Devils In Our Food

By Christine Thompson-Wells

'Having the chance to read such an amazing book which is based on full research of food additives and behaviour changes to individuals is a delight to know that it is not medical jargon but actual factual information of the additives and what it does to us when consuming them. Having family members' who suffer from ADHD and food intolerance to a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books For Reading On Line.Com
• Release date: Mar 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645131444

Christine Thompson-Wells

As a London-trained florist, I have owned and run busy flower shops, taught commercial floristry in accredited colleges and have been the florist to Prime Minister Fraser and his wife at the Prime Minister's Lodge, Canberra, Australia.

Book preview

Chapter One ~ Sugar

The devil of sugar

My interest in sugar started when I was 15. One day, I said to my mother, ‘I’m not eating any more sugar!’ I can’t say why I had made this decision or announcement, but I wanted changes in my life.’ I grew up in England and the English, have had a love affair with sugar for generations, in fact, in the 19th Century it was deemed affordable, and the majority of the working class could afford it. As a teenager, my own intake of sugar became the seed that made me start to think about the real value of sugar as a food?

There are now other factors in my life that have driven me to write a book about food. In About the Author in the previous pages, I have already mentioned the obesity epidemic that hits the news daily and the numerous television programs now seen on the subject.

To begin the journey of this book, I need to retrace some of my childhood footsteps. I would be out playing with my friends and I would often see my mum walking up the street and on her way home from work; she would be carrying carrier bags of shopping packed to overflowing with groceries. I would run to help her and offer a hand however her comment would be: ‘thank you, but I’m balanced and I’m nearly home…’

Within the shopping bags there was always two pounds of sugar for use over the next week. Sugar would go on breakfast cereal, (despite the large quantity of sugar already contained within the cereal); a tablespoonful of sugar would still be added. Sugar would be added to every cup of tea or coffee, on desserts, on fruit and occasionally on a slice of bread when all other jams or spreads had run out. Sugar was sprinkled on bread and butter to reduce hiccups; I don’t know if the remedy ever worked but just the same: sugar was added to the bread and butter!

I honestly don’t know what made me decide to stop using sugar, but I did and from that day I have avoided processed sugar in all or most of my food.

A further awakening came into my life when our son, at the age of 10 developed Type 1 Diabetes. This is also known as Juvenile Onset Diabetes. It is not caused by a young person eating too much sugar or having too much sugar in their diet. When mentioning to someone, ‘My son is a Type 1 diabetic,’ the reply was: ‘Oh, too much sugar in their diet or eating too much sugar…!’

Type 1 Diabetes occurs when the body’s immune system, which helps to fight infections, attacks the pancreas. During the time of adjustment and retraining to work with a young diabetic, it’s inevitable to learn a lot about the human system. Having to work with a strict carbohydrate-controlled diet takes a bit of getting used to but the discipline it brought into our lives has been worth the journey of awareness it has created.

From the time of my son’s diagnosis until this day, my mind is constantly working and asking questions about the diets people are eating; the processed food they are consuming and the drinks they are drinking on a daily basis.

As I have previously mentioned, we are aware of the obese situation now in many communities but logic and explanation of ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ overeating and obesity occur within an individual has not appeared to have been answered!

Before the consumption of sugar, any sweet intake made by a person would come from seasonal fruits, berries, natural honey and some grasses.

Through research, we now know that the original sugar cane was grown by the New Guinea natives at least 6,000 years BC.

The sweet liquid was sucked and chewed from the cane fibre. This rich energy-giving food, in its raw state, possesses sucrose, vitamins and minerals.

It took another thousand years for the sugarcane plant to reach other places in the world. By 5,000 BC sugarcane cultivation had spread to India, where once harvested, the sweet juice was turned into basic sugar crystals. In this form, monks and migrants could easily transport it to China, Northern Africa, and Persia. Sugar eventually reached Europe in the 11th Century.

For 400 years, sugar remained a European delicacy, spice and luxury. The fine crystals were considered to be ‘white gold’ and would make many sugar merchants extremely wealthy.

Christopher Columbus took sugarcane to the Americas in 1493. Sugarcane plantations were established in the West Indies and South America in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Sugar then became a vital commodity for Europe and England. In England and during the time of the Industrial Revolution and into the 19th Century, sugar intake had increased by 1,500 percent.

In the 19th Century, refined sugar was considered a necessity by the people of Great Britain, Europeans, and Americans. In the 20th Century, sugar was added to nearly every food consumed. In the 21st Century sugar is still added to cereals, breads, drinks, yogurts, health bars, juices, salad food dressings, sauces, readymade meals, frozen meals, Chinese, Indian, other Asian meals, take away meals, fast food meals and numerous other foods.

Sugar is not just a sweetener it is a poison in its refined form. Sugar also has habit forming attributes that your brain finds hard to resist.

I am not the only person who feels that it’s time to make changes to what the food conglomerates and manufacturers insist on putting into the food they market to many nations around the world.

