Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (16 page)

Why is sugar so bad for us?

In limited quantities, our bodies can handle it, explains Dr. Lustig. Take fructose. Traditionally, it was found mostly in fruit and honey. We can metabolize a certain amount of it, especially if it contains fiber, which delays its absorption in the intestine,
and gives the liver a chance to spread out the time it takes to metabolize the food. Exercise also helps, because it speeds up energy metabolism within the liver, allowing the fructose to be turned into energy rather than liver fat. But the much wider use of high-fructose corn syrup puts our health at risk.

“If you overwhelm your liver’s capacity to metabolize fructose, then it’s a poison,” Lustig warns. “A calorie is a calorie in terms of the number of pounds of weight you put on. But that doesn’t mean that a calorie is a calorie in terms of the metabolic consequences. If you put those calories in your subcutaneous fat, you just get fat. If you put those calories in your visceral fat or in your muscle or in your liver, then not only are you going to get fat, but you’re going to get sick, too.”

Studies of how sugary drinks affect the body, conducted by Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist at the University of California–Davis, suggest that Lustig’s fears are justified. Her subjects were young, healthy people in a hospital setting where it was possible to measure every calorie they consumed. Within two weeks, those who consumed drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup had higher levels of LDL cholesterol in their blood and other risk factors for heart disease, while the subjects who consumed drinks sweetened with glucose did not. LDL cholesterol, also known as the “bad” cholesterol, collects in the walls of blood vessels, causing blockages and increasing the risk for a heart attack from a sudden blood clot in a compromised artery.

Stanhope explains that all fructose and glucose molecules get delivered directly from the digestive system to the liver. Most of the glucose molecules bypass the liver, because glucose use by the liver is controlled by an enzyme which shuts down
when the liver does not need energy. (Glucose, a simple sugar that the body makes when it digests carbohydrates, provides our primary source of fuel.) Therefore, most of the glucose in the drinks sweetened with glucose ended up being used by muscle, brain, and body fat for energy. In contrast, most of the fructose in the drinks sweetened with fructose ended up in the liver. That’s because, says Stanhope, “the enzyme that controls fructose use by the liver never shuts down. It efficiently starts processing all the available fructose molecules, which allows the liver to keep bringing more fructose molecules in. The liver has to do something with all this fructose, so it starts turning some of it into fat for later use. Some of this fat gets sent out in the blood where it increases risk factors for cardiovascular disease.”

Lewis Cantley, a Harvard professor and head of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is another scientist very worried about sugar, especially its potential link to cancer. His theory is that when we eat or drink sugar, it causes insulin to spike, which may help fuel the growth of certain cancers, including breast and colon cancer. Dr. Cantley is so convinced of the connection that he has practically eliminated sugar from his diet. “I can remember when I was a kid the thought of eating bars and bars of candy was just absolutely fantastic. And now, if somebody offers me something sweet, I might take a bite of it to be polite but I would never finish it.

“I think the problem is a lot of people get addicted to sugar,” he adds. Indeed, he thinks the dependency may be strong enough that people need to move slowly to break the hold. “If you take sugar out of your diet, maybe it has to be done gradually.”

So we’ve got a weight problem in this country, and the same foods that are making us fat are also causing serious diseases. What are the solutions? I think it’s safe to say that some combination of personal responsibility, education, and changing the food environment in this country offers our best hope. “At the end of the day, what each of us does with our feet and our forks is up to us, and so we do have to share in the responsibility for the solution,” said David Katz. “Most of us who manage to be thin are working really hard to make it so, and have a skill set that the rest of the world doesn’t have.”

I totally agree with that. I’ve found an incredible amount of inspiration, smart advice, and new skills from the friends, colleagues, nutritionists, scientists, and other experts dealing with food issues whom Diane and I spoke with as we were writing this book. But making the commitment to get to a healthy thin is a lot harder if we don’t know what’s in our food. So one very important public health step is to require more informative food labels in both supermarket and restaurant foods, including a clear indication of how much sugar is added.

As an illustration, Stanhope points to the label on a yogurt container. “I think the time has come for the companies to have to say ‘added sugar’ versus ‘total sugar’ on the container, so we can differentiate between the sugar that is in the fruit or the milk, and the sugar that is added in the processing,” she says.

