Here we are.   Next topic:  We have a former self-confessed sugarholic with us.  She changed her life and her state of health when she left her sugar habit.  And as we begin the holiday season, this is information that you want to know -- how sugar upsets your whole body chemistry; how it can age your cells; the link between over consumption of sugar and a long list of degenerative diseases and how too much sugar affects behavior and mood; what sugars are safe.  If fructose is harmful, why is it in so many so-called health foods?  That's what I want to know.  And what foods contain hidden sugars?  You'll be amazed it's in foods you wouldn't suspect -- there are so many euphemisms for sugar.  How much sugar does your fellow American consume?  Well I learned in Nancy's book that on average, Americans eat 149 pounds of sugar per person per year -- we can break that down to more understandable terms -- that's over ten pounds of sugar a month, four and a half cups a week, 33 teaspoonfuls per day.  And, she says, the average teenage boy eats as much sugar as people in any other age group.  I was also told that if sugar were a brand new substance today, even the FDA wouldn't approve of it  -- it behaves in the body like a drug and it's addictive.  Nancy Appleton has the full story in her newly revised book Lick the Sugar Habit and at $5.95, this is a book everyone should have.  Hi Nancy!

NA:  Hello Laura Lee.

LL:  Nancy, you are a former sugarholic.  Tell me about your own personal story.  What health symptoms did you experience as a sugarholic that you don't have today that you believe were directly attributable to
over-consumption of sugar?

NA:  OK.  Well first I want to say, I'm not a former, I am a sugarholic.

LL:  Oh, you mean once you are, you always are.  But you don't consume sugar today.

NA:  I consume none but one M&M and I'm in trouble.

LL:  How many years has that been?

NA: Twenty years.

LL:  Good for you.

NA:  So, yes, symptoms.  Oh my gosh.  As a child I had all the classic symptoms of allergies -- the runny eyes, the scratchy throat, the itchy ears, sinusitis, waking up every morning sneezing -- my eyes runny and then when I got to UCLA I had a tumor removed from my chest which was nothing more than a calcium deposit.  My adult life was plagued with boils, canker sores, a continuation of the allergies, yeast infections, pneumonia four times, arthritis so bad that I couldn't bend my fingers, falling asleep after meals, yelling at my kids . . .  I was a mess by age 40.

LL:  And you were not fat.  I mean most people think if you overeat sugar, you're going to gain weight, but not necessarily so if you exercise enough.

NA:  That's true.  When I got my Ph.D., I put up signs all around the LA area.  I put up signs all over UCLA and health food stores and gyms -- Sugarholic, Chocoholic, Lick the Sugar Habit!  That's where I got the title for my book.  I would ask one dollar for entrance, and I would have a hundred people in my front room looking as thin as I was, looking great but knowing they were addicted to sugar.

LL:  What are the symptoms of a sugar addiction?

NA:  Well, you subconsciously or consciously always are putting something sweet or caffeine, which does the same thing, into your body, like every two or three hours to give you that lift.  It's a subconscious thing -- it's your morning break, your afternoon break, an evening snack besides all of your meals.  Other things  -- you know, you can't go a day without sugar, you have to have a sweetened something after each meal -- Coca Cola or soft drink become a mainstay in your life -- all of these things.  You don't have to have all of these problems, but one or two of them can really add up.  You've started with a Danish or coffee and doughnuts for breakfast --and the day continues with sweet things.  There's a of things that point to addiction -- just like an alcoholic . . .

LL:   . . . gotta have it . . .

NA:  . . . there are signs for an alcoholic and there are signs for a sugarholic or a chocoholic.

LL:  I believe that there are a lot of people who think that they eat healthy, that frequent health food stores, that keep a very strict diet -- if I buy at a health food store, it's got to be OK -- but you look at some of the ingredients of those things . . . they are full of some sort of sugar.  So I believe you just can't say, OK, if it's in a health food store, then it's OK.

NA:  You absolutely can't.  I couldn't agree with you more.  I guess one of the things that I have become aware of recently is that I talked to a TV hostess in Las Vegas who read my book and said, "This is just for me.  I have a four and a six year old who have never been to dentist or a doctor."  And I have other friends like that too.  The children eat nothing but whole food -- they never were vaccinated but that's another whole subject and they don't eat sugar -- they don't eat processed foods -- they eat the foods that grow out of the ground, that grow from the ground or walk on the ground, that swim, you know.  And they don't eat foods that come in packages, containers, cans, jars or bags.  We've gotten so away from the diet that we can digest, that early man ate because of all of the packages, containers, glass, tins, plastic bags, etc. that we put food in and process it in such a way that we it's killing us off today, I believe.

LL:  We'll get to that.  I want to help you establish that many people may be having a problem with sugar and aren't recognizing it.  You may not go for the so-called sweets but there are a lot of hidden sugars in ketchup -- 50% of the content of ketchup is sugar and I've heard cigarettes have sugar in them . . .

NA:  . . . 17 percent.

LL:  . . . meats -- give me the list of where you wouldn't suspect to find sugar but if you look, it's there.

NA:  Morton salt.  How's that for a starter?  All your processed pastrami, all of your bacon, check out your pizza mixes -- you'd be amazed.  Many canned vegetables like peas and corn have sugar added to them.


LL:  What about frozen peas and corn?

NA:  No, they're usually pretty good.  I'll tell you the newest thing -- we're not frying our potato chips anymore, we're baking them but take a look at the ingredients!  Oh God!  In the latest potato chips, the second ingredient is corn syrup and then dextrose is down farther.  And they really taste sweet because they no longer have the fat.  I mean the whole thing is nonsense!

