Say "Non" To Sugar

One of the best pieces of advice, apart from never give any advice; would certainly be Nutrition.  Get your head around it, better still spend some time talking to a Nutrition coach about it.

We spend hours smashing the tarmac, pool, gym or bike and merely minutes perusing the odd email about Carbs, protein etc….

I was lucky enough to spend some time with Non Evans.  (Not a relation !!) In fact there are few people who have excelled at sport at international level in more than one sporting discipline – but Non Evans has competed with honours at international level for over 20 years at 5 different sports – Rugby Union, Judo, Olympic Freestyle Wrestling, Weightlifting& Powerlifting.

Non has gained a degree in Sports Science and a Post Graduate Certificate in Education, and is constantly in demand as a TV and radio presenter, commentator and analyst.

So in terms of knowing her stuff – she is right up there, but more importantly she tells it as it is!! Non Kindly writes for Activity Wales Events as one of their nutritional partners, and they have kindly let me pass on this great article on Sugar…. enjoy !

Did you know the average Briton consumes 238 teaspoons of sugar each week – often without knowing it? But just how hard is it to go sugar free? When people come to me for. Healthy eating plans I would say I’ve 90% of them say they have a sweet tooth!

Like it or lump it, few of us get through the day without adding sugar to our daily diet. We are a Pavlovian population made up of sugar, treacle and toffee addicts, drawn to the taste of sweetness like bees to honey…!

But that’s not a problem, is it? We could stop and eat a piece of cheese instead – any time we wanted. Or could we?

Maybe not. It seems that our desire to load up with sugar regularly may not be the cheeky reward-cum-energy boost we think it is. Increasingly, experts believe we can be truly addicted. So if you feel like you are craving a chocolate treat, that craving is more than just a figure of speech. You may be one of the world’s most common dependents: a sugar addict.

But take heart. Around the world, a growing body of expert opinion – the ‘No Sugar’ movement – is leading a global fight back and warning that our sweet habit is completely out of control, leaving a nasty taste in the mouth of the body public. Sugar, whether added to food by you or the manufacturer, is the greatest threat to human health, bar none, they say. And unless we wise up and quit on mass we risk personal obesity.

At a basic level, sucrose, or table sugar (which is made up of equal molecules of the monosaccharide’s fructose and glucose) is not metabolised in the same way that a carbohydrate such as flour is. If people eat 150 calories more every day, the rate of diabetes goes up 0.1 per cent. But if those 150 calories came from a can of fizzy drink, for example, the rate goes up 1.1 per cent. Added sugar is 11 times more potent at causing diabetes than general calories.

Some scientists believe that fructose fools our brains into thinking we are not full, so we overeat. Also excess fructose cannot be converted into energy by the mitochondria inside our cells. Instead they turn excess fructose into liver fat. That starts a cascade of insulin resistance (insulin promotes sugar uptake from blood) which leads to chronic metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.

Look online and you’ll see fructose described as “fruit sugar” – it’s the nutrient that nature put into apples and pears to entice humans to eat them. So do we stop eating fruit in order to go sugar-free? It’s not that easy. Fruit is sweetened by fructose but it doesn’t contain very much, although you still shouldn’t eat very sweet fruit like grapes and melon to excess.