That’s just one example of the big-picture solutions Diane and I discuss later in this book. We can’t hope to get on the right track as individuals until we get on the right track as a nation. We need smarter policies and healthier communities if we are going to really solve our problems with food and weight.

M
Y STORY, WITH
J
OE
S
CARBOROUGH
,

D
R
. N
ANCY
S
NYDERMAN
, F
RANK
B
RUNI

W
ith Americans living in a food carnival and eating foods that may have addictive properties, it shouldn’t be a surprise that so many of us have eating disorders. Many of these disorders lead to obesity, while others help us keep our weight down, but not in a healthy way, as I know all too well.

When I set out to write this book, I thought I was writing about problems that were in the past. In recent years, I have managed to maintain my tight grip of control most of the time. But now, at Diane’s insistence, I am trying to release a little bit of that control and settle at a slightly higher weight. My goal is to develop a more relaxed attitude toward food so that I do not have to live at two extremes: feeling hungry most of the time and bingeing occasionally. It’s hard, and the truth is that acknowledging my struggles with food has uncovered some
bad influences and feelings that leave me on the edge of reverting to old, unhealthy behaviors.

Joe Scarborough tells another story about me, and it’s one that I hate, because it’s so embarrassing. But I’m in “tell-all mode” here, so I won’t hide it. This one happened when we were traveling. We do that a lot, broadcasting the show from around the country. We tend to have especially long days when we are out of town. Generally it means getting up even earlier than usual, in another time zone, and staying up late to attend events and meet people.

Joe says, “We were at a luncheon for about five hundred people in California, and I took one bite of the meal and thought, that’s not worth the calories. I looked over at Mika, and this skinny woman who I had assumed just didn’t like food, had in thirty seconds devoured the entire plate—the chicken cordon bleu, the sauce, the fries, everything. She probably inhaled about thirty-five hundred to four thousand calories in thirty seconds.”

Joe watched in amazement as I pressed my fingers onto the plate trying to get the last of the crumbs. Moments later, we were onstage in front of five hundred people! Later, he said to me, “I can’t believe you ate that.” I was horrified, too, but it really helped Joe understand why I work so hard to hold myself back. “It hit me that she was struggling every single day of her life to not do what I would do, which is eat when I was hungry. She
lived hungry
all the time. Every six months or so when she was
just exhausted and her defenses were completely knocked down, she would, without thinking, just start eating like the rest of us, except even more ravenously.”

It hit me that she was struggling every single day of her life . . . She
lived hungry
all the time.

—
Joe Scarborough

Another story still shocks both me and my husband. I had taken an Ambien one night to get to sleep. With my crazy schedule, I need to do that sometimes. The drug can increase the likelihood of sleepwalking, and that’s what I did—down two flights of steep stairs from the bedroom and right into the kitchen. Jim told me what happened next. He thought I was coming down to get a snack because I couldn’t sleep. I said hi to him, and then I went into the pantry and opened this big jar of Nutella.

Nutella is made from hazelnuts, skim milk, and cocoa, and it’s meant to be spread on bread. I love, love, love it. Really, it’s my favorite thing in the world. Never mind that a couple of tablespoons have as many calories, fat, and sugar as a Three Musketeers bar. Never mind that consumers have filed a class action suit against the manufacturer, saying they were misled into thinking Nutella was a healthy breakfast for their kids to spread on toast. I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I reached into a drawer and grabbed a spoon. In the next moment, I began devouring it as if I was the hungriest person on earth.

Then I seemed to say “the hell with that,” as I put down the spoon and reached into the jar with my hand, scooping out
the Nutella again and again, then licking it off my fingers. Pretty soon, the stuff was all over my face. I dipped in one hand, then both, again and again. As the Nutella spread up my arm, I licked it off there, too. After I finished the entire contents of the jar I calmly went back upstairs to bed.

The next morning I woke up, took a shower, and went to work, with no memory of the Nutella raid. When I got home that evening and saw Jim, he was like “whoa” and I’m like “what?” And he says, “Nutella?” and when I looked totally confused he said, “Oh my, you must have been eating on Ambien.” Then I kind of remembered. I thought I had just been dreaming about eating Nutella, but I had actually done this in the kitchen in front of Jim!

To me, Ambien is almost like a truth serum. It frees you of inhibitions, allowing you to give in to temptations you are usually able to resist. The Nutella night revealed the intensity of my ongoing eating issues.