LL:  Take away fat, then they want to add sugar in order to get it to taste.

NA:  That's right.  And Entenmann-- those cakes that people buy -- they've taken all the fat out of those and just tripled the sugar. Sugar is twice the problem that fat ever thought of being.

LL:  OK.  Tell me about the biochemistry of sugar and its effect on us. Give me the conception -- you can eat a little bit and it's OK, is it when you go past . . .?

NA:  Well, I'm talking to people who have symptoms, who do fall asleep after their meals, who bloat, who have gas, who are fatigued, who sleep 9 hours a night and still don't feel as good as they should and take a quick nap in the afternoon, who have joint pains, who are on high blood pressure pills -- all of these symptoms are saying you're doing something that's causing this.  You didn't inherit these symptoms and they don't come from out there.  You're not just getting old.  You can die without diseases and symptoms.  So these are the people I want to talk to and the first thing with problems like this, which unfortunately is 85% people -- you don't have to worry about people turning off their radio early because most of the people have these symptoms.  Anyway, these are the ones I want to talk with.

LL:  And the good news is, you can do something about it.

NA:  That's right.  You're in charge of your own health in most all cases and you're in charge of what goes in your mouth as well as you're in charge of what comes out of your mouth and what you think and say -- all of those things can upset the body chemistry.

LL:  And you can't trust what your government says!

NA:  No, you can't.

LL:  That was fascinating to me -- that the government wants us to think that we eat less sugar.  But you say that eat a lot more corn sweeteners.  They have just as bad an effect and some of those studies out there are rather misleading.

NA:  Well,  we used to have sugar of cane and beet and then the manufacturers found out that corn was cheaper.  So Coca Cola's and ketchup and pizza and all the rest of the stuff is made from corn and it's a bigger problem because cane and beet are made up of what we call sucrose.  And 50% is glucose and 50% is fructose.  But unfortunately corn syrup is almost all fructose and it's the fructose molecule that is the killer.  Fructose is much worse than glucose.  So we are eating far more fructose than we ever did in the past and it's far worse for us.

LL:  I've seen in health food stores that they actually sell fructose -- a supposed safe sugar so . . . .

NA:  Yes.  It's far better to eat table sugar than it is fructose. What's happened is that the first studies that were done on fructose showed that the blood glucose did not go up as high with regular table sugar . . .

LL:  that's with (?) sugar . . .

NA:  . . . blood sugar, excuse me.  So they said that it was fine for diabetics to use.  Well, what they never tested was the immune system. They never tested to see what the minerals were doing or never tested the cholesterol or the triglycerides and all this information is out of medical journals and it's written up in my book.  I have something like 15 pages as you well know of journal articles.  This all comes from journal articles.  This is not out of my head or anything.

LL:  And I appreciate that you cite the studies and you cite the research and you show the problems right there.  Hard to argue with. What are some of the euphemisms for sugar.  When we read a label, what should we be watching out for?

NA:  Yeah, that's a good question.  I don't mean just good old sucrose which we used to see 90% of time.  It's become very deceiving today because not only sucrose but it's glucose or fructose or dextrose or dextrin, corn syrup, corn syrup solids, corn sweetener, honey, maple syrup, barley malt, brown sugar, turbinado sugar, raw sugar, all of those are simple sugars that hit the bloodstream, not even having to go through the digestive tract completely and so they hit the bloodstream very fast and upset all of our minerals, they make our enzymes unavailable, they make some of the food unable to digest, get into the bloodstream undigested and cause an immune response so the bottom line is, that a certain amount of sugar in each one of us suppresses the immune system.

LL:  So, everyone has their own threshold of when they hit that mark or is it just any little bit of sugar that's going to being that process?

NA:  Sugar takes everybody out of what we call homeostasis or balance. It upsets everybody's body chemistry.  But some people who are healthy, who laugh a lot in their lives and stress hasn't become distress, who are genetically born strong, who are not 55 but probably 25 -- their body can bounce back to homeostasis or this balance easily but it's the other people who have the symptoms, who are older, who are not genetically born strong, etc. whose body stays out of homeostasis and that leads them down to degenerative diseases.

LL:  Or, if you're putting sugar in your mouth every few hours, you're in homeostasis, then you're out, then you're in, then you're out . . .

NA:  You never get back in . . .

LL:  . . . because you're continually adding that irritant.  I was surprised to find that under the influence of sugar in your system, our bodies handle stress less well than without sugar.  That was fascinating as well. One other quick thing --- I have been reading the ingredients of a coffee substitute -- I'm one of the few people not addicted to coffee in Seattle but a coffee (??) is trying Paul in this.  Barley malt -- the whole thing is full of barley malt.  So that's a sugar so even those so-called grain coffee substitutes aren't any better.

NA:  Well if the whole thing is barley malt, it's just barley -- if they've taken barley but that malt means that they have stripped it of its nutrients and made it into a simple sugar.  Rice syrup, that's another thing they use in health food stores.  It's the same stuff -- it's simple sugar.

LL:  Same stuff, same effect.  We'll come back with Nancy Appleton and listen to her lay out the research on how sugar can devastate the homeostasis in your body, upset your body chemistry and what you can do about it.

