The Virgin Diet (12 page)

However, having a genetic sweet tooth does
not
mean that you have to eat cookies. Don’t try that one with me. It won’t fly. You’ve got two other choices and I’ll help you with both of them. My top choice is to retrain your taste buds. Learn to appreciate raspberries, strawberries and blueberries. Cinnamon, vanilla, cloves and almonds can also feed that sweet tooth once you learn to savor their natural sweetness.

Having a sweet tooth does not mean that you have to eat cookies.

Here’s your second choice: dark chocolate. Yes, you heard me. The nutritionist is telling you to eat chocolate. But only 1 to 2 ounces per day, only if it’s dark—and only if you can stick to that amount. You should look for organic dark chocolate at 70 percent cacao or above: the higher the cacao percentage, the better. If you have 2 ounces, count it as a high-fiber carb serving and adjust accordingly. Now remember, Cycle 1 is where we really buckle down and yank the sugar, so leave out the dark chocolate during Cycle 1.

Okay, I have a confession to make. I personally cannot bring dark chocolate into the house. I don’t have a sweet tooth, but if I bring home dark chocolate, I eat every bit of it. I have to buy a small bar and share it with a friend or toss out the extra so I get only my allotted 2 ounces.

IF YOU HAVE A SWEET TOOTH…

• Mix chocolate vegan pea–rice protein powder with a little coconut milk and cinnamon, which is a nice blood sugar balancer. Add some decaf or regular coffee powder for an amazing hot or iced mocha.
  
• Mix a little bit of coconut milk with some chocolate protein powder to make a sauce. Add berries and top with chopped almonds. Mmmm…
  
• Make your own nutella by mixing almond butter with slightly liquefied chocolate protein powder (liquefy by adding a tiny amount of coconut milk or water). Then, add cinnamon. A tablespoon of this is 1 serving—then put it
  away!
  
• Smear some almond butter onto apple slices and sprinkle with cinnamon.
  
• Roast a sweet potato and add some cinnamon and chopped walnuts.
  
• Vanilla naturally raises your serotonin as soon as you smell it, so add some vanilla to your coffee or to anything you’re making with coconut milk.
  
• Nutmeg and cloves help satisfy a sweet tooth, and they go great with orange foods like carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin and butternut squash.
  

I hate to break it to you, but the idea of healthy sugars is crazy. I’m sorry. They don’t exist.

Some people argue that agave and honey are natural. Agave is higher in fructose than high-fructose corn syrup. Read on for the problems with fructose. Natural or not, it could not be worse for you.

Honey, however, could have some homeopathic benefits for allergies. If you have immune responses to bits of mold and dust, organic honey can strengthen your immune system and help you handle those things better. This needs to be locally grown organic raw honey, and you only need about a half-teaspoon a day.

The idea of healthy sugars is crazy.

Not all sugars are created equal. Fructose, which is one of the sugars found in fruits and vegetables, is much, much worse. You don’t need to worry about the fructose found in whole fruits and vegetables that you consume. The problem is when you start drinking juice or consuming high-fructose corn syrup or agave-sweetened “health foods,” because that approach gives you super-high levels of fructose, which set you up for weight gain and other health risks. One study estimated that high-fructose corn syrup accounts for as much as 40 percent of caloric sweeteners used in the United States. The study looked at both short-and long-term effects of high-fructose corn syrup on body weight, body fat and triglycerides in rats. The rats were fed different chows: one with high-fructose corn syrup,
one with sucrose and one regular one. In both the short term and long term, the rats fed the high-fructose corn syrup chow gained more overall weight and fat around their waists and had higher triglycerides than either the control rats or the rats who ate the chow with sucrose. These results suggest that excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup may contribute to the incidence of obesity in humans.
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An overabundance of fructose first found its way into our diets when we learned how to genetically modify corn. As a result, it became very cheap to produce high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener and preservative that is in just about every processed food you can think of, not to mention one of the main ingredients in full-sugar sodas.

