The Missing Piece of the Diabetes Puzzle

Modern medicine operates much like a farmer who fixes his fences only after the horses or cows have broken out. Hence, most serious health conditions incubate for years before they are diagnosed. This is certainly true of type 2 diabetes.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a timely article in Life Extension magazine entitled “Glucose: The Silent Killer.” In addition to summarizing all of the really bad things that excess blood sugar can do to your body, the article documented an important fact: By the time you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, you’ve actually had blood sugar problems for years. (Note: Do not confuse type 1 diabetes with type 2 diabetes. They are really very different. Type 1 is an autoimmune disease, which begins in childhood and requires insulin. Type 2 diabetes, also called diabesity, is related to your diet and lifestyle.)

I certainly knew this to be true, and I have written about it in my books. But there is a new piece to the puzzle: We’ve set the range for normal blood sugar too high. Recent studies indicate that fasting glucose levels should be in the range of 70–85 mg/dL. Unfortunately, most standard labs give the upper limit of normal for a fasting blood sugar at 99 mg/dL. That’s too high!

In addition, blood sugar levels after a meal should not spike more than 40 mg/dL higher than your fasting level. This means that your blood sugar level should be in the range of 110–125mg/dL one or two hours after a meal.

After reading this compelling new data on blood sugar, I decided to test my own blood sugar on a regular basis to see how I was doing—to take my health into my own hands. Taking control of your health starts with knowing where you stand. You don’t need to wait! I sure didn’t. (I have a family history of cardiovascular disease, so doing what I can to keep my blood sugar normal is a good way to support my heart, and so forth.) The first thing I did was consult with my Facebook community. I have a lot of “experts” there — individuals with diabetes who regularly check their own blood sugar. After getting some opinions, I bought a One Touch Ultra Glucometer on Amazon.com, along with lancets and blood sugar strips. Ingenious, simple, and oh-so empowering!

I quickly discovered that my blood sugar never went above 120 mg/dL. Probably because I have pretty much quelled my excess sugar cravings over the years by focusing on lots of activities that bring sweetness into my life in other ways besides eating sugar. This includes dancing tango in close embrace, listening to good music, de-cluttering my house, doing work I love, and taking long baths while reading good novels or looking out the window at the river. I have created a personal paradise for myself. This process has taken a lifetime and began in earnest during perimenopause—the time of life when most women first develop blood sugar and blood pressure problems.

I encourage you to do the same. Be kind and gentle with yourself if you’re not there yet. (I realize that I am reporting from the front lines here!) Bringing sweetness of other kinds into your life will bolster your health, allow you to enjoy your life even more, and help you curb those carb cravings! Don’t get me wrong. I crave a gooey chocolate brownie, just like you might. So, from time to time, I indulge without going overboard and savor every bite. But I want to continue to flourish in the personal paradise I’ve created. And that means doing what I can to keep my blood sugar levels normal.

If you’re checking your blood sugar levels regularly, if you’ve figured out a way to curb your sugar cravings, or if you just like what you’ve read, please leave a comment here or on my Facebook page.

This information is not intended to treat, diagnose, cure, or prevent any disease. All material in this article is provided for educational purposes only. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you have regarding a medical condition, and before undertaking any diet, exercise, or other health program.

Photo credit: Steve Rothman

The Face of Diabetes; The Importance of Role Models

When I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1985 at 14 years old, I had just moved away from home for the first time. My hometown in Vermont was so small that we didn’t have enough kids for a high school, so my parents sent me to a private boarding school in New Hampshire. I loved my new school, Proctor Academy. I loved the green fields, white dorm houses and red brick buildings where we called our teachers by their first names. I couldn’t wait to shed my small-town skin and become a sophisticated young woman. So when I started feeling tired and thirsty and kept waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I ignored the symptoms. But when I lost 15 pounds in five days, I knew something wasn’t right.

That afternoon I reluctantly walked to the school infirmary. The nurse weighed me and asked why I’d lost so much weight, and I shrugged; I didn’t have an answer. She put me to bed in the sick room and went to call my parents. I could hear her on the phone telling my mom she needed to come right away, “Your daughter’s anorexic,” she said. I wasn’t anorexic. Mom took me out of school, drove me to our local hospital, and I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.

Twenty-six years have passed since that day, and I am still struck by the irony of my initial misdiagnosis. Lillian, the nurse who told my mother I was anorexic, had Type 1 diabetes herself. She was the only other person at my school with diabetes and was not an inspiring role model for a 14-year-old girl.

