Kids Stuff, Sugar & the Brain - 011

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalized, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. SPEAKER B Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Roses are red, violets are blue sugar is sweet but is it good for you? What about the effect of sugar on the brain? Think you've heard it all? Think again. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a 13 part production of three ABN Australia television, focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER B In the studio today with me we have Dr. John Clark and health psychologist Jenifer Skues. Welcome, John. And welcome, Jenifer. So pleased to have you on the program. And this is a very sweet topic that we have today. Tell us about sugar and the brain, John. SPEAKER D You know that we in America import enough sugar for every American to eat 150 pounds. That's about 70 kilos a year. Since I don't eat that much, somebody else is eating more. SPEAKER A I don't eat much at all, so someone's getting all my lot. SPEAKER B That's tragic, isn't it? SPEAKER D And we've become a society that loves sugar. And sugar is very addictive. I mean, sugar is something that is more addictive than cocaine. SPEAKER B Really? SPEAKER D Really. Studies show it raises the dopamine in your brain to a larger extent than does cocaine. Now, when I was in school, we had this group called the Canadian Brass coming to Uni to do a consort. They were probably the best brass group in the world from Canada. And when they arrived, there was a reception in their honor in progress. The reception involved a punch, sweet drinks. What would you say there? We say cookies, but you say biscuits. Sweet biscuits. And they offered the men some. The men turned it down. The musician said, we cannot drink your sugary punches or eat your sugary sweets. If we do, we will not be able to tongue our notes like you'd like to hear them tongue, and our concert will be a disaster. SPEAKER B So it affects your tongue. SPEAKER D So it affects your tongue, it affects your nerves, it affects your brain. It slows you down, it makes your blood thick. SPEAKER B Wow. SPEAKER D And so sugar has quite a dramatic effect on the body just as it is immediately absorbed. SPEAKER B That's incredible. I never knew that sugar could do that, that you could affect the way your tongue works. I mean, women don't experience that. They can talk all day long. Just kidding. Just talk more. Okay. Just having a little go at women. SPEAKER A So you can imagine what it does to children. And one of the things I find is in our culture, children will come home from school and they're given the red cordial full of sugar or a sugar drink or even a fruit juice with lots of sugar in and then something sweet, a bit of cake, a biscuit, something like that. And then the parent's finding the child is virtually climbing the walls because they are so hyped up, and then they crash. So what it does, the blood sugar just skyrockets, and then it will do a corresponding low. So once it hits a certain point, because the body's producing too much insulin, this happens in children. You're going to have this massive drop, and then they're in tears and they're irritable and they won't go to bed, they can't sleep. Sugar can cause insomnia. It's a reason we get insomnia, because it boosts the blood sugar. And then we have this constant blood sugar problem. And what will happen then? Particularly after midnight. If your blood sugars drop too quickly and if you've just had something to eat in the evening and you've had a dessert or sweets or chocolates your blood sugars will plummet and it wakes you up. Because when we go to sleep a normal sleep cycle is after midnight. The blood sugars slowly drop. It's like inverse relationships. As blood sugars are dropping, we're actually waking up. So when our body's healthy and our sugar levels are right and we metabolize, then it's a slow process. By about six in the morning, we're ready to wake up and have breakfast. And breakfast is to break the fast. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER A And then we meant to have the healthy foods we're talking about, which will be fruits and grains or whatever to stabilize the blood sugars and give us fuel for the day. Now, if you skip meals like you skip the breakfast, or the child gets up and has Fruit Loops and all these sweet things, as you can imagine, you can see how their brain how can they go to school and study and learn? SPEAKER B That's right. It's actually quite tragic what's in the breakfast cereals. I've gone down the breakfast cereal aisle many times taking supermarket tours and looking at the labels, and it's a challenge, it's an absolute challenge to find a handful, if that, of breakfast cereals that