LL:  I'm Laura Lee and this is the Laura Lee show.  My guest is Nancy Appleton.  She's written Lick the Sugar Habit; a Life Saving Guide. This book is only  $5.95 and it's full of very useful, fascinating research that can help you, intellectually at least, kick the sugar habit.  I think it's something that affects most of us.  Also you can get this book -- we've been asked -- the Radio Bookstore has this book; you can call at 1 (800) 243-1438.  You can also get Stevia, a no calorie, totally natural liquid sweetener, good sugar substitute, actually good for you.  It doesn't have any negative effects on the body when you call the Radio Bookstore as well -- 1 (800) 243-1438.

Nancy, we were talking about some of the research on how sugar can link with degenerative diseases, set you on the road, you've even cited alcoholics have a correlation to sugarholic.  Can you explain that one?

NA:  Yes.  This research was done by Dr. Urlich and he took alcoholics, he took people who were in AA, and he took people right off the streets.  So he had people who didn't drink at all, he had alcoholics and regular people.  And he found out that those alcoholics had many more allergies, had many more symptoms and the consequences of allergies than people who were member of AA who didn't drink at all and people just off the street who just drank small amounts of alcohol.  Then they found out that these people -- many of them were sugarholics before they became alcoholics and many people in AA go back to the sugar afterwards.  So sugar takes the same pathway in the body that alcohol does.  It's a drug!

LL:  There's also a test on lab rats who were fed ( you cite this) a junk food diet and they preferred alcohol to water.  They were given a choice of both.  What's the story there?

NA:  The rats that ate the junk food preferred the alcohol more than rats that were given the rat chow.  That's fascinating, isn't it?  And I imagine that there is a correlation.  I'd sure like to go to some bar and ask everybody what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I think it would be a fascinating study.

LL:  It would.  This was interesting.  You cite tooth decay may be caused by a system malfunction.  We think that tooth decay is caused when you eat candy and don't brush your teeth.  Right?  The sugar sits there and proliferates the bacteria that then eat away at your enamel. Talk about the study where this researcher put sugar water down rats by tube and bypass the teeths' exposure to sugar.

NA:  That's just what he did.  So that teeth never touched the sugar, they put the sugar right down a tube into the stomach and what happens was on the teeth  We have a small amount of a liquify substance, you might call it a saliva, that is secreted from the teeth and it pushes any of the leftover food and any bacteria that gets in the mouth outward and it's continually doing that -- that's a natural process in our body.  The minute that the sugar got into the body, bypassed the teeth, got into the stomach, got into the gut, that liquid no longer pushed out from the teeth but started pulling into the teeth so that anything that was in mouth at the time or later on -- I think it went on for about an hour afterwards -- would get caught on the teeth and of course cause problems but without any sugar in the mouth.  So this sugar plays a role systematically.  And that's another interesting thing.  You know, the only thing that the medical community seems to feel that sugar does is to cause tooth decay.  Well, if sugar can drill holes in hardest tissues in our body, think what it does to the soft tissue!

LL:  Have they done studies on that?

NA:  No.  I mean yes.  I mean we know what sugar does; we know how it can upset the endocrine system.  All of that's in the book.  But I mean, by soft tissues, that means any of the other parts of the body that sugar's exposed to.  Well, if it's exposed to the teeth, a very hard tissue, and drills holes in them, think what it does to the other parts of the body.  Well, you just logically think about it.  It just seems crazy not to realize what it's doing to your whole body.

LL:  When we come back, we'll ask Nancy about the research that she cites in her book, Lick the Sugar Habit on how sugars can raise your pulse, your resting pulse rate.  Just eat some sugar, take your pulse before and after and you'll see a rise . . . is that in everybody or just certain people?

NA:  Well, any food that you happen to not be metabolizing, any food you're allergic to can raise your pulse and it's not supposed to be -- that's not homeostasis -- that throws your body out of balance and sugar is one of those things that does it to most people.

LL:  And we'll talk about how sugar ages the cells.  That's a frightening one.  You may think you're getting away with sugar but if it's aging your cells, you're going to bear the cumulative affect of it over time.  She'll tell us how fructose can cause white cells to become sleepy and unable to defend against invaders.  Have you ever eaten sugar and then come down with a cold immediately after?  I think that's what's happening on that one.  She's got lots of fascinating studies.  The knowledge of this will help you make better choices in life and protect your own health.  Lick the Sugar Habit.  We'll come back and spend another hour with Nancy Appleton.  We'll take your questions next hour.

LL:  Hello.  Laura Lee back on the Laura Lee Show. . During the break, Paul came in and he said, "We've already spent an hour with Nancy Appleton and Lick the Sugar Habit."  We'll spend the next hour with her here.  We'll hear more about some of these studies and take your phone calls on this topic.  But Paul came in and he said, "You know, the holidays are coming in and of course, they're going to be sweets everywhere.  Are you trying to be the grinch here?"  I said. "No, I believe that we should all make informed and intelligent choices in life and if we're going to say no to something, we need to know exactly why." Especially if our friends ask us, "Oh, you're not eating sugar!" "Well, here's why."  Also, I noticed that there are ways around this. You can satisfy a sweet tooth.  I noticed that in Nancy's book, Lick the Sugar Habit ,  she has a recipe section and I told Paul, "There are recipes for carob mousse, Paul"  And it includes sweet potatoes, baked (those are wonderful!)and some carob powder . . .

NA:  . . . and vanilla.

