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Podcast 069: Sugar, Sweeteners and Diabetes

Sugar addiction is a complex process that starts with the stimulation of the sweet sensors in our mouth and ends with a distorted immune response and malfunctioning endocrine system. Sugars are known to cause massive dislocations in our endocrine system, leading directly to a national obesity epidemic and the eventual and certain loss of the body’s ability to metabolize food properly.

The result of an out of control sugar addiction is often diabetes, obesity, kidney failure, blindness, amputations and an early death. The price of allowing ourselves to be deceived by fraudulent labels, and failing to cope with a sugar addiction is very high.

Podcast 069: Sugar, Sweeteners and Diabetes

This is the Life Enthusiast co-op podcast Restoring Vitality to You and to the Planet. Let’s join our host Scott Paton and Martin Pytela now.

Scott: Welcome back everybody you’re listening to the Life Enthusiast co-op podcast restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I’m your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela and Martin you’ve got your finger on the pulse, we tell people who listen to our podcast and go to our website that they want to ask questions and they can call and get a live person usually you by calling 779-529-4661 or 1-866-543-3388 and so I’m kind of curious because I know that often times when we are recording our podcasts the phone is going off the hook there, they asking questions about all sorts of different thing and I thought someone would be kind of curious to know what people are asking and you’ve got your finger on the pulse, what’s going on.

Martin: What’s hot and what’s going on is not necessarily the same thing. A lot of people are calling in about fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, candida. We get calls about that a lot, and that’s because we are visible on the internet. We get a lot of questions about restoring the hormonal systems and helping people get out of their very crazy world of having candida overgrowth. so I’m very used to talking about that. But lately I’ve been getting questions about sweets, will I start offering agave juice.

Scott: I have never heard of that, what is it?

Martin: Well lately there is a bit of a fad that is going on on the Internet. People have started promoting agave juice as a healthy sweetener quote unquote. Agave is a cactus and tequila is made from agave juice, you must know tequila right?

Scott: Oh I’ve heard of tequila yes.

Martin: Oh you’ve more than heard of it…

Scott: Okay I’ve had a couple of shots of it or maybe a bottles of it, just not all at once.

Martin: Good thing. Anyway so to make alcohol you need sugar, you need something sweet. If you start with grapes you make wine and wine you can make brandy. If you start with agave juice, you cook it down and you keep boiling until it’s a concentrated then it is agave juice, and you can make tequila out of it or you can sell it to people as this new age quote unquote sweetener. But I must say sugar is sugar. Just as a side bar here, one of the clear symptoms of Adrenal exhaustion is craving for sweets. People who have been living in stress; stressed adrenals and exhaustion are craving sweets. That is making sense, right? We all want to sit down with the perfect dessert after lunch or dinner. When in stress we just want to hug a tub of ice cream and go for it. I’m not saying “we all” but especially people who have adrenal fatigue will have that need and in this western society who is not stressed?

Scott: That’s right we all live high stressed lives. That’s why we all like alcohol and that’s why we like our chocolates and that’s why we like ice cream.

Martin: So anyway here comes this agave syrup and people are buying it and so they are marketing. There are two types the clear syrup you know the more yellow. The regular one is just to get rid of excess liquid and then there is this other one, the more healthy one that is boiled in 150 degrees so it still kills everything in it.

Scott: So we are back to the same thing, dead food.

Martin: Well it’s empty calories just straight sugar, you have maple syrup is another example of it, it’s a wonderful Canadian specialty and there is such a thing as raw maple syrup but then again it’s been boiled until it’s been saturated and you know you need to get rid of the excess liquid to make it sweet, and the sweetening is such an important topic in so many people’s questions about nutrition. They say how am I going to sweeten my drink, what am I going to put into my coffee and I say coffee you’ve got to be kidding so okay herbal tea they have this herbal tea that they want to drink but it’s just bitter and they cannot handle it straight, so what would they sweeten it with? We recommend stevia and it is a concentrate of Stevia leaves but it is only one or two drops in a cup you don’t need two or three teaspoons to make the drink palatable so we think that for people who just have to have their drinks sweetened then Stevia works quite well. Please do not take artificial sweeteners like Aspartame, Sucralose or NutraSweet or all of that. That’s just deadly.

Scott: So talk a little bit about these artificial sweeteners because I have actually had people come up to me to say I haven’t seen anything as bad as your telling me Scott, it would be kind of nice to point them to a podcast and let them listen to you talk about it.

Martin: Under the health education in our website I believe I have some pages about aspartame, under nutrition and it says avoid aspartame. We have assembled several articles that relate to this: the sugarless, sugar free, low calorie, equal, NutraSweet, aspartame. These are several common symptoms related to ingestion, depression, menstrual irregularity, headache, constant irritability, constipation, brain tumors and seizures. How do you like it so far? I once knew a lady that worked at a company that my friend was running and was addicted to diet coke. anyway she has a 2 liter bottle of diet coke every day. She would wake up in the middle of the night and need to top up because she would be jittery and she would get migraine headaches trying to get off of it. She would actually get migraine headaches and then drink some and so she was already at the stage where it was all upside down. Anyway she was really having a hard time and she was eventually fired from the job because she was out of control and she was raging at times, unable to control herself and her behavior was just off the wall. There was a wonderful, intelligent, caring woman in her forties that everything should have worked for her but she was just going crazy with this. Another story I just heard recently was a women who was getting multiple sclerosis and she was heading for the wheel chair, she was already walking with a cane and things were already getting difficult for her. Her sister who read something on the internet about the toxicity of diet drinks and thought of her. She said: you drink diet coke and she said yes, I do, several cans per day. So she cut it out and there is no multiple sclerosis, her neurological function returned and she is fine. Are you just stunned?