you think would be appropriate and not high in sugar and low in fiber and so on. And the tragedy is that for the people who eat breakfast, many don't, unfortunately, but those who do, that's usually where they make their choices. Well, it is, and it's not a great process. Terrible start for the day, actually. SPEAKER A And then they add another two or three teeth. SPEAKER B Oh, yes. SPEAKER A You get kids who love to put the sugar on and you can see how that sweet tooth we talk about develops, because this is the craving. SPEAKER D That's interesting that there's a famous doctor in America who does a whole program that he calls how to Hypnotize a Baby. SPEAKER A Oh, okay. SPEAKER D And in the nursery, it's often difficult to take a newborn and to prick them with different pins and know in their process of doing what they think is important for health. And so if they give them a little bit of sugar syrup on their tongue, all of a sudden they're zoned out, really, because the dopamine goes up, they got the feel good sensation and it's a strong drug. In actuality. SPEAKER B That's really incredible. You're talking about being addictive and more addictive than cocaine. I'm just wondering how many of the people tuning in would even realize that or even maybe want to believe it because it's not what we want to hear. Actually, you talk about a sweet tooth. I know someone who's got 32 of them, no names on the grounds that it might incriminate. SPEAKER A Well, when it when it comes to addictions, sugar, as you said, it boosts the dopamine rapidly. And dopamine is our feel good. It's one of the feel good neurotransmitters. It's the thing that picks up our mood and helps us to feel good. But it has other actions that also helps mobility and other factors in the brain. But when you have the sugar hit, it boosts it so high, but it actually decreases the dopamine receptors. So that means your ability to feel good is reduced over time. And then you've got to have more sugar to pick yourself up. That's where the addictive cycle starts to come in. So it has quite a profound effect on the brain and it can overstimulate what we call our reward system. And that's a system in the brain that feeds addictions of wanting more and more and more. So you've sort of got a double factor there happening and it doesn't take long. You don't have to have a sugar for a year to get addicted. Once you start, it happens very, very quickly. SPEAKER B How quickly? SPEAKER A Well, you have a look at children. Once they have a taste for sugar. You take them shopping. What do they do? They want lollies, they want the biscuits. And they do anything to get what they want. You see, I haven't looked as far as the exact time frame, but it is very rapid, very short. Yeah, it's like caffeine. You have a few caffeine drinks which is loaded with sugar. It's the same principle. You'll find then you'll feel it. You also go through a massive withdrawal when you stopped eating sugar. And anyone who stopped, they get headaches, they can shake, they can tremor. People who consume a lot of alcohol, what they call the DTS, when they're shaking, and that it's. That sugar withdrawal. And the blood sugar plummets that has all these different effects. So it's not nice. No, I encourage people to try it. They feel better after. SPEAKER D The other effect on the brain of sugar is it shuts down the blood flow to the frontal lobes. SPEAKER B Oh, dear. SPEAKER D And the frontal lobes of your brain are where you do your higher thinking, where you sort out the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. It's really the part of your brain that distinguishes you from a monkey. It's a distinction you want to maintain. And for this child that goes into school and has been eating a lot of sugar, that distinction is blurred as their frontal lobe shut down, they become a greater discipline problem. And then as far as their grades go, a student eating more sugar will have at least one letter grade, lower grades for a given time period. And so it affects their academics. SPEAKER B It would that's really broad in its scope of what it's doing to us as people. It's not just what's doing us physically, but to our mind and to our decision making and who we are as a person. You don't think about that, I suppose, when you don't enjoying something that's sweet. SPEAKER A But you affect the rational thinking brain, because your frontal lobes, that neocortex is the left brain is more the thinking processing brain. And the right brain is a direct link into the emotional brain. And with sugar, because it affects those lobes, it will stimulate the emotional brain and the thinking brain can't rationalize. So this means we have an imbalance in brain function and then things go straight. Like with sugar, the