On paleo diets, and why they miss the point

We use a lot of carefully selected paleo recipes in our cooking, but I get annoyed when people call our diet "paleo" because in my mind the current iterations of the paleo diet completely miss the point of how we should be eating.

The idea behind a paleo diet is that we should be eating as our very remote ancestors ate. Our caveman/woman/kid ancestors didn't suffer from modern ailments to the degree we do, so if we return to that way of eating we all ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after.

Don't get me wrong: a paleo diet is far better than the standard American diet. Most paleo diets minimize processed foods and carbs, and this is why I don't hate them completely. I really like true paleo/primal diets which eliminate sugar (which wasn't accessible to our ancestors in the quantities or forms we see it today), and minimize fruits and nuts (which were only available at certain times of the year, in small amounts). These diets also don't knock dairy, which can have a very good place in a healthy diet given its high fat and protein content.

However, in current paleo diets and cookbooks that seem to be all the rage, these foods are "OK":

1) honey

2) coconut sugar

3) dried fruit

4) copious amounts of nuts and nut butters

5) juice

6) dates, figs, bananas, grapes and other highly sugary fruits

7) flours based on nuts and coconuts

We don't allow #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 in our house. On occasion we allow #7 but only in smaller amounts (like for the delicious chicken nuggets). 

Why? You can put a wolf in sheep's clothing, but it's still a wolf. Maybe you feel better calling your added sugar "honey" and using coconut flour in your "paleo pancakes" or giving your kids grapes instead of fruit chews, but you're still putting a wolf in their lunchbox.

The real issue behind the sad state of our public health is how many carbs-that-quickly-turn-to-sugar we consume. Whether those carbs come from a bag of Cheetos or from "homemade paleo crackers" made with almond flour really doesn't matter at the end of the day, and that's what so many paleo fad diets seem to miss completely. I'm not knocking the paleo crackers; I've tried some and they're delicious. You just have to be aware when you're eating these paleo foods that metabolically they're not all that different from any other processed food.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably still a duck.

Chicken nuggets

This chicken nugget recipe from Stupid Easy Paleo is one of our family's favorites. It's pretty easy to prepare, and very tasty. So tasty it doesn't need condiments, it works cold as a lunch leftover the kids ate multiple helpings right off the bat AND they've continued to eat it every time we've prepared it.

What's wrong with eating sugar?

Will you trust me if I just answer: "everything"?

OK, fine. I'll try not to get too technical since other, more learned people have done a better job than I could, but it's still going to be a long discussion.

I have four big problems with sugar. Before I lay them out for you, remember that sugar == carbohydrates, so I'm talking about not just the white stuff here but all processed carbs and even some "unprocessed carbs" that turn to sugar as soon as they get into our digestive system (grapes, I'm looking at you here).

These are my three big problems with sugar:
1. Sugar is addictive.
2. Long-term, chronic consumption of sugar initiates a cascade of health problems termed "metabolic syndrome".
3. Sugar sneakily tricks our brains into eating more of it.
4. The sugar and processed foods industry is evil.

#1: Sugar is addictive.
Our brains have a system called the "reward" system that helps us learn what we like and don't like so we can do it again. When you do something pleasurable (eat, hang out with friends, have sex), your reward system sends out a signal to the parts of your brain that help you remember and control your behavior. If we could translate that signal from the language of neurons it would sound something like: "That was totally awesome. Do it again."

This system is pretty basic. Even worms and flies have reward systems in their brains. Trying to stop it from working is like trying to stop yourself from breathing. You can control it for a little while but eventually your body is going to take over and there's nothing you can do about it. Those of you who have tried to go on a diet know what I'm talking about here. Willpower will only take you so far when your reward system kicks in.

The reward system is naturally activated by pleasurable things that are good for us (eating, hanging out with friends, having sex). But it is also activated (highly) by drugs like cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, etc. In fact, the reward system can be activated 2-10x more powerfully by drugs than by natural rewards.

As you can imagine, activating the system that gets us to repeat behaviors -- the same one we have very little control over -- 2-10x more than usual is generally not a good thing.

Sugar activates the brain in a similar manner to how drugs activate the brain. Neuroscientists have shown fancy colored pictures of brains so it must be true (I'm joking about trusting a result from a study just because it has a picture of a brain, but it is true that sugar highly activates the reward system).

Science is showing so much evidence that sugar is addictive that a couple of years ago, some prominent scientists came together and published an opinion paper in one of the top scientific journals in the world stating sugar should be regulated in the same way that drugs and alcohol are regulated because sugar is addictive and, like cigarettes, drugs and alcohol it has seriously negative consequences for public health.

There are many more studies that explore the addictiveness of sugar, and some day I'll post links to them, but for now if you want to hear a real nutrition scientist talk about sugar and processed foods and why they are evil, take 90 minutes to watch Dr. Robert Lustig's "Fructose 2.0" talk. For the less technical audience watch the movie "Fed Up", and for the less technical audience that's short on time, watch this 3-minute clip (which is also great for kids).