What’s wrong with fructose? Where do I start?

Fructose can exacerbate high blood pressure. In fact, researchers use fructose on lab rats if they need them to become hypertensive for a study. Fructose can also elevate uric acid, which can cause gout. Fructose can also cause small bacterial intestinal overgrowth, intestinal yeast overgrowth, insulin resistance and kidney disease. Fructose can poke holes in your small intestine creating leaky gut.

Would you believe me if I told you that these are the
least
bad things it does?

The biggest problem with fructose is that it has a low-glycemic index, meaning that it doesn’t raise your blood sugar. That’s because fructose is metabolized differently from glucose. Fructose doesn’t trigger your brain to release leptin (the fullness hormone), which means that you can consume an enormous amount of fructose calories without your brain ever realizing that you are full. Yet, because you’re loading your body up with calories, your blood sugar spins out of control, and you develop leptin resistance. Meanwhile, 100 percent of the fructose you consume goes straight to your liver, which stores a lot of it as fat and converts the rest into free fatty acids, triglycerides and cholesterol, which turn into fat and artery-clogging plaques.

Remember back in
Chapter 1
when I told you that counting calories is not the point? Here is part of what I meant: according to Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, one-third of fructose calories ends up getting stored as fat. If you consume 120 calories of glucose, only 1 calorie is stored as fat. If you consume 120 calories of fructose, 40 calories are stored as fat. So fructose is 40 times more likely than any other sugar to make you fat—not to mention that it doesn’t trigger the hormone that lets you know you are full. What I want you to imagine is that if you are eating large quantities of fructose, you are making fat.

Fructose is 40 times more likely than any other sugar to make you fat.

Fructose just frustrates your weight-loss efforts everywhere you turn. It can also affect your fat-burning abilities after exercise, which is exactly when they should be cranked up! One study compared two groups of adults after exercise by measuring their fatty acid oxidation (i.e., fat burning). One group consumed a drink with 50 grams of glucose, and the other group consumed a drink with 50 grams of fructose. The fructose group showed 39 percent less fat oxidation after exercise as compared with the glucose group—and remember, they were consuming the same amount of calories.
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So, there are two morals to this story: avoid any product containing high-fructose corn syrup like the plague (see pages 117–118 for more information) and junk the juice. These products are not just extra calories. They are a type of calorie that is metabolized differently from broccoli, French fries or even a teaspoonful of white, refined sugar. The glucose in broccoli, potatoes and sugar does not all go straight to your liver. The fructose in corn syrup and fruit juice does. These calories are on a fast track to turn into fat. Not a pretty picture.

I know that fruit juices, especially fresh-squeezed, sound healthy, but I’m sorry, they are actually one of the worst weight-loss traps you can stumble into. Liquid sugars drive up your blood sugar even faster than solid sweets, and therefore your insulin goes up faster, too. Because juices are high in fructose and low in fiber, they don’t have the satiety effect, which means you don’t feel full. You wouldn’t sit down and eat four oranges but you could easily drink the equivalent in one quick glass of juice. So you’ve consumed a lot of sugars that don’t satisfy you. What kind of sense does that make?

You don’t want drinks whose names contain the words
nectar
or
cocktail.
Both of those terms are code for “we added even more sugar.” Also, avoid any product with the word
light
on it because that only means they added water and artificial sweeteners.

Now let’s get one thing straight: fruit is fabulous if you’re eating the right kinds in the right amounts. I want you to choose a high-fiber, low-glycemic fruit (see page 167 to find out which fruits are low-, moderate-and high-glycemic). Berries are the best. They have so many wonderful benefits that they are one of the superfoods.

Fruit is one of the big ways that we raise our level of triglycerides, and triglycerides are how we store unused calories as fat.

One to two pieces of low-or moderate-glycemic index fruit per day should be it. And if you have issues with insulin resistance or high triglycerides, you should only have one fruit per day or maybe even none.