Many prominent and distinguished scientists and researchers are of a similar opinion. ‘Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco, famous for his viral YouTube video ‘Sugar: The Bitter Truth’. A few journalists such as Gary Taubes and Mark Bittman have reached similar conclusions.’³

It has been stated in detailed and extensive research that eating too much sugar is one of the primary causes for Diabetes Type 2, cardiovascular disease, and other metabolic disorders.

In 2014/15, six million Australians aged 18 and over were overweight. This accounts for more than a third or (36 percent) of adult Australians being obese.⁴ Obesity rates among adults in the United Kingdom have almost quadrupled in the last 25 years and now around 1 in 4 falls into this category. What’s more, over 60 percent of adults are classed as overweight or obese…⁵ Adult obesity rates now exceed 35 percent in seven of the States in the United States of America, 30 percent in 29 states and 25 percent in 48 states. West Virginia has the highest adult rate of obesity at 38.1 percent.⁶

Given the statistics above, it’s enough to put people off eating sugar, but there is more: sugar is a harmful toxin that interferes with the body’s regular hormone cycles and harms organs. Referring back to my teaching, as an educator, I’m currently teaching many children in many schools in my everyday work. One of my focus areas of education is educating children as they reach puberty. From the knowledge I’ve gained, most educators want to develop strategies that help to protect children as they go through this stage of life. Puberty allows the body to prepare for adulthood. The time period for change in a young adult can be as long as 10 years. During this time, each individual child experiences changes; each may experience changes in different ways. Changes happen through hormones kicking in to make the changes within their bodily systems.

It is now clear, through scientific investigation, sugar in its refined state, is a poison and may interfere with hormone release during the time of puberty. This interference may contribute to different and more pronounced mood swings in young adults. More investigation needs to be done, however, given the evidence so far there is a possibility that sugar, if not the culprit, it may be a contributor.

Why is sugar a devil, a toxin and poison?

All plants contain sugar. Sugar is needed to bring the moisture from the ground and up into the plant to keep it healthy and allow it to grow. Drawing moisture from the ground allows foliage to develop, flowers to grow and fruit to develop and ripen. This drawing up of moisture is known as photosynthesis. Photosynthesis converts light into energy; sugar allows the transition from light to draw the moisture up and through the plant. All plants work in this way.

Sugarcane has a high content of sucrose and is the main contributor to worldwide sugar production. Sugar in its natural form, as discussed previously, is not harmful to the human system; it’s the refinement of sugar that makes it toxic.

Processed sugar is a poison and may be responsible for many of the health problems seen in the general population today. So why is this?

In 1957, Dr William Coda Martin wanted to answer the question, ‘When is a food a food and when is it poison?’ His answer: ‘Medically: any substance applied to the body, ingested or developed within the body which causes or may cause disease.’⁷ Dr Coda Martin classified sugar as a poison ‘because it has been depleted of its life forces: vitamins and minerals’.

When sugar is processed through refinement, the leftover crystals are pure refined ‘empty carbohydrates’ normally seen as sugar crystals.

The human body cannot use refined, empty carbohydrates unless the depleted minerals and vitamins are present. Accordingly, ‘Nature supplies these elements in each plant in quantities sufficient to metabolize the carbohydrates in that particular plant.’⁸ It’s the pure sugar eaten as ‘empty’ carbohydrates and eaten in above normal consumption quantities that help to contribute to the obese problems seen in today’s populations.

In Dr William Coda Martin’s paper, he maintained: ‘Refined sugar is lethal when ingested by humans because it provides only that which nutritionists describe as empty calories…’⁹ He later went on to describe how ‘empty calories’ can leach from the body valuable vitamins and minerals through its demands in digestion, elimination and detoxification.

In order to satisfy the body’s digestion, the intake of too much refined sugar robs the body of calcium culminating in calcium being taken from different areas of the body including the teeth and bones. Further in his paper, Dr Martin expands: ‘…eating sugar in excess and eaten everyday produces over-acid; this condition will eventually affect every organ in the body.’

The journey of the sugar crystal

At first, excess sugar is stored in the liver in the form of glucose (glycogen); the liver’s capacity is limited. The liver, after eating excess sugar and when it becomes overloaded, will bloat. With nowhere to go, the excess glycogen is returned to the blood in the form of fatty acids.¹⁰ Fatty acids are stored in immobile parts of the body such as the breasts, stomach, thighs, upper arms, buttocks, lower legs and ankles.

The continuous eating of sugar builds more fatty acids as the breasts, stomach, thighs, upper arms, buttocks, lower legs and ankles become larger and overloaded. Fatty acids are then distributed to active organs including the heart and kidneys. Eventually these organs start to slow down, and their tissue finally turns to fat. The whole body is affected by this deterioration and abnormal blood pressure is created.

The parasympathetic nervous system¹¹ with the combination of blood pressure and fatty acids in the human system, eventually affects the small brain (the cerebellum); this brain may become paralysed or inactive.

With the process of invasion of the fatty acids, the human blood circulatory, including the lymphatic system, are overrun and the quality of the red blood cells start to deteriorate thus allowing more white cells to increase. When this happens, the human body’s tolerance to immunity is limited allowing for easy infection to develop. Infection may come from insect bites, virus attacks and occasional skin cuts from obscure items such as rusty nails and garden twigs and or abrasions, or intolerance to extreme heat or cold.