#2. Long-term, chronic consumption of sugar initiates a cascade of health problems termed "metabolic syndrome".
Metabolic syndrome is a set of risk factors that put us at risk for many nasty health conditions including heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. It results from a diet that is chronically too high in sugars.

Our bodies are not made to have a high sugar intake for a long period of time. Our body has systems in place to regulate the amount of sugar in our blood, so that when we eat something very sugary it won't overwhelm our bodies. But when we are sugar-addicted, our bodies are chronically attacked by sugar and after a while those natural mechanisms to safely dispose of sugar stop working (much like many of us with 9-5 jobs cease to function by the time 4pm rolls around).

One way our body gets rid of excess sugar is by storing it as fat. Yes, you read that right: sugar makes you fat. In the long term, after a decade or two (or more) of excess sugar consumption, your body is no longer able to efficiently process sugar and you start seeing effects on your cholesterol and triglyceride levels (markers of heart disease), not to mention your waistline.

#3. Sugar sneakily tricks our brains into eating more of it.
Our fat cells secrete a hormone called leptin when they get full. Our hypothalamus (part of our brain) detects leptin and uses leptin levels to regulate how much we eat. When we don't have enough fat in our bodies leptin levels are low, leading to our feeling hungry and eating uncontrollably. When we have too much fat in our bodies, leptin levels are high, leading to our feeling full and not wanting to eat.

Guess what blocks leptin?

Yes! Sugar.

Sugar blocks the leptin signal to our hypothalamus. If our hypothalamus doesn't get the leptin signal, it tells us to keep eating. Sugar tricks our brains into eating more than we need.

As with the reward system, this food regulation system is not one to be trifled with. The hypothalamus is a basic part of our brain, one that is evolutionarily quite old. We never would have made it this far as a species without a solid system to regulate our food intake. You might be able to stop yourself from eating temporarily, but unless you're on a hunger strike for a very good reason you're not going to hold out for very long before you start eating uncontrollably (one of the big reasons diets don't work).

#4. The sugar and processed foods industry is evil.
Remember the reward system? It plays a big role during puberty and adolescent development. During puberty, and with a lot of help from our reward system, our brains lay down the pathways that will influence the rest of our lives. More so than at any other time in our life, what we choose to do as young adults sets in place patterns and habits that will exert a lot of influence on our future selves. If you're triggering your reward system with addictive substances during adolescence (cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, sugar), you're more likely to get hooked than if you waited until adulthood, and if you do get hooked your habit is going to be harder to break if you start as an adolescent than if you start as an adult. This is one reason why tobacco companies had to be stopped from marketing to kids.

The sugar and processed foods industry is the tobacco industry of our children's generation, on steroids. Anyone growing up prior to 1990 saw cigarette marketing that directly targeted kids (remember Joe Camel)? We knew cigarettes were bad for our health but the cigarette industry didn't care that they were poisoning entire generations. They just wanted to make money off of our addiction.

Like tobacco did 20-30 years ago, the sugar and processed foods industry strongly markets to kids. If you don't believe me, take a trip down any of the interior aisles in your grocery store. How many boxes and containers are brightly colored? How many have cartoon characters? How many have toys inside or offer "free online games"?

Maybe there are some adults who like brightly colored cartoon characters on their foods and still enjoy playing with toys, but it's pretty obvious to whom these companies are trying to sell their poison. Get a kid hooked on sugar early on, and not only are you likely to have a customer for life, but you also have a customer whose sugar tolerance will only grow over time. In other words, if you get a kid hooked on sugar you have a customer for life who will keep buying more and more of your products as they get older, even when it's killing them. Evil, right?

What is sugar?

Let's get some definitions out of the way so we can have a better conversation about sugar.

What do you mean by "sugar"?

Sugar as we typically think about it has many different names:
Sugar
Evaporated cane juice
Beet sugar
Cane sugar
Brown sugar
Honey
Agave nectar
Barley malt
Molasses
Brown rice syrup
Corn syrup
High-fructose corn syrup (AKA, "the devil")
And on and on.

These are what I will call "added sugars". They're extracted from some source (agave, corn, beets, barley, sugar cane, honeycomb, etc.) and added to foods they don't exist in naturally.

Added sugars are bad news. Food companies put them into our foods because they know they are addictive and can get us to buy more of their foods (more on the addictive nature of sugar later).

OK, I'll get rid of all these sugars in my house. Can we be friends now?

Sorry, but no. Don't be offended; you're not alone. This is a point a lot of people don't understand.

There are also sugars that are inherently a part of the foods we eat. "Natural sugars" may be an appropriate term here. Fruits have a lot of these sugars, as do vegetables (particularly root vegetables), nuts, legumes, milk, and grains. These "natural sugars" are called "carbohydrates".

