Sweet Cravings Part 1 - Nourish Coaches

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We all love sugar. Six years ago, we published this series on sugar cravings. We wanted to revisit this podcast because it’s still very relevant and has great information on why we crave sugar and how to better deal with cravings so that they don’t rule our lives.

Transcript of the Nourish Noshes Podcast Sweet Cravings Part 1

Edited for clarity.

Wendy: 0:00 Sugar is just so powerful. We’re so excited to rerelease these three parts.

Debbie: 0:06 We want to revisit these podcasts because they are so relevant even today, even though we recorded them six years ago.

Wendy: 0:15 Yeah, there are some really juicy gems in here that when we listen to them again, Oh, right, even we forget we wait, the recording of these. And there are some things that I had forgotten about–our endocrine system and sleep.

Debbie: 0:35 And the funny thing to me is that when I went back to listen to it to see if it was any good because again, it’s six years old. I was like, oh, I don’t know if it’s worth it. We might have to edit it too much. But it was so damn good. We’ve got to rerelease this, we don’t need to change a thing on it!

Wendy: 0:52 It was so damn good! And I have to have this confession as well. I was binge-listening to these three, right? They’re only 15 minutes each or so. But I was listening while I was baking something very, very sweet. And it had maple sugar crystals in it. And it had a whole bunch of dates. And it came out of the oven. And my mouth was watering. And I had a couple of bites. And then I had a couple more bites. Oh, sugar! So I went and I gave a whole bunch of it away to my dearest friends. But I really savored it and I cooked it with a whole bunch of love.

Debbie: 1:35 Yeah, that’s the best way to have sugar, I think. So, we thought that it was only going to be two parts at first, too. And we ended up doing three parts. So in this first one, you’re gonna hear us say, “in two parts,” but it’s really three parts.

Wendy: 1:50 So, we encourage you to listen to all three parts. Give us some feedback. We’d love to hear from you–what landed really well, what shocked you? Where are you in your sugar journey? And how can we help you?

Wendy: 2:06 This is part one of a two-part series titled, “We Love Sugar.” And we’re going to start out by asking you, Debbie, about this very interesting story you had this past week.

Debbie: 2:19 Yeah. Well, I went to the outlet stores in Jackson with my son and husband, and they were starving, so they wanted to go to the food court. They had this drink and sat down with it and I saw the drink was a Snapple “half and half”. And I went to go grab it to look at the label. And my son quickly grabbed it away from me because he knew what I was doing. But anyway, I got the bottle and I turned it around. Of course, the first thing I wanted to look at was sugar, because I knew it was going to have a lot of sugar. Now, this is a 20-ounce bottle. So I went right to the sugars. And it said 64 ounces of sugar. Wow. And so I said to them, “this has a crazy amount of sugar!” And he said, Well, I got this because I knew you wouldn’t want me to get a soda.

Wendy: 3:03 He has been listening to you!

Debbie: 3:04 Yes, he has been listening to me, but what he didn’t realize is this had just as much sugar as a soda would have had. Right? You know, I think it’s a difference of maybe one gram. So this Snapple has 64 ounces of sugar, and I said, “Do you realize how much that is?” Because each teaspoon of sugar has four grams. So the packets that you get in restaurants is one teaspoon of sugar which has four grams of sugar. That is a crazy amount of packets of sugar. It’s 16 sugar packets in that one bottle.

Wendy: In one bottle, and it probably said two servings right?

Debbie: No, no, it actually didn’t. It did say one serving, 64 ounces, 16 teaspoons of sugar in one serving! In one serving!

Wendy: 3:46 I think that just lends to I think the biggest recommendation that we have been talking about sugar is actually reading the labels because we often get kind of pigeonholed into products that we’ve been having since we were children. And we just keep going for them. And we don’t actually know what’s in them anymore.

Debbie: 4:07 Or, we trust what it is–like they didn’t ever look at that label because it’s iced tea. Right? Who would think it would have that much sugar, and yeah, so they were shocked when I explained it to them.

Wendy: 4:18 So he was trying to do the better thing, right? Interesting.

Debbie: 4:20 Yeah. But, you’re right. People don’t read labels, and they might read labels for calories. And that’s one thing I never look at, actually, you know. I go straight to the other things–the macronutrients, really. We need to check our labels and understand that we have this craving for sugar. Most people do. Almost everybody has a craving for sugar, which is a natural thing. You know, it’s a natural human craving that we’ve developed.

Wendy: And we’re not bad because we crave.

