The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast by Mark Hyman Read Free Book Online

risk of diabetes by 82 percent.
    One young woman with eight kids from New Zealand had a bad Coke habit. It killed her. She drank 2.2 gallons a day, or 2 pounds of sugar and 900 milligrams of caffeine. Autopsy reports show she died of a fatty liver and heart damage from the Coke. Though the American Beverage Association would have us think otherwise, sugar-sweetened drinks are a major contributor to our big fat problem.
    Considering that 15 percent of our calories come from sweetened beverages, cutting them out is an easy way to dramatically improve your health. One patient of mine lost seventy-five pounds just by becoming aware of and cutting out his liquid sugar calories.

WHY NOT SWITCH TO ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS?
    Diet soda and diet drinks make you fat and cause type 2 diabetes.
    Wait… diet soda makes people fat? Really? How does that happen?
    If losing weight were all about the calories, then consuming diet drinks would seem like a good idea. That’s certainly what Coca-Cola wants us to believe, judging by its ad campaigns highlighting its efforts to fight obesity. (And the other food giants making diet drinks push the same propaganda.) Coke proudly promotes the fact that it has 180 low- orno-calorie drinks and that it has cut sales of sugared drinks in schools by 90 percent.
    Is that a good thing? I don’t think so. In fact, it may be
worse
to drink diet soda than regular soda. A fourteen-year study of 66,118 women published in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
(and supported by many previous and subsequent studies) discovered some frightening facts that should make us all swear off diet drinks and products:
    Diet sodas raised the risk of diabetes more than sugar-sweetened sodas.
    Women who drank one twelve-ounce diet soda a week had a 33 percent increased risk of type 2 diabetes, and women who drank one twenty-ounce soda a week had a 66 percent increased risk.
    Women who drank diet sodas drank twice as much as those who drank sugar-sweetened sodas because artificial sweeteners are more addictive than regular sugar.
    The average diet soda drinker consumes three diet drinks a day.
    Let me lay out a few more of the evils of artificial sweeteners, just in case you’re not yet convinced:
    Artificial sweeteners are hundreds to thousands of times sweeter than regular sugar, activating our genetically programmed preference for sweetness more than any other substance.
    Artificial sweeteners trick your metabolism into thinking sugar is on its way. This causes your body to pump out insulin, the fat-storage hormone, which leads to more belly fat.
    Artificial sweeteners confuse and slow down your metabolism, so you burn fewer calories every day. They make you hungrier and cause you to crave even more sugar and starchy carbs, such as bread and pasta.
    In animal studies, the rats that consumed artificial sweeteners ate more food, their metabolic fire or thermogenesis slowed down, and they put on 14 percent more body fat in just two weeks—even if they ate fewer total calories than the rats that ate regular sugar-sweetened food.
    The bottom line is that there is no free ride. Diet drinks are not good substitutes for sugar-sweetened drinks. They increase cravings, weight gain, and type 2 diabetes. And they are addictive.

THE WAY OUT
    The evidence for biological addiction is overwhelming. You may be saying, “No, not me… I can control my eating. I can handle having some sugar or cookies. It really isn’t affecting my life that much.”
    This is called denial. Food addiction affects more than just a few of the massively obese. It affects nearly all those who are overweight or have struggled to control their eating behavior, cravings, and appetite. The diagnostic criteria for substance abuse in the DSM-V (the psychiatry handbook) match exactly the behavioral characteristics of food addiction, including:
Tolerance, the need for increasing amounts of the substance to feel anything (needing more and more to feel