information can go straight into emotion instead of being able to go hang on. That's not a very nice thing to say or do because sugar gets you on hyper. And when you're hyper, how often do you think or what comes out of your mouth? You think, oh, I wished I hadn't said that. But you have that sugar hit and it's more likely to happen because of those reasons. SPEAKER B Yes. Very significant things going on there, John. SPEAKER D Yes. And so for the student that's been eating sugar and the frontal lobes are shut down, they're not thinking, they're not working with their higher intelligence, and they're more likely to overreact to things or just to be in Lala land. And we slap on them a diagnosis of ADHD hyperactivity disorder. Or they're bipolar when they're up, they're up. When they're down another one, they can. SPEAKER B Be are you serious that they might be diagnosed as bipolar? SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B When it's really just sugar? SPEAKER A Yes. And that's how it presents because it puts you on a high and sugar hypes, it gets energy going and it mimics the same condition as the person who's in a mania. SPEAKER B So they don't actually have bipolar, but. SPEAKER A They'Re diagnosed they're acting like and then. SPEAKER B They'Re treated. SPEAKER A Medication for bipolar. SPEAKER B That's a mental illness. So then they're on drugs. That's not even appropriate. Would that be right? SPEAKER D That would be right. SPEAKER B That's incredible. Is there any more bad news? SPEAKER A Sugar has a lot to answer for. When you look at the impact of it and people don't know this is the problem. People aren't aware of it and they don't read their labels, they don't have a look. And I guess some of maybe what we need to talk a bit about, well, what can you have? Because people do like to eat something sweet. So that's where your field comes into it. What sort of things might you reckon? SPEAKER D John you know, one of the best things you can do, once you get used to it, for eating something sweet, is to eat fruit. You see, when you buy something that has refined sugar in it, it's got one type of sugar in mega doses, but you get a fruit. There's many glyconutrients that are in balance that help each other so that they don't overwhelm you with one unique type. And so if you can eat fresh fruit, bananas, apples, pears, oranges, grapefruit, papayas, mangoes, we'll get hungry here, then you're getting your sugar from a good source. And even for the diabetic, if we put them on even 50% to 80% fresh fruit for breakfast and they chew it well and they choose the right fruits, they can do much better, really, than if they try other things. SPEAKER B Now, that's probably not what they're used to hearing. SPEAKER D John that's correct. A lot of times the physician will tell them, okay, you're diabetic. That's the end of fruit for you, one half piece a day. And other than that, you're restricted. And then your risk of cancer goes up when you don't eat fruit. Other problems increase when you don't eat fruit. But it's not the fruit because the fruit has fiber, the fruit has minerals, the fruit has phytochemicals to go along with the sugar. So your body handles it in the correct way at the correct time. I'm not saying that a diabetic should become a fruititarian. SPEAKER B No. SPEAKER D But on the other hand, there's many nutrients and fruit that they don't want to be without. SPEAKER B That's right. SPEAKER D And for the children coming to school, if they would eat an apple, a pear, an orange, banana instead of a biscuit, then they'd be much better off. SPEAKER B Yeah. SPEAKER A I think the other thing that I've and I educate my clients with is loaded sugars. Not just sugar, but there's glucose and there's sucrose. And as soon as they take sugar out of something and add it in separately, it's going to do the same thing. It's a sugar. There are many forms of sugar that people aren't aware of. So it says sugar free and you read it and it's got sucrose in it, or some other form of sugar that still is not good. So it's not just about the sugar we're aware of, which is the cane sugar. It's about all types of yes. SPEAKER B And what about honey? Where does that come into this? SPEAKER D Well, you know, like the Bible says, a little honey is good, too much can make you vomit. There's a balance in everything, especially in where you're getting your sugar from. So a little honey is good and honey is honey doesn't make your blood sugar go as high as an equal amount of sugar would. It's 85% less. SPEAKER B Okay. And it's got some still fair bit, though, isn't it? We don't want too much, but still. SPEAKER D Yeah, it's got some other things about it that are beneficial. It helps your immune system a bit. Doesn't make your cholesterol