The Secret Poison

This is an article is word for word typed up straight out of the Oxygen Magazine Jan 2010 issue, I read about so many people not being able to control their sugar consumption--this is why, please read--I have stopped using the white poison for months now and can see a difference not only in my skin but health as well. Not to mention I don't crave it like I use to. And I use to crave it like nothing else!!!!

Gloria Swanson reputedly hissed about sugar: "That stuff is poison! I won't have it in my house let alone my body!" She kicked the sugar habit and lived to be 84 years young.

There it is, a teaming bowl of oats, greeting me on my kitchen table every morning. Topped with flax and wheat germ, a few gleaming berries and a spoonful of bee pollen, porridge - and I mean porridge, not sugar - is the first meal of the day and my tried-and-true breakfast companion. I eat hot cereal even when it feels like the tropics outside and humidity is climbing.

Whether you're a chef or not, oatmeal should be the grain of grit when it comes to cooking - anyone can make it, even my six-year-old nephew. Pour one cup of boiling water over half cup of dry oats and you have porridge, or at least the bare bones of porridge. But let me be clear - I never put sugar on my cereal.

So why do so many of us still eat sugary breakfast cereals? It makes no sense to mew hen I think of the damage the white powder does, and not just to our teeth. Sugar is today's socially acceptable drug of choice: It gets you up and buzzing and then you rash soon after. (Socially acceptable white powders you much avoid: White refined flour - there is a whole new world of bread, muffins and clean cookies. You don't have to give up baking. Alternatives: whole wheat or spelt flour. Refined sugar - you can still indulge your sweet tooth, but in a much healthier way. No need to buy sugar ever again. Alternatives: stevia, Sucanat, honey or maple sugar flakes. Refined table salt - kick the nasty salt habit once and for all. Make the switch and enjoy the new taste. Alternatives: sea or kosher salt.)

Sugar is widely available, so much so that you can get your fix without having to ask for it. Food companies happily provide it for you in anything from canned beans to deli meats and even drugs. And did I mention that sugar is addictive? The more of it you eat, the more of it you want. I have had not one but thousands of women say to me. "Sugar is the bane of my existence. I can't have even a little bit. Once I do it's full on attack on anything sweet. Never in my could I stop eating just one piece of carrot cake. If the whole cake is still standing after I have seen it, I would be quite a miracle. Help!" Virtually of these women complain of being "just a little overweight" too.

I get mad about it. Really mad! People who know me know not to hit my "sugar is white poison" button, because once I have been triggered I can't stop myself. What makes me the maddest is how much we have been fooled by giant food companies to disregard the sheer destructive power of these dangerous white crystals in deferecne to their sweet taste campaigns, Watch the movie Food, Inc. to get a sense of how much we have been duped and who has done it to us; you will never eat the same way again, and you will have a much clearer picture of the dangers of eating today. not only do these "food" companies trick us by adulterating our natural foods into perversions thereof - think corn to Twinkie or sick and diseased chickens into chicken nuggets - but they also market to our emotions, not to our brains. Get a nose full of the smell of baking bread and you know what I mean your're hooked, hungry or not. Look closely, however and you'll find that some of these "baked loaves" are stuffed with ingredients neither you nor i have heard of, nor do we have any idea what their purpose is.

One of the most ubiquitous ingredients in bread - in its various forms - is sugar. We eat it because we think bread is food and we are told it is, but that is where the relationship to food stops. Adulterated white bread is merely a vehicle by which to incorporate corn and soy-based ingredients (which are heavily subsidized in North America) into something North American probably will unwittingly (and unquestioningly) eat, regardless of its nutritional value. A bowl of cute colored cereal (ahem!) is not food. We eat it, it slips down our throats heading in the general direction of our stomachs, but in no way does this nourish us. I call sugary, dead foods "fillers" because they fill you but don't nourish you. Need to be convinced? A perceptive Japanese student of medicine, Nyoiti Sakurazawa watched three of his siblings die of incurable diseases related to sugar consumption, wrote in the early '20s, in his prescient book You are All Sanpaku: "Sugar is the greatest evil that modern industrial civilization has visited upon the countries of the Far East and Africa." (I would add North America to that mix.) This guy was brilliant. In the '20s, without the benefit of Harvard degree, he predicted the medical crisis we are in now as a result of sugar consumption and confusion.

Confused about carbs? The West has labeled all carbo-hydrates as dangerous. Sakurazawa begged Western nutritionists to correct the error and to clarify the distinction of unrefined grains as a source of com-plex healthy carbs and to please not toss them into the bin alongside simple carb-loaded cookies, white bread, potatoes, processed foods and the deadly white poison called sugar. I spend a lot of my time helping people understand the difference between simple and complex carbs and the damage simple carbs will do to them. Maybe you will comprehend it better this way: Healthy complex carbs from whole grains, for example, are broken down in the stomach into simple sugars or monosaccharides, which are usable nutrients that build the body up. But if you eat simple carbs together with refined carbs - like sugar on cereal or sugary cereal - you will end up with an acidic mix that ferments (read: rots) in your gut. The by-products of this are CO2, acid, alcohol and a little H2O. Water is the only usable ingre-dient or nutriment, while the remaining by products damage you from the inside out. If you are overweight, have migraines, acne, hypoglycemia, irritability, depression, mood wings and powerful craving, to name a few, you may be suffering from what William Dufty called "the Dugar Blues."

I'm with Gloria Swanson. I don't eat sugar. I don't have it in the house and I don't crave it. I'd rather eat a natural apple than poison myself with refined sugar. How about you? Tell me your sugar horrors I am always listening.

Tosca Reno (Creator of the Eat Clean Diet Cookbook Series) --this was written by this amazing 50 year old woman whom look wonderful and is in tip top shape!!!!