How to Stop Eating Refined Sugar

White Sugar, Just say "No".

We are all bombarded with sugary treats every day. Isle after isle at every major store is designed to dazzle and allure consumers with pretty packages containing high-fructose corn syrup or refined sugar. Those enticing treats pack a powerful punch to your body. The typical sugary snack has little real nutritive value. Sugar rots your teeth, your liver, your pancreas, and tears down all your bodily organs by taking them on a wild sugar ride that ends abruptly leaving you burned-out and empty except for unwanted calories. Americans have seen an increase of over 17% in sugar in the average diet since the 1970s. It is put in everything from hot-dog buns, to salad-dressing, toothpaste, cough-syrup, and cereal, just to name a few. Todays children are increasingly obese and can not pay attention. We prescribe them drugs without first addressing the dangerous levels of sugar in their daily diet. In order to stop eating white sugar, you need to start reading the labels of every food and household product you consume. Then, simply stop buying products with sugar in them and find natural alternatives possibly at your neighboring coop or whole foods outlet. Learning to cook your own meals and desserts using alternative sweetners will drastically improve your health and stamina. Refined sugar gives you false allure and excitement, followed by emptiness and fatique because it has no real enduring nutritive value. Try nourishing your body with naturally sweetened foods and you will look and feel better, and live longer.

Difficulty:

Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Look for natural products

   Learning to read the labels of everything you ingest takes practice and patience. Usually, more natural products contain fewer ingredients that are easier to pronounce. You will drastically simplify your shopping trip by eliminating all white sugar products. Shop for quality not quantity. Check out your local coop or health food store for natural sweeteners and even chocolate alternatives!

2. Stop buying products with white sugar in them. Sugar is hidden in everything these days from steak sauce and cough syrup, to fruit juice and even toothpaste. Weed out foods and household products that contain refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup, both of which rot your teeth, stress your body and add unwanted pounds.

3. Learn to cook and bake with natural sweeteners such as: 100% fruit juice, honey, molasses, rice syrup, beet root, evaporated cane juice, stevia or licorice. Your local coop or health food store has most or all of these products. You can usually find honey, molasses, stevia, and unsweetened cocoa at your local grocers. Most recipes can be easily adapted to natural sweeteners with about the same ratio, i.e., cup per cup. Read the proportion label on each natural product. Don't be afraid to experiment because you can always eat your mistakes!

4. White sugar, just say "no." Just because it's in front of you doesn't obligate you to eat it. Like cigarettes and alcohol, sugar will always be there dressed up in all it's finery, daring you to unveil it. It's up to you to be smart and discriminating about what you put in your body. Choose foods that will impart strength to you instead of an sugar that leaves you listless and empty.

5. Consider the long-term effects of every food choice and shop accordingly. By choosing alternative sweeteners and eliminating refined sugar and corn syrup from your families diet you will have better collective oral and physical health, both of which are undermined by white sugar. You will also set a healthier example for the children and adults around you who would greatly benefit from not eating it as well.

Tips & Warnings

• Foods sweetened naturally are delicious and nutritious. You don't have to suffer. Your taste buds will adapt over time so that you begin to appreciate the natural sweetness of foods instead of the overprocessed sugars in junk food that give you lots of calories and little nutrition.

• Natural sweeteners are supplements and not meant to replace a balanced healthy diet. Moderate eating natural goodies as you would otherwise. Remember, sweets are meant to be a treat not a meal.