LL:  . . . and vanilla.  She's got the recipe right here.  You know, Sam Graci who developed Greens Plus  -- he's a big fan of sweet potatoes. He says that they're very nutritious and very good for you.  We take sweet potatoes and peel them and pop them in the oven and they're just wonderful  -- they're like dessert.  And they're good for you.  She also has a recipe for coconut/sweet potato pudding, for pumpkin pie and spicy carob brownies.  So there are ways to satisfy a sweet tooth and do it in a healthful fashion.  You just have to be smart about it.

I have a quick story about pumpkin pie.  The keeper of the lion house at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle tells us -- we went on a tour there at the feline house -- I don't know how we got onto this topic but she said that the pumpkin pie spices, cinnamon and nutmeg and those pumpkin spices she has found are aphrodisiacs to felines.  And she wants to do some studies to see if those pumpkin pie spices act as aphrodisiacs to the rest of  the mammal collection.  I don't know why, but pumpkin pie is a very favorite food of Paul.  Maybe that's part of it.  Anyway, we're back.  . . . .

You are a good researcher, Nancy, I must tell you.  She's got every study here to do with sugar and its effect on you.  You can take a test on, are you a sugar addict; she's going to list all the hidden sugars in foods -- a list which is just unbelievable.  We're going to take a look at the so-called healthy sugars, the problems with the sugar substitutes, aspartame and saccharin.  I want to personally recommend Stevia.  We had the interview with James May who is an importer from Paraguay and as it's made into a very easy to use liquid concentrate. Stevia is no-calorie -- it's all natural -- it's actually good for you and nourishes the pancreas.  You get it sweet (through the tap?????), put a little bit of that in tea or even soda water and you can alleviate that.  Before we go to the telephones, let's talk a bit more about some of these very interesting studies, Nancy, and I want to mention sugar ages the cells, new research that's just out.  How does it do so?

NA:  Well, this is fascinating.  I went over to England to interview one of the men who is doing this.  Rockefeller Center is doing it and the University of London and what they're finding is that normally when we eat sugar, our blood glucose goes up, insulin secretes into the blood stream from the pancreas and brings it back to homeostasis.  That's over a four hour period and, of course, if you're diabetic they have to give you extra insulin because your insulin is not getting into the cells. So, what is happening is today we are eating so much sugar that the sugar is going up and staying up there.  It doesn't come back to homeostasis because we're always eating it.  Now when the sugar goes up there and stays up there, it binds nonenzymatically which means that it's supposed to bind enzymatically with protein but it binds nonenzymatically with protein and makes the protein nonavailable to the body, makes the collagen sticky (this is one of the causes of cataracts) -- it is a vicious cycle that is going on because our blood glucose doesn't come back to its normal 85 or 90, it stays up around 140 or 150 milligrams per deciliter.  It's causing real havoc.  It's called glycosylation -- it's the big word that they've given to it with research just a few years old and we're going to hear a lot more about it.  So it ages the collagen, it ages the cells in the body when this happens.

LL:  I also notice you talk about you talk about advanced glycoproteins and short form of that is AGE.  It's so appropriate.  It's talking about how it ages your system.

NA:  That's right.

LL:  Also you say that sugar destroys enzymes so it makes it very hard for the body to function without those enzymes.

NA:  Well, what happens is the sugar upsets the minerals and makes some of them deficient.  Phosphoralization is one of the things it does – it depletes phosphorous in the body when you eat the sugar and every enzyme that helps you digest food is dependent upon a mineral so the enzymes cannot function without the minerals that the sugar has depleted.  When the enzymes don't work, all the food doesn't digest and suddenly this undigested food gets into the bloodstream  That's a form of food allergy with the runny eyes, the runny nose, the scratchy throat, the itchy ears.  That's what happens with undigested food that gets in the bloodstream and finally the immune system looks at it like a foreign invader, like a bacteria or virus and comes in and escorts it out of the body.  But your immune system wasn't meant to do that over and over and that's how it becomes exhausted over the eating of sugar.

LL:  Also you mentioned foods cooked on high heat can have problems with these nonavailable proteins . . .

NA:  Yes.  When you overcook food, when you over-process food, when you barbecue food, all of those foods pass what we call the heat-labile point and at that point, they change their chemical configuration. You've evolved from early man able to eat food in a certain chemical configuration and with these new configurations, you don't have the right enzymes to digest these and the right digestive mechanisms so that's another whole story in itself.  But mostly due to processed foods and, of course, sugar in so many processed foods, we are getting degenerative diseases. LL:  And how does the fructose manage to make sleepy white blood cells so that they're unable to defend against all of these.

NA:  I have seen this under a microscope.  I've seen when people eat fructose, looking at the white blood cells under a microscope, what happens is that when this fructose gets into the bloodstream, it just makes those white cells, the immune system, become dormant.  The immune system just can't function, and, of course, you've got to have very fast alive white blood cells to defend you against cancer and AIDS and bacterial and viral infections, etc.  When they go dormant like this, they can't function.  And therefore, that makes you far more susceptible to all infectious diseases.

LL:  And a quick note on coffee which you say is a kind of a sugar substitute -- it has a similar effect on the body.  You cite a Dr. A. Takaahushi at the Tohoku University School of Medicine.  He found a correlation between the amount of coffee that a country consumes – of course this is a very broad study -- and the number of deaths from cancer of the prostate and you say other data suggests its the sugar used in coffee rather than the coffee itself that could be the problem.