Personal philosophy

That’s why I wrote my book, “The Smart Woman’s Guide to Diabetes, Authentic Advice on Everything from Eating to Dating and Motherhood.” I knew the real faces of diabetes were out there somewhere. I knew there were women who were living away from home, training for marathons, traveling to different countries, looking for love, getting married, having babies and growing old with diabetes, and I wanted to find them.

Writing this book helped me create a personal philosophy to living well with diabetes that is made up of five basic components.

1. Role models

Having positive role models is a key component to living well with diabetes. In the course of writing my book, I had the opportunity to speak with women such as Mari Ruddy, founder of the nonprofit organization Team WILD, We Inspire Life with Diabetes, who “empowers people with diabetes to take charge of their health by teaching how to be an athlete first, then a person, then an athlete with diabetes.” Women like Ann Albright, Ph.D., R.D., who gave me the idea of having a personal philosophy for living with illness. Dr. Albright, the Director of the Division of Diabetes Translation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has had Type 1 diabetes for more than 40 years and says her philosophy was influenced by her mother, a nurse, who encouraged Ann to experience life to the fullest. These are just a couple of the women whose lives inspire me on a daily basis. Knowing they are out there, struggling with their blood sugars and diabetes care, helps me to keep going, even on the worst days.

2. Translating the language of illness

Accepting illness has a lot to do with being able to communicate. I’ve often asked myself why I have to learn to speak like a medical professional to talk about my disease. If we don’t know how to communicate about diabetes, how can we accept it fully into our lives? The language of illness is often negative and scientific, and as a writer and a woman who searches for the right words every day, I choose to translate negative, ugly words into words that speak my truth. For example:

Instead of following a Diabetes Diet, I call it Healthy Eating.

Instead of using the word Seizure, I say my blood sugar was Low.

Instead of a life filled with Restrictions, I call it a life of Moderation.

Instead of Complications, I take care of myself to avoid future Challenges.

3. Asking for help

I can’t do this alone. For years I kept my illness in the metaphorical closet because I didn’t want to appear weak, needy or different, and I didn’t want to ask for help. Maybe it is my puritanical background or my introverted tendencies; but regardless of the source, I have always struggled to ask for and accept help, especially with diabetes. Being a mother has changed that, and I’ve realized an important lesson for my sons to learn is to know that asking for help is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of knowing your own limitations. I don’t want to do this alone. I want to have my husband, children, friends and extended family there when I need them, so that I can help others in return.

4. I’m no expert

After 26 years of living with diabetes, I’ve realized that I am not an expert, and I’m never going to be. When I was writing my book, one piece of advice almost every woman told me was, “Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t try to be the perfect patient because you’ll just get frustrated.” Diabetes is a very demanding disease with daily opportunities for making mistakes. Perfection is not all it’s cracked up to be, and there is more to life than living in fear of “failure.” Sometimes the biggest mistakes have taught me the most, and accepting that I am not an expert has helped me to embrace the dark side of living with illness.

5. Putting myself first

As a mother to three fabulous boys, this one is the hardest for me to maintain; but it’s also the most important. If I don’t put myself first, I won’t be around to watch my boys grow up. Taking care of me first doesn’t mean I am ignoring the needs of my family but that I am placing value on my health and well-being. As women living with illness, we need to say no We need to tell our children that we will get their glass of milk after we test our blood sugar, we will take them to the park after we’ve done our daily run/walk/swim/yoga, and they will just have to be patient while we chat for a few extra minutes with our doctor. When we ask our children/husbands/jobs/parents/boyfriends, etc. to wait while we attend to our needs, they will be reminded of how much we value ourselves, and they will value us, too.

Create a philosophy to living well with illness, and find role models who will inspire you to keep going, even on the hardest days.

Amy Stockwell Mercer is a freelance writer living in Charleston, S.C, with her husband and three sons. She likes to write about people, art, and living with diabetes, and her work can be found in a variety of publications including Diabetes Health, Literary Mama and skirt magazine.

Diabesity – A Reversible Epidemic

What life threatening, life sapping, energy robbing condition affects one in every two Americans (that is, every other person) including 80 percent of those overweight and up to 40 percent of normal weight people?  What condition is responsible for more deaths from heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes and dementia than anything else?  What condition also causes acne, infertility, sexual dysfunction and depression?

