EP 154 – Eat This: How to avoid sugar and processed food, and why it’s time.

If you haven’t read or heard that sugar and processed foods aren’t good for you, I’m not sure where you’ve been hiding lately. 

While there are the incessant ads for breakfast cereal (now said to be as healthy as having a chocolate bar for breakfast) to drive-thru temptations, smooth and creamy ice cream, the family breakfast and OJ, and hard-hitting campaigns from competing pizza brands, it’s hard to stay in the lane of avoiding these foods and maintain your healthy focus. I, too, get a craving triggered when seeing something, and with my understanding of what giving in to it could mean, and over the past three months having an accountability tracker, aka a glucose monitor, stuck to the back of my arm, it’s easier to stay the healthy course.

So why drive past the opportunity for a double double sweetened coffee and cream packed with over six teaspoons of sugar, or triple triple coffee that has almost 14 teaspoons or a third of a cup of sugar in it as your liquid jet fuel before you tuck into the glucose spiking muffin or breakfast bagel on your way to work or on morning drive? Because it could all be taking you down the path to blood sugar dysregulation, your pancreas working so hard that it just about gives up on you, a diagnosis of diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, accelerated aging, mood and mental health issues, digestive disturbance, and all that before you realize that you could have changed course NOW to prevent all that I just listed. I’m not painting a pretty picture here because this situation is serious.

As I scan over at what is on the checkout belt in people’s weekly shop, I’m very worried about the direction that we are going in as a global community when it comes to health. North America, and even Australia, stands out from the rest with the incidence of obesity being one in three people (that’s a US stat) but almost 70% being overweight, and I believe that it’s in large part to do with the processing of food into refined carbohydrates being the mainstay diet and liquid calorie intake, means that all generations especially that of my teenage kids and younger are in for a lifetime of health issues, earlier than we know. 

So today, on EAT THIS with Lianne, Dr. Davis Brockenshire is back to talk about how and why to avoid sugar and processed food and go deeper than we have visited in the past.

Wearing a glucose monitor has brought up a bunch more questions for me. If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know doing a deep dive into a health topic is my happy place. The more I dig, the more questions I have.

So who better to help us with a deeper dive into the blood sugar, processed food, and glucose monitoring insights than Functional Medicine Expert Dr. Davis Brockenshire? 

Head back to episode 149 to learn more about how you can use a glucose monitor without a diabetes diagnosis, Dr. B shared more about metabolic flexibility in episode 147, which will see this conversation up nicely, and for the basics of blood sugar balance, listen to episode 142. By that time, my hope is that you’ll be motivated to change some habits – one mouthful at a time, mind you.

I forced Chris to wear a glucose monitor, and there’s a lot in this episode that we didn’t expect to come from that. Data can be powerful, but what was revealed is fascinating in terms of food versus mindset when it comes to blood sugar balance and health.