NA:  Coffee in itself is a problem, I'll have to say.  But many people unfortunately when they do this research do not distinguish between what is causing the problem the coffee or is it the sugar?  Another one I noticed that they did research on -- they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of people are involved in this. They give them all a certain amount of food to test whatever they were testing.  Then to control their weight, because some people have to have more calories, they give them graham crackers.  If you've ever seen the ingredients of graham crackers, it's almost as bad as a doughnut.  There's hydrogenated fat which is killing us off today.  There are three forms of sugar. It's just a mess.  And the honey graham crackers are worse than the regular graham crackers.

LL:  Is that because honey is toxic when it's heated.

NA:  That's true.  But strangely enough there seems to be more sugar in the honey graham crackers than in the regular graham crackers.

LL:  It's so deceiving, isn't it?

NA:  Yes it is.

LL:  Here's a study that I read in the newspaper just last week.  It said that for chocoholics, there may be a reason for that addiction. There was research done by a researcher at the Neuro-Science Institute at San Diego which reported nature (?) and a Daniel Piomelli (?) speculates that chocolate(?) may make marijuana much less high but still some sort of high and others argue of course that there's not enough of the specific compounds to do much in chocolate compared with marijuana. But, I want to ask you about the nature of  addiction.  You say sugar, white flour are actually addictive.  We don't usually think of them as addictive but is it because it gets your body chemistry off so much that it's just hard to get it righted again.  How do you do that?  How do you go from a sugar addiction back to maintaining homeostasis so that you don't have sugar cravings?  We'll ask you about this and take phone calls for our guest, Nancy Appleton.  She's the author of Lick the Sugar Habit.

LL: Nancy, tell us a little bit about why sugar and white flour are addictive.  How are they addictive?

NA:  The definition of an addiction is craving of a substance and needing some of it on a continual basis to feel good.  It's not only white flour strangely enough for many people -- the thing that you're allergic to you can also become addicted to.  There are many people out there who, unfortunately, find that sugar upsets the body chemistry. Those foods that get into the bloodstream, as I talked about before, are the foods you are allergic to.  And when you think of all of the foods that we eat with sugar, it's the fast foods, it's all the wheat – the doughnuts, the  cakes, the pies, all of cookies . . . it's all made with wheat and sugar.  And the other thing is milk products, of course, milk shakes, cheesecakes, ice cream, etc.  That milk is eaten with sugar. Many people are addicted and allergic to milk products and to wheat products as well as sugar.

LL:  What a double whammy!

NA:  It is.  If you put us all into a computer and took a little blood from us and said what are we most allergic to, besides sugar, number one is wheat products, and number two is milk products.  That means yogurt and cheese and cottage cheese -- the whole bowl of wax.

LL:  We're going to have you on at a later date to talk about the problems with milk and some of those other things.  You've done a lot of research.  And you say as someone withdraws from sugar, you can experience shakes, fever, depression and headaches.  A little later on, tell us how we overcome, get over that hump, so that you can get homeostasis and become sugar free without cravings.

LL:  Let's take our first call.  David.  Hi David.  Thanks for joining us.  You're on with Nancy Appleton.

DA:  Good evening.  Two questions.  First of all I'd like to have your guest take on some of the other sugar substitutes that we find on the store shelves.  They're called isomols or sugar alcohol.

NA:  Yeah.  We don't see those on the shelves usually.  Those are used in research . . .

DA:  No, you find them in all sorts of sugarless candies in any drugstore.

NA:  Oh really!  I know them in terms of research but I'm sorry, I can't answer that.  I don't know if they are a simple sugar and you eat much of it, you're in trouble.  But again, one little candy I don't think it's going to do it either.

DA:  Next question.  We have Stevia and we're trying very hard to do something useful with it.  We tried baking with it and had some utter disasters.

LL:  Let's get Jim May on and we'll have him give us some recipes and ways to use it.

DA:  If you could even put some on the Web site, it would be nice.

LL:  Sure, you bet.  I'll do it as quickly as I get some.  And if we have anyone in the audience who's got some Stevia recipes they want to share with us, please send them in and we'll try to get them posted and share with everyone.

LL:  Next call is Betty.  Hi Betty.  Thanks for joining us.

BE:  Hi.  Thank you.  I have a question about sweet potatoes, yams, carrots, the sweet vegetables and also fruit that has fructose.  Do they do the same sort of thing in the body?

NA:  Those are what we call complex carbohydrates.  This is the food you want.  All carbohydrates, all fruits and vegetables and starches and grains break down into simple sugars, just like table sugar.  They're made of fructose and glucose.  But it takes a long time, and it's over a period of hours.  They don't hit the bloodstream immediately like those simple sugars that I talked about.  And those are the good guys.  Our brain needs two teaspoons of sugar at all times to function and it doesn't need any simple sugar to get that.  It can actually get if from protein and fat too.  But it's the complex carbohydrates.  It's the potatoes, the beans, the rice -- that's the good food.  That's the food that will very slowly get the sugar into the bloodstream.

LL:  I appreciate your call.  Tom next.

TO:  Hi.  I have some questions for Nancy.  First of all, you said something sugars with high fructose are bad.  Doesn't our body go through glycolysis and doesn't every glucose molecule convert to fructose eventually?

NA:  Yes.  You're right to a degree.  But again, our body cannot consume the amount that it's taking in at 149 pounds per person per year.  It just doesn't have the ability to handle this kind of abuse.

LL:  And because you take in sugars that are stripped of minerals, the body has to pull out some of its mineral store in order to process it, then you become mineral depleted through over-consumption, just one of many problems, you're saying.

TO:  And my second question was concerning why there isn't any effect on
the soft tissues?

LL:  She said there was.  It just hasn't been as well studied.