What condition accounts for more then 70 percent of our $2.4 trillion annual health care bill and will account for most of the $47 trillion we will spend globally over the next 20 years to deal with chronic disease?  What is responsible for nearly twice as many deaths every year as infectious disease, even in the developing world?

And what condition is not even diagnosed in over 90 percent of those who suffer from it?

What condition are doctors not trained or reimbursed to diagnose, treat or prevent, yet makes up the majority of health care visits and costs?

And what condition is nearly 100 percent preventable, treatable and reversible?

Diabesity.

It is the single biggest health challenge facing us individually, as a nation and as a global community.

Diabesity is the continuum of metabolic disturbances from mild blood sugar and insulin imbalances to pre-diabetes to full blown type 2 diabetes.  It occurs in about 40 percent of people of normal weight – these are the skinny fat people who look thin but are metabolically fat and have all the same risk factors for disease and death as those who are overweight.  And it occurs in 80 percent of overweight people.

Since it affects every other American, watch this video to see if you have it.

The solution is not coming from our healthcare system or doctors, not from our government, or from most corporations.  There are too many people vested in maintaining the status quo or worse: profiting from making us fat and sick.  We need a solution.

That is why I wrote, “The Blood Sugar Solution.”  It has a bold central goal: to address and begin to reverse a global epidemic. It is a personal guide and plan, as well as a program for helping people get healthy together, based on functional medicine, and it is a blueprint for us to take back our health as a society.

Obesity, pre-diabetes and diabetes or what I call diabesity, which now affects one in two Americans, arises out of existing social, economic and political conditions. In fact, obesity and diabetes are social diseases and need a social cure and collective action on many levels to reverse the tide.

Over 10 years, these conditions will cost America over $3.5 trillion in direct costs, not including lost productivity and the costs in quality of life.  From 1983 to 2008, worldwide diabetes rates increased seven-fold from 35 million to 240 million. In just 3 years from 2008 to 2011, the roll call for diabetes increased another 110 million.

Children less than 10 years old now get type 2 (or adult onset) diabetes, and have strokes and heart attacks by age 15 or 20.  One in three children born today will have diabetes unless we do something differently.

I wrote “The Blood Sugar Solution“ to tackle this problem head on.

It is a personal plan that breaks through myths about obesity and diabetes that keep us sick and fat. And lays out the seven key steps to preventing, treating and reversing diabesity by dealing with the underlying causes. It is an eight-week plan that takes you through step by step how to reboot your metabolism, lose weight, reverse type 2 diabetes.

It is a plan for us to be more successful by working together to get healthy.  We do twice as well and lose twice as much weight when we get support from others in community. We are better together.

We recently did a “beta test” of this program with about 150 people. Their results were astounding:

• The group lost a total of 1,536 pounds in just eight weeks. That’s an average weight loss of over ten pounds per person!
• More than half the group lost more than ten pounds. Some lost as much as 28 pounds.
• Average waist size decreased by 1.5 inches, and some people lost so much of their waist that they had to go out and buy new clothes. One woman lost eight inches from her waist. Imagine, eight inches in eight weeks. No medication can help you do that.

But “The Blood Sugar Solution” is about far more than weight loss; it’s about taking back your health and your life. People who completed the program reported an average reduction of 14 points on their systolic blood pressure, their fatigue evaporated and they had more energy than they had felt in years, their joint and muscle pain vanished; the program improved their mood and sleep, eliminated their brain fog, and a provided a deep sense of well-being. The Blood Sugar Solution gave these people a new lease on life.

The Blood Sugar Solution is a plan for each of us to take back our health as a society. Our health has been hijacked from us, taken from us slowly, quietly, over the past century. Our current food, social, family, school, work, faith-based, and community environments, health care institutions, and government policies make it hard for us to make healthy choices. We are presented with choices that foster bad habits. But together, getting and staying healthy is possible given the right information, tools, support and collective action to take back our health.

Navigating the Terrain of Disease: Getting to the Root of the Problem

To effectively treat diabesity we must shift our focus away from the symptoms or risk factors of the disease and begin taking a hard look at the causes. All of our attention is on treatments that lower blood sugar (diabetes drugs and insulin), lower high blood pressure (anti-hypertensive drugs), improve cholesterol (statins) and thin the blood (aspirin). But we never ever ask the most important question:

Why is your blood sugar, blood pressure, or blood cholesterol too high and why is your blood too sticky and likely to clot?

Put another way: What are the root causes of diabesity?

Answering that question must be the focus of our diagnosis and treatment of the disease if we are going to solve this global epidemic.