Leg ulcers

I once knew a beautiful lady who has now passed. She was a biggish, English lady who was born before WWII. During the war, she and her younger brother were evacuated to South Wales in Great Britain, where they lived on a farm for the duration of the war.

This lady could cook – she could cook all sorts of delicious, sweet, English fare from: spotted dick (a type of thick dough cake made with suet, sugar and dried fruit; this is baked and served with custard. This was one of her favourites. Other delicacies were: jam roly poly, (again with sugar) and served with custard; ginger bread cake and many other ‘mouth warming’ delights. She worked hard for her church supplying great numbers of cakes for sale at many church functions.

Because of tradition, all cakes, sauces, and desserts had added sugar. This lady was not an exception to the rule. Large containers of sugar were always in the pantry. She may have learnt her cooking skills while living away from home during the war! Sugar gave the food ‘mouthfeel’¹² and a sense of delight was experienced by the eater.

Of course, feeding people in Europe and the United Kingdom was paramount during and after WWII and people weren’t interested if sugar was good or bad. The necessity for the ingredient gave the sugar producers and suppliers carte blanche freedom to grow more plants and process more sugar. To meet demands, sugar production became more mechanised, streamlined and sophisticated. Little marketing was needed as the product had created its own demand status!

In her later and final years, this lady suffered agonising pain from leg ulcers. A nurse would come to the house and change her dressings two to three times a week. The ulcers were large and continuously weeping and seeping. Regardless of the treatments given, the ulcers grew ever larger and aggressive. The lady had sleepless nights, pain and had difficulty walking; day by day, her life became ever more difficult.

‘The continuous eating of sugar builds more fatty acids as the breasts, stomach, thighs, upper arms, buttocks, lower legs and ankles become larger and overloaded with poison.’ When the human system is overloaded it reaches saturation point.

Not only is the immune system affected by an over-sugared diet but also the major functions of the brain.

Young offenders

As an educator and having counselled and taught in many institutions, I know from observation, that students on poor diets have difficulties in learning. If I take one instance: when employed as a counsellor/educator at a young offenders’ institution in the United Kingdom, the learning and lack of concentration by most of the young adults, was limited. Their main diet consisted of deeply fried potato chips, processed meats, little to no fish, with little fresh, if any, leafy green vegetables or other cooked vegetables such as carrots and cabbage.

In order for the brain to function effectively it needs to have a balance of glutamic acid¹³ and other minerals and vitamins included in the daily diet. Glutamic acid is a vital ingredient found in many uncooked or unprocessed fruits and vegetables.

Fruit and vegetables, not exclusive, containing glutamic acid include:

Fruit

• Apples

• Bananas

• Blackberries

• Cherries

• Grapefruit

• Grapes

• Kiwi fruit

• Lemons

• Limes

• Lychees

• Mangos

• Melons

• Oranges

• Peaches

• Pears

• Pineapple

• Plums

• Raspberries

• Strawberries

• Watermelon &

• Apricots

Vegetables

• Pumpkin

• Tomatoes

• Artichoke

• Asparagus

• Broccoli

• Brussels sprouts

• Cabbage

• Carrots

• Cauliflower

• Chicory

• Corn

• Cucumber

• Green & red paprika

• Leeks

• Mushrooms

• Olives

• Onion

• Peas

• Pickles

• Potatoes

• Radishes

• Sauerkraut

• Spinach &

• Zucchini

When observing the young offenders and their lack of energy it was clear that something was very wrong. The majority of the inmates were lethargic and struggled to keep attentive with most given tasks.

The environment of a prison is difficult to accept if the conviction is tough for the crime committed. This lack of understanding within the inmates also confused them. Many young people would compare their crime with that of another inmate and would consider their crime to be less when compared with others’ but the sentence and conviction time was the same. The feelings of frustration and suffering from possible ‘brain hunger’ did not help many of the offenders.

Brain hunger

Brain hunger or brain starvation produces lethargy, lack of concentration and a lack of commitment to any given task. Tasks were difficult for the majority of males to perform.

There had to be a common denominator that was responsible for this behaviour. As the food eaten was eaten by all inmates, without any clinical studies, it can only be my assumption that the inmates may have been suffering from, the above mentioned: ‘brain hunger or starvation’.

Having said this, as more research reveals itself, we now know that food plays a vital role in accomplished learning, not only by the inmates of a prison, but by any person attempting to grasp or learn new concepts, skills or tasks.

Vitamin B

Mentioned on page 12 are the fruits and vegetables that contain glutamic acid and vitamin B. The brain needs to function by an orderly process. Eating the right ‘brain food’ allows this process to work. Eating the correct food eliminates brain hunger or brain starvation. Vitamin B also plays a key role in separating glutamic acid and the compounds which allows a controlled response¹⁴ in the brain to happen. Vitamin B is key to good mind health, it does not add to your energy level or fuel for your body however, vitamin B plays its role by helping cells to multiply making new DNA¹⁵ and helps the body to use the energy provided by fat, carbohydrate and the protein eaten in a regular and balanced