Results Fitness Studio - March 2013
Results Fitness & Training Studio is excited to welcome in the season of Spring! Warmer temperatures (we hope), longer days, & a renewed energy to work towards our goals of being fit & healthy. At Results Fitness Studio our clients work on being fit & strong but also on nutrition. We frequently discuss the "yeses" and "nos" of eating healthy. A major topic is sugar and the less the better. Below you will find an article by Mark Bittman, It's the Sugar, Folks, from the NY Times Feb 2013. Please take the time to read it.
The clients of Results Fitness Studio are continuing to make positive strides towards their fitness goals. We've had several clients hit the 30 lb marker, several have worked through difficult plateaus, and we have one client who has now loss 62 lbs!!! Each of these clients are to be congratulated on their weight loss but more importantly on their quest to be healthier. At Results Fitness & Training Studio we encourage our clients to focus on the mantra of being healthy & feeling better vs. "I'm going to lose 10 lbs". When a client's mindset is on improving their health, the weight loss and toning will follow. When you eat right & exercise you feel better, have more energy for your workouts , and you will begin to lose weight and inches. And, that is what the clients of Results Fitness & Training Studio do - they get fit & healthy! One of our clients, Tracey, shared this great recipe with us for people on the go (which is most of us). She brings it to work each day and it has been instrumental in her achieving her fitness goals - 25 lbs down and running outside on her off days!! Way to go Tracey!
Easy and Fabulous Mason Jar Salads"
The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.” The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics).
The key point in the article is this: “Each 150 kilocalories/person/day increase in total calorie availability related to a 0.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence (not significant), whereas a 150 kilocalories/person/day rise in sugar availability (one 12-ounce can of soft drink) was associated with a 1.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence.” Thus: for every 12 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverage introduced per person per day into a country’s food system, the rate of diabetes goes up 1 percent. (The study found no significant difference in results between those countries that rely more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup and those that rely primarily on cane sugar.)
This is as good (or bad) as it gets, the closest thing to causation and a smoking gun that we will see. (To prove “scientific” causality you’d have to completely control the diets of thousands of people for decades. It’s as technically impossible as “proving” climate change or football-related head injuries or, for that matter, tobacco-caused cancers.) And just as tobacco companies fought, ignored, lied and obfuscated in the ’60s (and, indeed, through the ’90s), the pushers of sugar will do the same now. But as Lustig says, “This study is proof enough that sugar is toxic. Now it’s time to do something about it.”
The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration. To fulfill its mission, the agency must respond to this information by re-evaluating the toxicity of sugar, arriving at a daily value — how much added sugar is safe? — and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” list, because that’s what gives the industry license to contaminate our food supply.
On another front, two weeks ago a coalition of scientists and health advocates led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the F.D.A. to both set safe limits for sugar consumption and acknowledge that added sugars, rather than lingering on the “safe” list, should be declared unsafe at the levels at which they’re typically consumed. (The F.D.A. has not yet responded to the petition.)
The take-away: it isn’t simply overeating that can make you sick; it’s overeating sugar. We finally have the proof we need for a verdict: sugar is toxic.