The good news is that the answer is shockingly simple.

The Real Causes of Diabesity

The entire spectrum of diabesity including all of its complications—diabetes, elevated blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol—are simply downstream symptoms that result from problems with diet, lifestyle, and environmental toxins interacting with our unique genetic susceptibilities.

Those are the real causes of diabesity.

And the reason these dietary and lifestyle factors lead to diabesity is because they create a condition known as “insulin resistance.” Contrary to what most people think, type 2 diabetes is a disease of too much (not too little) insulin. Insulin is the real driver of problems with diabesity.

When your diet is full of empty calories and an abundance of quickly absorbed sugars, liquid calories,^[i] and carbohydrates (like bread, pasta, rice and potatoes), your cells slowly become resistant to the effects of insulin and need more and more to do the same job of keeping your blood sugar even. Thus, you develop insulin resistance. A high insulin level is the first sign of a problem. The higher your insulin levels are, the worse your insulin resistance. Your body starts to age and deteriorate. In fact, insulin resistance is the single most important phenomenon that leads to rapid and premature aging and all its resultant diseases, including heart disease, stroke, dementia and cancer.^[ii],[iii]

As your insulin levels increase it leads to an appetite that is out of control, increasing weight gain around the belly, more inflammation and oxidative stress and myriad downstream effects including high blood pressure; high cholesterol; low HDL, high triglycerides;^[iv] weight gain around the middle; thickening of the blood; and increased risk of cancer, Alzheimer’s and depression. These are all a result of insulin resistance and too much insulin. Elevated blood sugar is not the source of the problem.

And because insulin resistance (and diabesity) are a direct outcome of diet and lifestyle, the condition is 100 percent reversible in the vast majority of cases. Most people just need to eliminate the things that are sending their biology out of balance and include what’s needed to help the body rebalance itself. For most, the interventions required are extremely simply and extraordinarily effective.

8 Steps to Reversing Diabesity

In my new book, ”The Blood Sugar Solution,” I outline a comprehensive 8-week plan for overcoming diabesity in all its forms. Here is a sneak preview of the steps outlined in the book:

1. Get the right tests. Most doctors focus on fasting blood sugar. This is actually a poor indicator of diabesity. The best test to tease out the condition is an insulin response test where insulin levels are measured fasting and then 1 and 2 hours after a glucose drink. Demand this test from your doctor.
2. Get smart about nutrition. Despite the media hype and the seeming confusion amongst doctors, the basics of nutrition are extremely simple. Eliminate sugar and processed carbohydrates, include whole real foods like lean protein (for non-vegans: chicken or fish), veggies, nuts, seeds, beans and whole grains.
3. Get the right supplements. There has recently been a frenzy of negative reports about supplements. Most of them are unfounded. Supplements are an essential part of treating diabesity. A good multivitamin, vitamin D, fish oil* and special blood sugar balancing nutrients like alpha lipoic acid, chromium polynicotinate, biotin, cinnamon, green tea catechins and PGX (a super fiber) should also be included.
4. Get relaxed. Stress is a major unrecognized contributor to insulin resistance and blood sugar imbalance. Push your pause button every day with deep breathing, visualization, yoga and other relaxation techniques.
5. Get moving. Aside from changing your diet, exercise is probably the single best medication for diabesity. Walk for at least 30 minutes every day. For some, 30-60 minutes of more vigorous aerobic exercise 4-6 times a week may be necessary.
6. Get clean and green. Environmental toxins also contribute to diabesity. Filter your water, look for green cleaning products and avoid plastics when you can.
7. Get personal. While the steps above will address 80 percent of the problems with diabesity, some may need to take additional steps to optimize key areas of their biology. Remember, the medicine of the future is personal medicine. Seek out your own biological imbalances and look for ways to address them.
8. Get connected. Research is beginning to show that we get better more effectively when we get together. Invite your friends, families and neighbors to change their diets and lifestyle along with you. Together we can all take back our health.

I hope that my book “The Blood Sugar Solution” will be the beginning of a larger transformation – for individuals, communities and for society.  In the book I outline all of the social, economic, biological, and medical underpinnings of this health epidemic and provide an 8-week, step-by-step system that will allow you to dig deep into your own biology and heal even the most severe cases of diabesity.