Debbie: No, Not at all. It’s our biology, actually. So how can we be bad? You know, we’re just following our biology. We need sugar. We use it in our bodies, and we’ve developed cravings to seek it out. Because most of our human existence, it was not easy to come by. In fact, when we were hunter-gatherers, which really wasn’t that long ago, you know, in the spectrum of time, people got sugar through berries. They got it through roots and tubers, and they got it through fruits. Now, there’s another one too, which I’ll mention. But first, berries and fruits were really, really rare. I mean, they were seasonal, and they weren’t proliferous.

Wendy: 5:28 I mean, they had to hike for miles, and all of a sudden sit down to a blueberry bush.

Debbie: 5:31 Exactly right. And, and they were also exerting a lot of energy, because they were hunter-gatherers, they had vigorous lifestyles, so they needed energy, they needed sugar to support their lifestyles, they also had access to honey. Now, this is, of course, raw, unprocessed honey, which also took a risk in getting it. And that was probably their favorite sugar because it was a little bit more easy access as far as getting the energy goes. So those were the sugars that were available for us for 200,000 years before we were in this civilized state that we’re in.1

Wendy: 6:07 Right. And it wasn’t till the 1700s, that we actually got ahold of ways of processing the sugar in what we know it today. And in the 1700s, we were eating, what, like four pounds of sugar per year? A whole year, four pounds. And that was more the elite, you know, the people who could afford it.

Debbie: It was really expensive.

Wendy: Very expensive, and new, and kind of–it was an affluent product. And then, now fast forward, a couple 100 years, and we’re eating 150 pounds, around 150 pounds, every year, per person, on average. If we look at the labels, we’re looking at all the dressings out there, and all the packaged products and the breads have tons of sugar, and the sauces have tons of sugar, and–

Debbie: 7:00 Even things like mustard. And things that you don’t consider sweet. Right? Tomato sauce. Those things have sugar in them, they put it in to make it taste a little bit better. Yeah, because we all love sugar.

Wendy: 7:13 Yeah. And if they put a little in and we like it, we’ll just want more. And so we’d have more of the serving size than we would traditionally go for.

Debbie: 7:22 That’s right. And you know to contrast that, 150 pounds a year–the average person shouldn’t have more than 30 or 40 grams of sugar a day–that’s added sugar. The average hunter-gatherer probably had as much as two teaspoons a day. And that was a good day, you know, two teaspoons of sugar a day, compared to us, who have a crazy amount of sugar every day, you know? We should limit it to 30 or 40. But most people are having much more than that.

Wendy: 7:51 So I wonder what would happen if we really sat down and did some journaling? Throughout the day, looking at the sugar content that we had. I think we’d all be shocked.

Debbie: 8:01 I think so too. We would be. Part of this whole process of talking about our ancestry and needing sugar is that there’s something called the food reward theory. And it talks about hyper-palatable foods. And this comes from processed foods. So foods are processed, and they give us these tastes and textures that are so much more intense than anything else we can find in nature. It’s not just humans; it’s animals too. So they’ll go for the hyper-palatable foods as well, you know for sure because usually there are biological rewards for that–in the old times when we didn’t have food so accessible. But these hyper-palatable foods, these flavors that are crazy flavors are really messing with us. They confuse our natural appetite regulation systems. It’s super stimuli basically, is what it’s called. And we’re just not used to it. Our metabolism isn’t built for that kind of intensity, I guess you’d say. And so that’s why we’re having all of these problems with obesity, diabesity diabetes, other metabolic problems out there.

Wendy: 9:10 We have a double whammy, right. So, we aren’t walking to find our food, right? Except for a couple of steps to the refrigerator, right, today? So, we aren’t moving our body like we used to, and we’ve got excess. But we need sugar–our body actually needs it. And, and in the foods that we talked about earlier, the berries and the tubers and roots and fruits. There’s a lot of vitamins, minerals. It’s not just pure sugar in these real foods. There’s fiber in there that our body actually needs to help break it down and process it. So, our body actually needs sugar. We need glucose, which is the sugar broken down from carbohydrates, and it’s one of our body’s most important fuels, so we must have it to function.

Debbie: 9:58 And it’s not like we can go cold turkey and not have any sugar at all.

Wendy: We’d fall over.

Debbie: Right.

Wendy: 10:03 So most of our organs and tissues actually run on the sugar and our brain and our muscles run on it too. And that’s why athletes need more sugar and available sugar to them to perform well. But the average American isn’t an athlete. They don’t need the sugar. You know, we’ve got boardrooms and soccer moms all pounding the sugar tree, trying to keep up in the boardrooms. And it’s really, we have an epidemic, right?