Normally, when we eat foods in their natural states (grilled vegetables, whole fruits, etc.), the natural sugars (carbohydrates) don't have much of an effect on us because their digestion is slowed down by the accompanying fiber. This is not always true -- grapes, for example are, in the words of Dr. Robert Lustig, an esteemed scientist, "just little bags of sugar" -- but it applies most of the time.

Unfortunately, much of our modern food is highly processed so that the fiber is taken out, giving our bodies "natural" sugars in very unnatural amounts.

Take the orange as an example. To get a cup of orange juice, you'd have to a) eat 2 medium-sized oranges, b) spend 5 minutes juicing 2 medium oranges, c) spend money on a juicer/blender to do the hard work for you, or d) spend even more money to pick up a carton of orange juice at the grocery store.

Show of hands: How many people have ever, in their entire lives, eaten more than 2 oranges in one sitting? How many people have had more than a glass (1 cup; 8 oz) of orange juice in one sitting? You can leave your answer in the comments if we want to get pseudo-scientific about it, but I'm going to bet that a lot more people have had more than one glass of juice in one sitting than have had more than 2 oranges in one sitting. Why is that?

The sheer volume of or is going to take up a lot more room in our stomachs than a glass of orange juice, so in eating a whole fruit, your body is going to limit you to what you consume in a much bigger way than if you ate the juice. It also takes longer to eat a couple of oranges than it does to drink their juice, giving your body time to process the sugar it has taken in.

One orange (medium sized) has about 15g of carbs with 3g coming from fiber.  One cup of orange juice has about 26g of carbs with less than 1g coming from fiber. Because our bodies can't digest fiber, we can subtract the carbs coming from fiber from the total carbs in the orange, and the same with the orange juice.

If you compare the "net carbs" for a whole orange (15g-3g=12g) to the "net carbs" for a glass of orange juice (26g-1g=25g) you find that in one cup of orange juice you get 2x the sugar you would get from eating a whole orange. Carbs that aren't fiber turn to sugar, and the less fiber that exists in a food, the faster that conversion happens.

Now apply that same principle to crackers, bread, tortillas, pasta and every other food staple in your pantry and you will see that the problem of excess sugar consumption is not solved by simply avoiding "added sugars".

When we talk about sugar in our family, we don't just use it to mean "added sugars". We use it as a synonym for "carbohydrates".

The beginning

We started our unsugared journey over a year ago, after realizing what our sugar addiction was doing to our physical and mental health and wellbeing. With two young kids (4 and 6 at the time), we knew giving up sugar would not be easy but we knew we had to do it for their wellbeing and ours.

One of the questions I often get is: "How do you do it? The change is so overwhelming! Everything has sugar!".

My answer is "slowly" and with a lot of perseverance. I think the transition is easier when your whole family gets into it. The kids see that they aren't the only ones who are limited, and as a parent you're the example for your kids so you're less likely to cheat (at least, when they can see you).

There's a lot of time spent at the beginning revamping your pantry and learning what you can and cannot get from the grocery store. Foods that had been a staple in a household with kids (e.g., ketchup), are now off limits (or don't taste very good).

We started slowly and worked our way up to our current state: A diet in which our sugar intake comes entirely from vegetables and (very) small amounts of fruit.

Here's the general idea... each of these stages took 1-3 months. The later stages we achieved faster than the earlier stages -- the initial changes are the hardest.
1. We eliminated grains and added sugars. I threw out about 2/3 of our pantry in one afternoon, including all sorts of grains and sugars (in my sugared life I was a stellar baker). Corn tortillas were our holdout, as a relatively low glycemic food we felt we could keep them in as special occasion foods. For the kids, we left in a daily "treat" that had sugar and/or grains.
2. We started limiting the treats to once per week.
3. We gave up treats with grains. We also gave up corn tortillas at this point. Treats were still limited to 1x/week.
4. We further constrained the treats to those with minimal amounts of carbs (small pieces of chocolate, a small scoop of ice cream).
5. We gave up dairy (other than the youngest child), and all sugar completely. Yes, we are now the parents who send their kids to birthday parties with apple slices and almond butter.

All in all it took 13-14 months to wean ourselves off of sugar. Adults could accomplish the same goal much faster, but we found the slower pace saved us a lot of battles, fussing and whining. And no, we weren't perfect. We cheated on the sugar from time to time (who doesn't love ice cream??). But at this point we've realized that every cheat leaves us feeling awful, craving more sugar, and unable to cope any problems that arise (e.g., your brother plays with your balloon, your sister gets an extra carrot, your husband forgets to turn on the stove to heat the water for your coffee).

We have reached the point where we understand, deeply, that the fleeting moment of deliciousness is just not worth it.