Get a book, get two and give one to someone you love – you might be saving their life. When you purchase the book from this link you will automatically receive access to the following special bonuses:

• Special Report—Diabetes and Alzheimer’s: The Truth About “Type 3 Diabetes” and How You Can Avoid It.
• More Delicious Recipes: 15 Additional Ways to Make The Blood Sugar Solution as Tasty as It’s Healthy!
• Dr. Hyman’s UltraWellness Nutrition Coaching – FREE for 30 days!
• Hour 1 of The Blood Sugar Solution Workshop DVD

For more on diabesity, visit www.drhyman.com

*Vegan alternatives include: Omega Zen or V-pure.

References:

November is National Prevention Month (Because I Said So!)

Health Ambassadors,

Last week I decided to totally hijack the entire prevention movement and throw all chronic disease, shit pickles, emotional BS and dis-ease into one month of self-care awareness. We’re calling November “National Prevention Month” – for everything! I wrote about it in Friday’s newsletter, so check your inboxes and spam folders if you missed it.

In 1971 – the year I was born – President Nixon and Congress declared war on cancer. So what’s happened in the 40 years since? Not much. Today, the United States has the seventh highest cancer rate in the world. While heart disease is on a slight decline in the U.S., the cost to treat it is expected to triple by 2030. Around the globe, diabetes deaths will double between 2005-2030. By 2030, almost 23.6 million people will die from from heart disease and stroke. These are expected to remain the single leading causes of death.

Here’s the download that most of us missed: The majority of chronic diseases, including many cancers, are caused by diet, lifestyle choices, and environmental factors. Not just genetics. Actually, poor ole genetics often gets a bad rap. Enter … drumroll … epigenetics! The sexy science that teaches us that our genes are not always our destiny. We can actually have a predispostion for something and still avoid the trigger. And catch this, we can even change our DNA. Um, yeah, we’re that powerful.

What can you do to stack the odds in your favor to hopefully avoid an unwanted medical condition? Remember this very important snugget: Keep you inner eco-system as clean as possible. That’s right, you have rivers and lakes and sky on the inside. When you smoke and shout, eat dead foods and refuse to wean, finger your remote, cry on the inside, junk out on sugary crack, and slather chemicals on and around your body – you’re polluting the pristine environment that is you. If you’re a swamp on the inside, it’s time to cleanse the waters and get them moving again. Here’s how …

Eat LOTS of plants, less animals, real food, nothing fake, move your assets, dial down stress, breeeathe, don’t smoke (it will rob your beauty and your life), build a contemplative practice, love more than you hate, forgive (yourself), pray like you give a damn, take fun seriously, burn your to-do list, say no to other peoples “you-do” lists, dump stuff, make memories, poop, poop, poop, drink your holy green juice, take supplements based on what your blood work suggests ya need, pet your pet, smile like a child, live like it’s the first day of the rest of your life and it’s so delish that you can’t wait for another!

There is only one lasting cure … and it’s prevention. And it’s up to us to set an example, teach our children, and lead the way to health, spiritual wealth, and happiness through personal action. Prevention rocks!

If you’re on board, then join me and spend the next 30 days focusing on self-care. Do it for yourself, do it for the broken sickcare system and do it for the next generation. This is a movement, my friends. We need numbers. We need you. Share this post with your friends. Talk about it on Facebook and twitter. Make prevention trend! Wanna? Use the hashtag #preventionrocks

And if you haven’t signed up for my newsletter yet, get on it! From here on out, I’ll be writing a lot more about my personal thoughts and reflections there.

xo

Kris

Photo credit: Peggy Dyer

Sugar Addiction: A Nation In Need Of Rehab

Imagine how American society would function if drug dealers pumped 150 to 175 pounds of heroin per person per year into the veins of the elderly, the middle-aged and the young alike. Legally.

Well, sugar, an addictive substance that speeds along the same brain pathways as heroin, enters the food supply in those quantities. The result of this sugar surge is that more than one in three adults now has either Type 2 diabetes or its harbinger, pre-diabetes. Include those under age 18, and 105 million Americans are harboring a life-threatening blood-sugar disorder.

As with any addiction, the sugar situation will only worsen barring drastic intervention and widespread lifestyle changes. Consuming too much sweet stuff is lighter fluid for Type 2 diabetes, and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that by 2050, the disease, in its full form, will inhabit as many as one in three U.S. adults. Add in the far more numerous pre-diabetics, and you may be hard-pressed to find anyone with healthy glucose metabolism by the middle of the 21st century.