Scott: I am and I am also looking at some of the pages on the website and like there is a page that you’ve got that is written by an Arthur Evangelista a former FDA investigator and it just goes on and on about all the things they were looking at when it was being approved and all the things that they kind of ignored when it was getting approved and it’s just amazing that it got approved.

Martin: Yes, we are going to get political here again, it’s so amazing that the CEO of the company that invented and then eventually marketed this became a high level player in the Bush government in the first term so it is tied to political influence like that.

Scott: I’m just sort of learning this as we go too and if the aspartame changes so it can cross the brain blood barrier which actually protects the brain from anything that is in your blood from anything that can harm it, and then it breaks down into a formaldehyde, formic acid component and all I remember about formaldehyde was that we used to use that in homes when we were insulating homes, there was formaldehyde in the insulation, and of course when I in the 70’s and 80’s homes were being ripped apart and the formaldehyde was being taken out and replaced because it was so quote unquote bad or carcinogenic.

Martin: Yes, it’s carcinogenic. Well when you want to pickle brains or frogs or pigs for your future experiments you pickle them in formaldehyde. That’s what is used in those famous medical jars in which you store the body parts so they don’t break down or rot. Formaldehyde is a deadly toxin and yes when this is broken down it break down into formic acid and all of that. It is neuro toxic there is no question about it. So of course the defense on the side of the industry is yes but you have to give a thousand times the dosage to get these effects. They would feed the rat a thousand day dosage that you would give to a human and watch as they display this crazy behavior. I tell you, we see crazy behavior in humans.

Scott: Well we know that some people look at children with peanuts if they are even touched by a peanut they go into seizures and everything else some people are very sensitive to this and some people may not be. I certainly don’t drink a lot of soft drinks or diet drinks but when I have I haven’t felt anything that I wouldn’t feel with a regular soft drink but it’s not like I break down.

Martin: One drink won’t do it but it’s the accumulation. If you drink one soda a week I don’t care which it is, that is fine, your body can deal with the toxins but if you are consuming six or seven or eight a day you are given the impression that when you drink the diet drinks there is no down side to it. With the sugar sweetened drinks you are aware of the calories and the in 9 teaspoons of sugar in every can of the soda. You take the sugar out so you don’t have the excess calories so you are only drinking the drugs now but what they are not telling you is that five, six, and seven a day for a year or two you are going to arrive at a toxic level because your body will not be able to detoxify it effectively. It is the accumulation of this …

Scott: Right when you combine it with all the stress with our day to day lives which we also have to deal with it can become over load.

Martin: I tell you I cannot be more vigilant or strong or I don’t know what word I would use with my children about these artificial sweeteners and it’s so insidious. I mean I was at a grocery store the other day and I wanted to buy an ice cream because we had guests coming over, and what the heck I thought let’s have some good time. so I reached into the freezer and pulled out this box that says unsweetened and I thought wow I can get ice cream that is unsweetened and then I started reading the ingredients and low and behold its loaded with aspartame. Anyway same goes for chewing gum, chewing gum needs to be sweetened with sorbitol which is quite variable but not anymore it is full of this aspartame stuff.

Scott: Just imagine chewing on that all day.

Martin: I just get these shivers running down my spine just thinking about it, I’m trying to contain myself.

Scott: One of the things I noticed just shifting the topic slightly is since I’ve been on the Excela 50 my sugar sweet tooth had dropped dramatically. I remember days 2 years ago opening up all the cupboards trying to find something to stuff in my mouth and I was just thinking about It when we were talking about sweets, chocolate bars and that I have not experienced that in quite a while.

Martin: Yes that’s the other cause one is the Adrenal fatigue or adrenal stress that gives you the sweet tooth and the other one is of course how we’ve trained our body because if we haven’t eaten enough high nutrient foods throughout the day our body says feed me because it is craving nutrients. If they are not in your body you have a signal and the signal says feed me now. Of course we are trained to now look for instant gratification and something sweet that is going to give you a boost right now.

Scott: That’s why I make a very conscious effort to have very few sweets in the home. It’s easy to succumb to temptation when you’ve got it all over the place. Don’t have it there and it is a lot harder. On a cold rainy night do you want to go out and go get an Oh Henry bar and by the time you are half way there you realize what a silly thing this is and turn around. Hopefully go home.

Martin: Hopefully or pull into the nearest health food store and buy yourself something useful. So anyway for the people who like to sit down with a cup of green tea or herbal tea and want to sweeten it please try some Stevia, it’s quite bearable and palatable, it’s not the toxic aspartame and it’s not the high fructose sucrose sweeteners like the agave. Nothing eats empty calories from within or from a cactus or sugar beets or maple tree sap high concentrated that will supply your craving but will not support you. They do have some redeeming qualities but nothing in moderation.

Scott: But it’s still high calories.

Martin: Yes high sweets still means high calories and high glycemic index and it’s just the ups and downs and all that, this would be having craving for something and about 45 minutes later it would crash.

Scott: And you do that with the Stevia.

Martin: No you don’t it doesn’t have the calories. It has a sweet taste to it without the calories.

Scott: So if somebody wanted to talk to you some more how would they reach you?

Martin: What we said at the top of the podcast 1-779-529-4661 and that will ring on my desk or 1-866-543-3388 or the website at www.Life-Enthusiast.com at the help section, there is a place about nutrition and sugar and raw food and all of that.

Scott: And for previous podcasts you can go to LifeEnthusiast.podomatic.com. Over to you Martin.

Martin: Right. This is Life Enthusiast restoring vitality to you and to the planet.