The Guardian’s The Sugar Conspiracy

Sugar

This is a long read. Not mine, but the linked article from The Guardian – The Sugar Conspiracy. In our quest for better health and wellness found through the trifecta of exercise, nutrition, supplementation we have believed that the ‘bad guy’ in nutrition was sugar, not fat. It’s been our experience personally and what we have seen time and time again in helping thousands of people find better health and fitness with our gym and personal training.

“If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres. Nor can it be passed off as innocuous scientific error. What happened to John Yudkin belies that interpretation. It suggests instead that this is something the scientists did to themselves – and, consequently, to us.”

macros

If everything that you eat is divided into the 3 macro nutrient groups (it is) – protein, carbohydrates, fat – not by us but by our bodies who are utilizing what we are supplying as building blocks for everything from defense to structure to growth to storage then you can start to see the importance of the big picture items you eat. Implications of ‘guidelines’ espoused by those designated to ‘care’ about us in the grand scheme – from the government and your family doctor – not being advised by what is actually in our collective best interest but in the best interest of the egos of scientists and researchers is scary if you think about it. Ego, not data, has guided the health of the world and we all are paying for it through increased medications, increased insurance costs, increasingly poor health and on and on.

We do not believe there is only one way to eat so arguing over Mediterranean or your version of Paleo or Ketogenic or Zone or any number of programs that promote differing ratios of the 3 macro nutrients is not the goal of this post. The goal, for me, would be to have just one person look at food a little bit differently. See it a little less as reward or entertainment and a little more as fuel for building you, for better or worse.

When obesity started to become recognised as a problem in western societies, it too was blamed on saturated fats. It was not difficult to persuade the public that if we eat fat, we will be fat (this is a trick of the language: we call an overweight person “fat”; we don’t describe a person with a muscular body as “proteiny”).

I could highlight almost every paragraph of this article as a must read but instead I will hope that you will follow the link to the original – The Sugar Conspiracy – and take the time to read it. Happy weekend to you.