SUGAR Free Duniya

26/01/2023

Avoid Refined Carbs & Added Sugar

Sugar and refined carbs have one thing in common: They both spike blood glucose, which results in too much insulin being released. Then, once the insulin mops up all the glucose, you crave more sugar or carbs. Over time, the cells don’t respond to insulin as well and resistance sets in.

25/01/2023

Ten Tips To Avoid Sugar For A Better Body Composition

1) Eliminate All Processed Foods
The easiest way to avoid sugar is to eliminate all processed foods. Opt for whole foods: Organic meat, whole milk dairy, nuts, seeds, beans, vegetables, and fruit.

2) Read All Food Labels
You should avoid all processed and packaged foods, but in the rare cases that you can’t, try to buy foods that don’t have added sugar. First, check the ingredient list for all of the following: Sugar, evaporated cane juice, high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, agave, honey, molasses, brown sugar, and fruit juice concentrates.

Second, check the nutrition label to find out how many grams of sugar is in the food. This may be added sugar or naturally occurring sugar found in milk, plain yoghurt, and fruit. Don’t worry about naturally occurring sugar as long as you eat in reasonable quantities. Obviously, you want to avoid added sugars whenever possible.

3) Start By Limiting Sugar Intake to 100 Calories a Day
If you are a sugar ju**ie and can’t fathom the idea of eliminating sugar, start by cutting back. Shoot for 100 calories a day, which is equal to about 25 grams a day or 6.5 teaspoons.

4) Avoid All Sweetened Beverages
Avoid all sweetened beverages and all other beverages that have added sugar, including diet and regular soda, tea, sports drinks, energy drinks, etc.

There is compelling evidence that sweetened beverages of all kinds are linked to accelerated fat gain, and a greater risk of obesity, diabetes, and other health problems because liquid sugars are turned into fat very quickly and alter insulin sensitivity.

5) Avoid Fruit Juice
Avoid fruit juice. Juice contains none of the fibre of the fruit and most fruit juices have a whopping dose of added sugar. Even if they don’t, you need to avoid them from a body composition perspective because the liquid sugar (much of which is fructose) is quickly converted into fat like soda.

6) Minimize Your Fructose Intake
Save your fructose intake for fruit and avoid all other forms. Most fruits are high in fibre, vitamins, and antioxidants, making them an important part of your diet.

For fat loss, limit your intake to 5 to 10 grams of fructose a day, with very active individuals maxing out at 20 grams. Lower fructose fruits and vegetables include most berries, nectarines, grapefruit, avocado and tomatoes. Bananas, apples, and pears are on the high end of the scale.

7) Don’t Add Sugar To Foods or Beverages
If you currently drink tea or coffee with added sugar, stop.

8) Accept that There Is No Healthy Sugar
Although added fructose may be the worst sugar because of how it slows metabolism and halts fat burning, there is NO nutritional value in any form of sugar except possibly honey. For optimal body composition, avoid ALL sugar.

Be aware that “healthier” sweeteners are a myth—agave is one of the worst sweeteners because it is almost pure liquid fructose with an even higher fructose content (88 per cent) than high-fructose corn syrup!

9) Avoid Diet Sweeteners
Avoid diet soda and other diet sweeteners because many are chemically derived and have been linked with severe health problems and cancer risk. Ingesting sweeteners such as aspartame, Splenda, etc., increases your toxic load, and there is evidence that humans naturally use sweet taste to predict the caloric content of food. Eating sweet non-caloric substances may degrade this predictive relationship, leading us to eat more calories, and producing fat gain.

For example, controlled studies of rats have found that feeding the animals artificially sweetened food reduces the correlation between sweet taste and the caloric content of foods, resulting in increased energy intake, fat gain, and a blunted thermic response to sweet-tasting diets. This means the rats’ bodies adapted to burn fewer calories in response to the same amount of food intake, indicating a slower metabolic rate.

10) Enjoy Stevia in Moderation
Stevia is a non-caloric sweetener that comes from the stevia bush, which is native to South America. It has been found to improve glucose tolerance and may help fight diabetes. Other studies have shown that it can lower blood pressure and convey additional health benefits.

Stevia doesn’t cause an insulin release but it does need to be metabolized by the body, which happens via detoxification through the liver and kidneys. So, it’s not turned into fat or used as energy in the body, but it still must be processed and excreted, meaning you don’t want to eat it in huge quantities.

24/01/2023

The Problem With Fructose

Fructose was originally thought to be a great alternative to sucrose because it doesn’t affect insulin. Recent research shows that consuming food or beverages with added fructose will slow your metabolic rate, halt fat burning in the body, and the liver will turn any excess fructose into fat very quickly.

For example, a study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition compared the effects of eating a diet that was high in fructose-based carbohydrates with one that included mainly glucose-derived carbs on body composition in overweight individuals. Researchers had participants eat a diet of 15 per cent protein, 30 percenter per cent and 55 per cent carbohydrate (30 per cent was complex carbs and 25 per cent fructose or glucose) for 10 weeks.

Both groups gained fat, but the fructose group gained more fat, most of which was visceral belly fat. They also decreased their resting metabolic rate, meaning they burned fewer calories at rest after the 10 weeks, which is never a good thing because it will lead to an excess energy balance and fat gain.

Fat burning was also decreased in the group that ate the fructose, which is a very unfavourable result because it leads to fat accumulation in the liver and decreased insulin sensitivity.

Other studies provide additional evidence that fructose is bad news: A Harvard review of 300,000 people found that for each 12-ounce serving of high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened beverage ingested a day, diabetes risk was increased by 15 per cent, and a similar finding linked fructose-sweetened beverages with greater visceral belly fat and insulin resistance in teenagers.

Aside from causing visceral belly fat gain, increasing diabetes risk, and lowering the metabolic rate, fructose intake is thought to lead to elevated blood triglyceride levels, which is a primary indicator of heart disease risk.

All of these negative effects are set off by what happens with the liver when too much fructose enters the system. The liver can process a small amount of fructose efficiently, such as the amount found in a serving of blueberries or raspberries.

But more than a few grams get converted quickly by the liver into fat, and the liver appears to favour putting the fat into muscle, the abdominal cavity, and the liver itself. All this fat is called visceral fat and it is the worst kind for you to have because it sends out inflammatory factors that promote insulin resistance, raises triglycerides, and degrade muscle tissue

23/01/2023

The Problem With Sugar

There is a serious flaw with the argument that sugar is okay in moderation. Humans don’t seem to be able to control themselves when it comes to sugar intake. And for good reason: Sugar alters hormone response and brain function so that we are driven to eat more of it.

Wakefulness, energy expenditure, and the brain’s reward centre are all downregulated when we eat sugar. A network of transmitters in the brain responds to the food you eat, and if you eat carbs, especially sugary carbs, the network is inhibited, slowing energy use and making you less alert.

For example, dopamine signalling is reduced so you feel less pleasure and want more sweets, while the hormone leptin, which suppresses hunger and signals fullness, is not elevated.

Humans aren’t to “blame” for loving sugar or being unable to control their intake since it basically hijacks the brain to persistently crave more sugar, a craving that the vast majority of humans are not able to overcome.

And many people eat some if not lots processed foods, nearly all of which contain some added sugar, making their intake that much higher and intensifying their cravings. Therefore, if you or your children eat foods with added sugar on a regular basis, there’s little doubt that you are getting too much, and putting yourself at risk of insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity, and disease.

21/01/2023

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