Why Diets Fail (Because You're Addicted to Sugar) by Nicole M. Avena Read Free Book Online

around, insulin can even convert it into fat stores. Eating a lot of fast carbohydrates such as white bread, donuts, and soda can increase your chances of having energy dips, becoming irritable, and getting hungry quickly between meals. These feelings are also associated with the withdrawal you feel when you go for periods of time without eating these foods.
    A system known as the glycemic index helps classify carbohydrates based on how quickly they increase your blood sugar and to what level. Fast carbohydrates are on the high end of the glycemic index and slow carbohydrates are on the low end. Some studiessuggest that a diet rich in high-glycemic-index foods, which cause blood sugar to spike and dip faster than low-glycemic-index foods, may increase your likelihood of overeating 2 and may be linked to heart disease 3 and diabetes. 4

    What does all of this mean? Based on what we’ve described so far, you would be right to assume that you should eat some carbohydrates as part of a healthy diet, but avoid ones that have empty calories and are fast digesting, as these can lead to you to overeat and then, shortly afterward, feel hungry and irritable. Here is the problem: those fast-digesting carbs made up of empty calories are delicious, and many of us love to eat these types of foods. Cutting back on our intake of these carbohydrates can be difficult not only because they are tasty but also because they are cheap, convenient, and readily available. And there is a biological basis for the desire to eat these types of carbohydrates, sugars in particular, which may lead you to become addicted to them and thus hinder efforts to remain on a low-carbohydrate diet. We have an evolutionary tendency to view things that are sweet as being safe. For example, if our ancestors were to come upon a berry patch in the wild, those berries that were ripe and safe berries would taste sweet, whereas rotten ones would not.
    Luckily, it is possible to overcome these challenges and cut back on your intake of fast-digesting carbs with empty calories. Understanding why these carbs end up being stored as fat is the first step. In Step 4, we’ll help you begin to reduce these carbs until, at the end of the book, you will have cut them out completely!
    The Many Faces of Sugar

    Sometimes it can be difficult to understand which foods are actually sugars. Contrary to what we normally think of when we envision a sugar, not all sugars taste very sweet and not all things that are sweet (for example, artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes) are considered sugars.
    As you can see from the box on this page , there are lots of different sugars and sweeteners out there. While sugars like those on this list are grouped into the same class for the purposes of this book, it is important to underscore that they are not exactly the same. Aside from the obvious differences that some are sweet and some are not and that they are derived from various sources (for example, corn sugar comes from a different source than beet sugar), scientists continue to uncover other intrinsic differences among various types of sweeteners and their effects on the body.
    WHERE ARE SUGARS?
    As mentioned earlier, our bodies need to make glucose (a sugar) to survive, so sugar plays an important role in our diet and health. However, this does not mean that you need to eat sugars to get glucose; your body can break down fats and proteins to make glucose when needed as well.
    Most of us eat more sugar than we need, and often this sugar is consumed blindly. We don’t always realize how much sugar is actually in the foods we eat, and foods that contain empty calories are not clearly marked. While we often see food items that are labeled “low-fat” or “fat-free,” we never see a food labeled “nonnutritious” or “junk food.”
    The labels are there, but it is up to the consumer to know how to read them. So, in order for you to properly evaluate the amount of sugars contained in a