Debbie: 10:30 We do. And the problem is, you know, we all have an internal balance. It’s called homeostasis. We have to keep homeostasis, our body is constantly trying to be at homeostasis. This balance is completely responsible for the proper functioning of all of our organs and our whole systems, our hormones, everything, you know when we’re out of homeostasis, that’s when we get sick. If we’re out of balance for any period of time that’s been sickness happen, so keeping the balance or the homeostasis is super important. And we begin healing processes. When we are balanced, that’s when healing begins. Of so many systems in our body that help regulate homeostasis, one of the biggest ones is the endocrine system. That’s the hormone master. And it’s the primary regulator of our balances. So the endocrine system has a bunch of glands associated with it, the pancreas, the adrenal glands, sexual glands, the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the thyroid–those are all a part of what we call the endocrine system. And they’re all responsible for keeping us set balance.

Wendy: 11:28 And I love what you’re talking about–the orchestra?

Debbie: 11:31 Oh, yes, they all work together; all of these glands make hormones, and they all work together, just like an orchestra. And if you think about each gland being an instrument, and putting out different sounds, which are the hormones, and they all have to work together to make beautiful music, and if one of them is off-it throws off the whole composition.

Wendy: 11:49 –-too slow or too fast, or their sound is off. They’re out of tune . . .

Debbie: 11:56 Yeah, it throws the whole thing off. And that’s exactly what our body is like, and, you, as the person, are the conductor of the orchestra. You decide how to keep it in tune.

Wendy: 12:07 Oh, we have a choice! That’s a lot of responsibility.

Debbie: It is.

Wendy: 12:10 When someone consumes too much sugar on a regular basis, one of the body systems that get stressed the most is the pancreas because that’s the first organ that actually has to do anything. Hey, all the sugar comes flowing in and the pancreas has to decide what to do with it. So if it’s constantly bombarded, it gets stressed out.

Debbie: 12:32 that’s responsible for the insulin to lower blood sugars. If there’s too much sugar in our system, it says, hey, you’ve got too much sugar, let me give you this hormone to lower that sugar in our body.

Wendy: 12:40 So it creates chaos in the endocrine systems–causes our glands to be depleted. And the result are all these diseases or dis-ease, a ton of hyperglycemia, diabetes, thyroid problems. A lot of people are talking about adrenal exhaustion, right? And we’re not even considering that it’s the sugar, you know, we’re going straight to stress, menopause too, early menopause or crazy menopause system or andropause, which is the men’s version of menopause. All because of excess sugar. So we’ve talked about sugar. We know it suppresses the immune system by taxing our bodies and throwing us off.

Debbie: 13:22 It‘s also acid-forming. So people talk about acid and alkaline and sugar is acid. So most of our Standard American Diet is acid-forming. And sugar is sort of the root of all of that. And we need to have more of a balance having more alkaline type foods, which of course is mostly vegetables, green leafy vegetables.

Wendy: Go green leafy vegetables!

Debbie: 13:46 And being in an acidic state is the basis of all diseases. Every single disease out there needs an acidic state in the body to flourish. So you can say my disease is caused by this, this and this, but, absolutely, your body had to be in an acidic state to even get to that point. So, to balance this acid out what our body does, which is amazing, by the way, is it pulls minerals out of other parts of our bodies, our bones, and other muscles, whatever it does, it pulls out minerals that it needs to process sugar, which is calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and many others. Those minerals help balance the acidity out. Because those are alkaline minerals. And so they balance it out.

Wendy: That’s just leading to more deficiencies in the body.

Debbie: That’s exactly what happens. If it pulls it out. Then it’s not where it was before, and we’re deficient, which causes aging, extreme aging, extreme fast aging, osteoporosis, among other things. We need those minerals and those minerals actually work in conjunction with vitamins. They’re called cofactors. So they help vitamins work, minerals and vitamins work together. They’re a good team and they need to–,

Wendy: 14:59 It’s part of the orchestra.

Debbie: 15:01 It’s part of the orchestra. They need to be together to work. So, you don’t have the minerals to process the vitamins that you’re eating in your food, you’re not gonna absorb the vitamins.

Wendy: 15:09 So here we are, in part one, we’ve set us up, we understand how quickly we’ve eaten so much sugar over the last couple 100 years. So the two things we want to leave everybody with today are to read labels and–

Debbie: 15:23 Look at those grams of sugar. Try to limit your sugar, you know, maybe add it up, try to see that you’re not eating more than 30 grams of sugar a day on the labels that you’re eating.

Wendy: 15:32 So stay tuned to part two, where we’ll talk about different kinds of sugars, some that Debbie and I both recommend, and talk about some of the more processed popular sugars out there on the market.

Debbie: 15:44 And there are some new sugars out there too, that are just getting into the market that people are getting excited about.

Wendy: 15:49 So we’ll talk about those. And then we’ll talk more about how to deal with our sugar cravings.

Debbie: Everybody wants to know, “how do I deal with my sugar cravings?”

Wendy: So stay tuned, and in the meantime, please visit us on Facebook.

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Nourish Coaches