NA:  We know that it can lead to arthritis.  I have something like 72 different journal articles in the book in a certain section that shows sugar leads to gallstones, sugar can cause kidney stones, sugar can cause cataracts.  It's all right directly from journals and those are some of the soft tissues in the body.

TO:  I'm having problems with this.  The effects that are on the teeth are completely different then the effects on the soft tissues.

NA:  Yes, they are, you're right.  But as the fact that it can to this to the hard tissues in the body, the teeth, it should seem logical that it can also affect the soft tissues which really haven't been looked at.

LL:  And, it's a systemic effect, you're saying.  When we come back, if you could give us a quick list of some of the degenerative diseases that some of these journal studies, these researchers, have found that have a contribution to them from sugar.  Let's get the list of that and let's take the rest of your phone calls for Nancy Appleton.

LL:  We are back.  Right now we're talking with Nancy Appleton, author of Lick the Sugar Habit.  May I remind you, a lot of the sugars found in health food store products are just as bad for you as the regular table sugar.  The other sugar substitutes such as aspartame and saccharin have their own problems.  Nancy's come up with some pretty good solutions, even has some very nice recipes.  She can help you get on a whole food diet . . .

NA:  . . .and I have a whole chapter on self-help techniques to lick the sugar habits.

LL:  Very good.  What are some of the degenerative diseases associated with over-consumption of sugar.

NA:  Alright.  Here we go.  Sugar can suppress the immune system.  Sugar can cause a significant rise in triglycerides, can weaken the defenses against bacterial infection, can cause kidney damage, can reduce healthy lipoproteins and promote the elevation of the harmful lipoproteins, can interfere with the absorption of  calcium and magnesium, can lead to the cancer of the breast, ovaries, prostate and rectum, can cause colon cancer with an increased risk in women and raise the risk factor of gall bladder cancer, can increase fasting levels of glucose, and can weaken eyesight.  This goes on for 74.  This is interesting stuff, Laura Lee. When I go to UCLA which I do all the time and use their bio-med library and look under what we call Med-line which is the big computer that has all the medical research done from all over the world -- you can plug in anywhere and get information.  When I put in "sucrose, glucose or fructose" and then put "adverse affects" I get very little.  I get a little about hypoglycemia and a little about teeth.  None of these other research papers are there, and yet if I go to that year and go to that journal, it will be there.  Whoever programmed it was AMA totally oriented and that's all they put in.

LL:  That is so deceitful.

NA:  Isn't that wild?

LL:  It's so deceitful.

NA:  It's taken me 15 years to do this research.  Lick the Sugar Habit has been out for 12 years.  This is a brand new edition with all the newest research in it.  Literally to find this information has taken me 15 years.

LL:  And of course, sugar is a big industry, may we remind our listeners which could be the reason why some of this research isn't out there.

NA:  Not only is it a big industry, but the government still subsidizes sugar.  That's the reason it's $.33 a pound and the cheapest thing you can buy and why it's used as a filler in so many foods today because it's so cheap.  It's that addictive little flavor that keeps you back for more too, the hot dogs and sausages and all those things put in it.

LL:  So it's just holding the hand of all the processed food industries and saying, "Here, let's give you a cheap addictive substance . . ."

NA:  You're right.

LL:  You said in colonial times sugar was the equivalent of then $2.40 a pound so it was an expensive luxury.  If sugar was an expensive luxury, we'd have a whole different health scene and level of obesity today that's rising in American, wouldn't we?  And we would have . . . the impacts are on and on.

NA:  I have to tell you one other thing.  I've had the opportunity to travel in Third Worlds.  I've gone to China, Papua, New Guinea, Zimbabwe, and what I find is when I go into villages and the people are still eating their native food -- it doesn't matter whether it's rice in Southeast Asia or corn in Africa or sago palm in Papua, New Guinea – as long as they're eating their native foods and have not gotten into white man's processed foods, there are no degeneration.  I don't mean less -- I mean no degenerative diseases.  There's no cancer, no arthritis, no diabetes, no osteoporosis, no allergies, none of that, no heart disease.  There's none of that.  Isn't that wild?!

LL:  That is wild.  And Dr. Price did that research in the 1920's.

NA:  Ten years from now, I'll not be able to go those villages.  They won't be there.  White flour and sugar will be everywhere.

LL:  I'm surprised there are any left today that are untouched by Western diet.

NA:  They are very hard to find.

LL:  Back to the telephones.  We have Loretta.  She's in Newtonville, New York.  Hi.

NA:  Thank you for taking my call.  I have several questions.  What do you think of fruit and fruit juice sweetened products and how long would it take a body to get back to homeostasis if all sugars are eliminated?

LL:  Two very good questions.

