimen. I suppose this sort of thing could be what Ms. Deen meant by moderation, striking a balance between her Key Lime Pie and living long enough to enjoy the experience.

It wasn’t just the media having fun with apparent hypocrisy, but the announcement also included an agreement with a drug company to sell their top shelf diabetes drug. The jackals closed in all over again because we hate corporations and the very thought that a celebrity would sell out on a medical condition for money. At least, we know her maintenance care will be essentially free.

The coverage did also need more balance concerning the health advice for diabetes patients as butter’s being bad for people is under debate. Some (like the Atkins Diet and me) say naturally occurring dairy fat with limited lactose so eat responsibly because there are no substitutes, except that comes from a chemistry lab. Others (American Diabetes Association) say No Never. Even so that stack of butter sticks made for a great photo with which to smack around a celebrity. I suppose it’s now time for all of us to be distracted by the next dress to walk down the runway.

Nancy Appleton PhD is a world expert on health problems due to over consumption of caloric sweeteners. She’s the author of Lick the Sugar Habit, Suicide by Sugar, Killer Colas and others. For more information about Dr. Appleton or to get on her mailing list, visit her website: http://www.nancyappleton.com

Click here  for a direct link to purchase any of Appleton’s books.

HFCS (or High Fructose Corn Syrup) and sugar are the two most popular and prevalent caloric sweeteners in the world. They’re both similar and different. Table sugar, which is technically known as sucrose is made from a recipe that’s 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. HFCS on the other hand, is made from a recipe where there’s slightly more fructose, usually 55 percent or more. The other difference is that table sugar/sucrose typically comes from beets and is solid and HFCS comes from corn and is liquid.

HFCS was introduced to the U.S. food market in 1978, and was developed to taste exactly like sugar, which it does. Because HFCS is cheaper and easier for food manufacturers to use, it only took ten years for HFCS to become the dominant caloric sweetener in all products. If you look at the ingredients list for many beverages or for foods that come in a package, it’s highly likely you’ll see corn syrup or HFCS listed as the first or second food in the recipe. The ingredients list is always on the back of the food container. It’s always in the smallest print, and it’s sometimes hidden under a flap. Nonetheless, the ingredients list is the most important information on the package because it’s the one and only way you can figure out if the caloric sweeteners are naturally-occurring or not. This information is NOT ON THE NUTRITION LABEL.

Most people don’t know what to think about HFCS because they don’t know the meaning of fructose. “Fruct” sounds a little like fruit, and that’s a big clue. Fructose is the naturally-occurring sugar found in fruits. Everyone knows we’re supposed to eat more fruits, so the logical but false conclusion is that HFCS is a healthier substance than sugar. Of course, food manufacturers take advantage of this healthy association and do their best to convince consumers that foods made with HFCS are a wholesome, smart choice. There’s nothing wrong with the naturally-occurring fructose that occurs in fruits. Fructose is only problematic when it’s ingested in excessive, unnatural amounts which is especially the case in caloricaly-sweetened juices and sodas.

Another confusing factor is the fact that HFCS has a lower glycemic index (GI) than sugar, and this also falsely makes it seems less harmful. The glycemic index is a measure of how fast foods break down into blood sugar and the size of the insulin response it prompts. So, for example, the higher the concentration of blood sugar, the greater the insulin response, the worse the glycemic index. Unfortunately, the glycemic index only measures the effect of sucrose, not fructose. As you know, the HFCS recipe has more fructose than glucose, and this allows for the destructive overdosing of fructose to go unmeasured or monitored.

It’s important to understand the difference between the way glucose and fructose are absorbed and used by the body. Glucose goes directly into the blood stream where it’s converted (or metabolized) to blood sugar. Blood sugar first gets used for immediate energy needs before any excess gets stored as fat. Fructose, on the other hand, goes straight into the liver where it’s converted to triglycerides, which is fat. There’s no middle metabolizing step. When you ingest unnatural amounts of fructose, you’re putting a huge burden on your liver, and you’re also creating unnatural amounts of fat.

This fat floats around in your blood stream, gets deposited in your fat cells, and attaches to your blood vessels to form plaques. All this formidable fat action goes relatively unnoticed, however, because fructose is under the radar, so to speak. Even worse, triglyceride production accelerates when massive amounts of fructose are consumed over a long period of time. And lastly, high triglyceride levels have also been shown to drag up total cholesterol levels.

It seems illogical and contrary that a fat-free food like HFCS can have such a big impact on fat production, but this is exactly what happens in your body. The fancy technical term is carbohydrate induced lipemia, which is an excessive amount of fat in the blood from carbohydrates. (HFCS is a carbohydrate). Yet dietary fat continues to take the rap as the root cause of obesity and disease. In fact, our culture is so obsessively fat phobic, no one thinks it’s healthy to put a pat of butter on their veggies, but everyone happily slugs down yogurt made with HFCS as a primary ingredient.

Can it possibly be a coincidence that the introduction of HFCS into our food supply in 1978 parallels the dramatic increase in obesity and overweight in our country? Unfortunately for you, the bulk of scientific research attention is still focused on dietary fat and dietary cholesterol, very little is on sugar/sucrose, and even less is on HFCS. That said, the destructive role that excessive amounts of fructose plays in high triglyceride production is slowly coming to light. As it turns out, for example, it’s much more likely that cardiac patients will have high triglycerides than high total cholesterol, and something called the atherogenic profile could become the single best predictor of heart disease risk. This profile is comprised of just two factors: high triglycerides and low HDL (the healthy cholesterol). Atherogenic is a new term that refers to conditions that result in plaque build-up in the blood vessels.

Then there’s metabolic syndrome, which is defined by the presence of five indicators: 1) high blood pressure, 2) high blood sugar, 3) too much fat around the waist, 4) low HDL (the healthy cholesterol) and 5) high triglycerides. Did you notice that high total cholesterol or high LDL cholesterol isn’t on this list, but high triglycerides are? In addition to heart disease, metabolic syndrome puts you at risk for diabetes, stroke, and probably Alzheimer’s.

HFCS poses a potent triple threat because the glucose in it contributes to high blood sugar, the fructose in it contributes to high triglycerides, and both glucose and fructose contribute to fat around the waist.

It will take another 20 years or so for nutritional guidelines from our government to change and for the message about the toxic effects of HFCS to become more mainstream. In the meantime, think and act for yourself and consider just saying no to HFCS. It’s the easiest, healthiest detox program in the world! While you’re at it, get rid of sugar, too, which is no better for you.