Many of these blood-sugar cripples won’t be capable societal contributors. They may be little more than sugar smack-heads. They’ll bankrupt our healthcare system with their chronic fatigue, dialysis treatments, amputations and the numerous other diabetic complications. A society with such an overwhelmingly diabetic population will no longer be viable economically, a much scarier prospect than that predicted in the dystopian novel, “Brave New World”, where addicts merely crave the comparatively less harmful Soma and then go do their assigned tasks.

Most Americans keep right on eating and drinking boatloads of sugar because, after all, they’re sugar junkies. I witnessed this phenomenon when I saw my father for the first time in 20 years in early 2008. He was lying in a hospital bed looking nearly cadaverous. His entire right leg had been amputated; his teeth had disintegrated amidst swollen gums. Despite this wretched condition, his mood brightened only when orderlies wheeled in a meal of mashed potatoes (along with chicken) and fruit, both of which quickly convert to glucose in the bloodstream. His fix had arrived. He was dying of diabetes, and yet his “caretakers” were still pumping him full of diabetes-friendly carbohydrates.

What’s more, my father openly longed for the bottle of root beer that was stashed away in a cabinet across the room, a scene I describe in “Sugar Nation”: He still indulged this diabetic’s poison even knowing that too much sugar cost him part of his body. This scene reminded me of a drug addict who has seen his life destroyed by the substance he can’t refuse. Only the worse off he becomes, the lousier he feels, the more he craves the very thing that sentenced him to this hell on earth.

How can the white stuff that kids and adults alike sprinkle on their cereal have this narcotizing power? Researchers at Princeton University have studied the effects of sugar on the brain chemistry of rats, and what they’ve found is that their subjects exhibit all the effects of heroin addiction. Sugar does this by triggering the release of the feel-good brain chemical dopamine in the section of the brain normally associated with addictive behaviors. The dopamine release produces a drug-like “high.” Yet the brain adapts. So it takes more of the substance—in this case, sugar—to produce the same effect.

According to lead researcher and Princeton psychologist, Bart Hoebel, PhD, “Our evidence from an animal model suggests that bingeing on sugar can act in the brain in ways very similar to drugs of abuse.”

Lessening the sugar stimulation only makes the body want more dopamine. Remove the substance altogether, and the sugar abuser experiences physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms. The body is addicted. Twinkies aren’t classified as a controlled substance, but for the glucose intolerant, perhaps they should be.

But there’s more to it in the case of my father and the rest of us who have reactive hypoglycemia, an underreported pre-diabetic condition in which blood sugar spikes in response to a heavy carb load. Then the pancreas overreacts by secreting too much insulin, too late, like an over-eager rookie cop coming across a crime scene after the fact. This insulin response drives blood sugar below 70 milligrams per deciliter, making your body crave quick-energy sugar not just for pleasure but also for survival. At this point, it’s not just your brain that’s craving glucose; cells throughout your body demand it, too.

I’d challenge anyone to find a drug whose effects are more powerful than a blood sugar drop from 160 to 50 in half an hour—the scale of my descent on a glucose tolerance test when I learned that I was pre-diabetic. Before I learned to avoid the sugar trigger, fatigue didn’t set in gradually; it hit with a whoosh. I felt as though I’d been shot by a tranquilizer capable of taking down an elephant in the wild. I’ve never taken narcotics recreationally, but I have used Vicodin after surgeries, and the feeling of that drug reminded me of a carb-induced blood-sugar crash. If that prescription pain med came in the form of a jelly doughnut, rather than a pill, you’d have some idea of the hold sugar had on me during childhood and throughout much of my adult life.

The good news is that there are simple rehab solutions to sugar addiction. I know, based on personal experience. Breaking the cycle means avoiding crashes. To do this, you need to eat protein, healthy fats, and fibrous vegetables for breakfast, a meal normally stocked with simple sugars and other fast-acting carbohydrates. Know the code names that are used to disguise sugar on food labels: dextrose/maltodextrin, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, high fructose corn syrup, honey, maple syrup, molasses, sucrose and xylose. Avoid the foods whose packages list them. Better yet, switch from packaged to whole foods. Exercise daily, which not only helps usher sugar out of your bloodstream, but also produces good-vibe brain chemicals of its own, called endorphins.

So, we can change our fate. We know what to do to prevent this epidemic that will cripple us as individuals and as a society. But the question is: Will we take action before it’s too late?

Jeff O’Connell is the editor-in-chief of Bodybuilding.com and the author of “Sugar Nation” (Hyperion, 2011).

Photo credit: Dave Hoffman