NA:  What do I think of fruit.  Let's start there.  For healthy people, I think fruit is wonderful.  There's fiber in it. There are nutrients in it.  In the book, there are three food plans and the most strict food plan is for those people who have degenerative diseases, who have a lot of symptoms, who have a lot of allergies.  We take fruit out of the diet because when the body is healing, we want to keep everything in homeostasis, let it heal at the fastest rate it can.  Of course, anytime you eat a simple sugar, your blood glucose has to go up, and insulin has to be secreted from the pancreas to bring it back to homeostasis.  So, we try to keep everything as balanced as we can.  Then, after two months, we introduce fruit back into the diet.  Some people can eat fruit very well the rest of their lives.  I think that for those of you are sugarholics, who are hypoglycemic, who are pre-diabetic, who have yeast infections, you don't need the fruit. Your body will does not need fruit until body heals and your body will do quite well.  So that's what I would say about fruit  And then fruit sweetened desserts that we find in health food stores -- well again I say, if God made it, eat it.  If it walks on the ground, grows in the ground, grows above the ground or swims.  God didn't make fruit juice.  He made whole fruit.  When I was doing my research to find out what would happen when people ate sugar, I had them drink orange juice.  I found out that it did the same thing. I tried to get the same amount that was in a 12-ounce Coke so I had a 12-ounce glass of orange juice.  It took me five large oranges to squeeze to get a 12-ounce glass of juice.  Well, you'd never sit down and eat five oranges.   So there's a lot of simple sugar in juices today.  The sweetened cookies, etc., that they have in health food stores, I don't know how much fruit juice they put in.  If it's just a small amount for kids who are healthy, I'm not opposed to that particularly, but if there's a large amount in it . . .  make them yourself and just put a small amount of that concentrated juice in it.

The third one was about how long does it take your body to get back in homeostasis.  You know, it's amazing if you take the sugar out.  If you don't have too many foods you're allergic to, within a 25-hour period. When you read the book, you'll find out how you can test at home for food allergies and test for homeostasis.  There's a kit that you can use.  I won't go into that on the air now but there is a way that you can test and you'll find that a person who is half healthy within 24-hours to 48 hours of taking that sugar out, of cleaning up their act, of eating just whole foods, and their body comes back to homeostasis. It doesn't mean that they're healed, but it means that they're not abusing their body or on the degenerative process anymore, that they've stopped that process and their body is now in the healing mode.

LL:  Thank you for that.  Paul of North Adams, Massachusetts.  Glad you found us.

PA:  I'm totally devastated.  I was working out every day -- everyday I worked out really seriously and I ate -- I just drank water and I ate meat and some vegetables, doing that every day.  I went to a buffet one day, an all-you-can-eat buffet, and I got off the wagon and since then I'm totally wiped -- just like Jekyll and Hyde.  I can't get back get back the other way right now and I wanted to ask this lady, how can I make it through that first two weeks without totally losing control and go run out to the store and buy sugar or a bunch of pizza or (??)?  How can I stop doing that and getting wiped out everyday?  How can I get back to being normal again?

NA:  I can suggest Overeaters Anonymous, OA, and you get a sponsor or a person who can help you so that you don't have to call Lauralee or me. You could have a person that you can call when you need this help.  For many people, this is a Godsend.  That would be one thing, I would say. It's a hard thing and we're moving into the next few weeks of holidays. One of the things you might try to do is before you go to a party or somewhere where you know that there's going to be junk food eat before you go.  Because we're all social animals, there's no reason why you shouldn't enjoy other people's company.   If you fill your stomach with health foods before you go, then you can stand with soda water in your hand.

LL:  I remember studying where eating a baked potato and something healthy on it -- inside is helpful too -- helps kick off the serotonin in your system and so you feel satisfied, you feel sated and your blood sugar is doing fine.  You're a sugar addict.  You've had a lot of problem with careening blood sugar and so some of those foods, the complex carbohydrates that you recommended, or meat and vegetables, the diet that's the diet that this gentleman said he was on prior to "falling off the wagon" as he put it, that will feel smooth and even so that you're not tempted."

NA:  It does seem to help.  You're right.  I might suggest that you take some extra chromium because sugarholics depletes all of their chromium which is part of the hypoglycemic problem and you go into low blood sugar, you can crave those simple sugars.

LL:  We had Joe Brown on.  You talk a lot about minerals in your book and Joe Brown talked about a simple hair analysis test so if you find you are very deficient in a certain mineral which you say, Nancy, an over-consumption of sugar can deplete your minerals and you need to find out what minerals you're depleted in so you can begin to replace them and if your minerals, then you stand a good chance of being on an even keel all the time.  I've also found that Stevia -- I use it daily – I put it in teas, various teas, maybe sprinkle a little on a sweet potato with cinnamon -- that's good.  So that just getting it in your system helps.   It's nourishing your pancreas, helps your blood sugar and it tastes sweet so you satisfy whether it's in the form of tea or whatever.  So there are many things you can do.  And you say in your book you have a lot of self-help therapies; how to get over the hump of getting off sugar.  So there are many things.  It's kind of a multi-faceted approach, I'm assuming.

NA:  It is.

LL:  And also the knowledge of what this substance does to you.  Do you want to invest in your long-term health?  Do you want to avoid degenerative diseases?  Do you want to give your body the best chance of staying healthy because if you have your health, your chances of happiness are so much greater in this world.  If you have your health and it's so worth protecting, then what do I have to do to achieve that in the long term?  Then you need to know with information, what do I need to do, what do you need to avoid, just knowing that helps you quite a lot, I think.

NA:  I would never go back to my depression, my anger,  my fatigue, my boils and canker sores, my yeast infections and my pneumonia.  Never, ever!  I'm healthier now than when I was 21 and I'm 61.  So there you go.

LL:  Good for you.  And you can eat well and deliciously with a little bit of education.

NA:  I guess the bottom line for this man is, you are responsible for what you put into your mouth and I know addictions because I'm addicted.  So I have great sympathy for you, and I hope that you'll get the book and it will help you get through the holidays.

LL:  It's only $5.95 -- a worthwhile investment.  We'll come right back and take the rest of your phone calls.

LL:  We are talking with Nancy Appleton, the author of Lick the Sugar Habit.  Let's take the next couple of calls.  Maryann, thanks for joining us.