WHERE SUGAR HIDES

When you’re looking at labels, it can be like reading a foreign language. Let me help: all of the following mean sugar, and that means put the package down.

Barley malt

Beet sugar

Blackstrap molasses

Brown sugar

Cane juice crystals

Cane sugar

Caramel

Carob syrup

Castor sugar

Confectioner’s sugar

Corn sweeteners

Corn syrup

D-mannose

Date sugar

Demerara sugar

Dextrin

Dextrose

Diastatic malt

Diatase

Evaporated cane juice

Fructose

Fruit juice concentrate

Galactose

Glucose

High-fructose corn syrup

Honey

Invert sugar

Lactose

Malt syrup

Maltodextrin

Maltose

Maple syrup

Molasses

Raw sugar

Rice syrup

Sucrose

Syrup

Treacle

Turbinado sugar

Sorry, folks. These are not the solution. I believe they raise insulin. It’s still a question mark, but a few studies have shown that they do. One study showed that people’s bodies’ began releasing insulin when they swished and spit out either sucrose or saccharine, so the insulin response started in the mouth without the subjects even having to swallow.
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Another study showed that the effect of acesulfame K (an artificial sweetener) on insulin secretion was similar to that observed by injecting or infusing the same doses of glucose.
22
As we’ve just seen, when you raise your insulin level, you are telling your body to store fat. You can’t access stored fat for fuel. You will be hungrier. You create insulin resistance and leptin resistance, which makes you hungrier. That makes it much more difficult to lose weight.

Plus, artificial sweeteners might cause a phenomenon called calorie disregulation. This means that your body loses the ability to correlate the degree of a food’s sweetness to the amount of calories it contains. When you eat something supersweet, your body is supposed to say, “Wow! I just had a lot of calories!” Then you’re satisfied after a small amount. But artificial sweeteners teach your body not to respond this way. Because your body has lost its own sense of how many calories it’s consuming, you end up ingesting way more sweets than you otherwise would. A study found that “dietary factors that degrade the relationship between sweet tastes, food viscosity and calories may contribute to overeating and weight gain.”
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Furthermore, many artificial sweeteners can be neurotoxic. That’s a fancy way of saying that they deplete some of the brain chemicals that we need to lose weight. For example, many artificial sweeteners lower our levels of serotonin, the feel-good brain chemical that combats depression, helps you sleep well and generally boosts mood and well-being.
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Then, in the ultimate vicious cycle, low levels of serotonin make you crave more sweets!

Artificial sweeteners can also be neuroexcitatory, making it difficult to sleep and creating anxiety. And what do many of us crave when we’re anxious? Sweet, starchy foods.

Even more alarming, did you know that aspartame turns into formaldehyde when it’s raised over a certain temperature? Some artificial sweeteners have been found to disrupt healthy gut flora, allowing for the bad bacteria to take over, creating small intestine bacteria overgrowth, which we learned about in
Chapter 1
. So your apparently harmless sugar substitute might be setting you up for some serious digestive problems, which in turn will lead to weight gain.

Finally, and probably most serious of all, artificial sweeteners, like sugar, can go through a process called glycation. This is the fastest way to age your body, and it is reason enough to avoid all artificial sweeteners.

YOUR SWEETEST OPTIONS

If you must sweeten your food, I’ll allow the sugar alcohol xylitol and the sweet herb stevia. I prefer that you use xylitol or a blend of xylitol and stevia. I worry that if you use straight stevia, it might cause calorie disregulation. So I like to mix the two of them.

Xylitol can actually help you lose weight. It is a sugar alcohol, not to be confused with either alcohol or sugar. Sugar alcohols have less calories per gram than regular sugar and don’t significantly raise blood
sugar. Xylitol specifically has some benefits not seen in other sugar alcohols. It slows down stomach emptying and suppresses ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger. It doesn’t feed yeast, it’s antibacterial, it doesn’t promote cavities and it helps with bone remodeling. It is amazing stuff! It is a nutritive sweetener, if you can imagine that, making it my favorite to recommend.