MA:  I'm wondering.  Fruit is made from sucrose?  Is that correct?

NA:  And glucose.  Both.

MA:  Then why is fructose bad and fruit good?

LL:  Good question.

NA:  Again, potatoes have fructose in it -- so do beans.  And all carbohydrates have fructose in them.  So that the words fruit and fructose are a little deceiving in that there are a lot of foods that have fructose in them.  Again as I say, it is the amount and the speed that hits the bloodstream that seems to be so bad.  Our body can handle a small amount of fructose but it's the amount that we're eating today that seems to be the huge problem.

LL:  Because you don't eat tons of baked potatoes, you eat one for a meal and you get a little bit of fructose and it supplies the brain with the needed two teaspoons of sugar . . .

NA:  . . . and very slowly . . .

MA:  Right.  Another question.  Cranberry juice has been kind of a known drink when you have a yeast infection and that is extremely high in sugar . . .

NA:  No.  There are some in health food stores today that have no sugar
in them.

LL:  And (???)

NA:  Well, that's the way it goes.  That's what you want to drink, not the sugary stuff.  I've gotta tell you that one of the research papers shows that sugar can cause the urinary tract infections.

LL:  Because it helps proliferate the bad bacteria.

NA:  That's right.

LL:  Sarah is next.

SA:  I really want to thank you.  This is very interesting.  I had breast cancer three years ago and chemo, and I have to go in quite often to have my blood test and this is making me very suspicious that one of my reasons that my blood count drops, the white cells drop, is that I'm definitely a sugarholic.  Other than that, I really eat very healthfully but like the man that called a few calls ago, it takes me about four days . . .It must be like somebody that's an alcoholic or something -- it takes about four days of shaking and headaches and especially the first couple of days of feeling kind of dizzy and out of it . . .

NA:  Anger?  Depression?  Fatigue?  All of those happen when you withdraw from sugar and you're a sugarholic.

SA:  What you're really telling me is that it's dangerous.  I can't do
it.

NA:  No, you can't.  We all know that most of us get cancer on a daily basis but a strong immune system moves that out of the body and you are suppressing your immune system every time you do it.

SA:  The last time I went in -- it's supposed to be a count of about 5000, and it was about 2500 and I had been eating a lot of sugar and I had begun to get really suspicious.

NA:  No doctor has told you to knock off the sugar.

SA:  They don't.  Doctors are not that well educated because I have asked several times, how can I get my white count up, and they say, we don't know.  The red count is easier, but we really don't know, other than artificial nutrigen, that sort of thing.  But then that really hurts your joints and that sort of thing.  If I can just stay off of it for the first couple of days and then not have it in my house, in my body, I do really well because I love sweet potatoes, I love vegetables and . . .

LL:  Oh, you'd like to have some recipes . . .

NA:  You said you eat healthy food except for sugar.  Let me tell you, if you sit down to the perfect meal of a nice salad and some broccoli or cauliflower and a small piece of protein and some potatoes, a perfect meal.  It has all the nutrients.  You eat it but then for dessert you have a piece of pumpkin pie.  That sugar so upsets the body chemistry
that you can't get the nutrients from the healthy food that you ate. And some of those nutrients actually become toxic to the body.  It's fascinating.  So, when you say that eat well except for the sugar, you don't eat well because sugar ruins it all.

LL:  I want to just quickly summarize the cover-up that our own government is doing of this information.  You have to call it a cover-up.  You state in your book, Nancy, that the US Senate commissioned a report in 1977 that concluded that excess sugar consumption is associated with tooth decay, diabetes, (??), heart disease, etc. and called for a 40% reduction in sugar intake.  It's hard to find that report today.  You say that in 1986 an FDA report found additional complications from a high sugar intake:  behavioral changes, mineral deficiencies, calcium secretions, and on and on.  Then, they went and said, don't worry, Americans' intake of sugar is not that high.  What does your own research show you about how they calculated the average American sugar intake and how false it was -- off the mark.

NA:  I was furious when that report came out and I called the FDA to find out how the research was done.  They had taken 5000 people and sent them some questionnaires and told them to keep track of everything they ate for the past week.  Well, people forget their snacks; they forget all sorts of things.  They said, we eat only 40 pounds and at that time it was 129 total pounds that we were eating, not 149.  But they're still saying we eat only one-third of that manufactured.  They said that the other two-thirds of sugar, that we do actually manufacture and they admitted this in their report is not consumed.  We manufacture 129 but we only eat 40.  Well what the heck happens to the other 80 pounds?  It goes to dog food, to waste, and to export.  Well, I nearly blew my lid. And yet they did show that when you do eat this 129 pounds, it does cause many diseases, but not to worry because we only 40.  And the whole thing was a total hoax.

LL:  And you went to a soda manufacturer and said, how many sodas are people drinking a year.   Four hundred and seventy-nine, was it?

NA:  Yes

LL:  That's over one a day.  And each soda has 10 teaspoons of sugar.

NA:  The FDA said that we eat less sugar than we drink in all soft drinks.  I went to the soft drink association -- they have an association that tells how many soft drinks we drink a year.  The whole thing was nuts.

LL:  Nuts.  The best thing to do is to throw it out of your house. Don't even allow any  processed sugar, any of these foods into your house.  There are substitutes out there.  Get informed and do a lot for your own good health.

NA:  Laura Lee, you did your homework and you understood my research and thank you so much.  It was a wonderful interview.

LL:  Thanks so much.