go up like regular sugar does. A lot of unique things about honey that you wouldn't think for the fact that it is about the same sugar level as table sugar. SPEAKER B No. So it's just a little bit less. Well, there's some pretty good advice in the Good book, isn't there? And it was Solomon, I believe, who wrote that proverb. I'm intrigued, actually. He wrote about so many things in life. He was the wisest man who ever lived. And I was just fascinated that he wrote a couple about, know, find honey, eat just enough and you're too much and you'll vomit. I just couldn't believe my eyes the first time I read that. I thought, oh, that's in the Bible. I just didn't expect to sort of see something like that quite like that. SPEAKER A Practical advice. SPEAKER B Yes. Going way back thousands of years, and we could benefit from some of that. We do. SPEAKER A And this is where the more we know about what we're eating and what we're putting in our system and how it affects us, this is where education, on the level of an education, like, even though I'm a psychologist, educating people about what they put in their body does to the brain and does to the mood. And people who are on too much sugar often have mood swings. They get irritable. They can start to feel really unwell. The brain gets very confused. They can't focus, they can't make good decisions, they're more likely to be anxious or aggressive as well as it can drop you into that pit of depression. SPEAKER B And then what you've just been talking about that impacts into relational things. So we've got these four aspects of our being mental, physical, spiritual, and social. So something that's affecting your mood definitely isn't going to be helpful for relationships. No, especially between parents and children or anybody for that matter. What about stevia? SPEAKER D Well, stevia is merely a plant leaf if you're taking the pure form of it, and it has a sweet flavor. It's about 200 times sweeter than regular sugar. It has a bit of a bitter aftertwang that some people don't like. But for the average person, if they like it, it's good. You don't want things like truvia, which is a chemical form of stevia that's just manufactured in a laboratory. But you do have a similar effect that it does raise your dopamine in your brain. And the one downside to super sweet things that don't carry calories is that your brain says, I want those calories that your sweetness suggested I should get. And so you end up craving carbohydrates, and you tend to make up for what you didn't get by eating more. SPEAKER A Carbohydrates, which puts the weight on. That creates another problem on all levels. SPEAKER D Now, one of the sugars you definitely want to avoid is high fructose, like high fructose corn syrup, corn sugars. There's different products on the market that carry high fructose. SPEAKER A Garvey is a newer one, I've noticed for a while now, which is from a cactus. SPEAKER D It's almost pure fructose. And fructose will raise the inflammation in your body. It'll burn out your liver. It'll oxidize the cholesterol right in your liver. So you end up with more heart disease. SPEAKER B And so we're getting this I mean, there's fructose in fruit, isn't there? SPEAKER D Now, when you get your fructose or fructose in fruit, you're getting it in very small quantities, and you're getting it balanced with other glyconutrients. SPEAKER B Oh, I see. SPEAKER D Although for some people who are fructose or fructose intolerant eating things like figs, which are one of the highest in fructose, will give them a problem. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B All right. So that's a dried fruit because it's. SPEAKER D More concentrated, dried or whole. SPEAKER B Oh, is that right? All right. So I think the important thing there is you're talking about the fruit doughs that comes in corn syrup. That's a highly processed thing where it's been extracted out of the corn, and you're not getting it in its natural state. So you're not saying that fruit is bad. And I was just thinking back, too, about the amount of sugar you say that people are eating in your country and we're not too far behind them, as far as I know. But I remember reading somewhere that to get two, if you had a meter or a yard of sugar cane, you'd only get a couple of teaspoons out of that. Now, I guarantee I mean, I guarantee that if you had to get two teaspoons of sugar a day and you had to get it from a meter of sugar cane sugar cane, you would not do it because you just wouldn't. And because we've altered food so much and we've just made it so easy to ingest things that in great quantities that you never could unless we'd done those things to them, unless we refine them in that way. That's really the difficulty, isn't it, in a lot of areas? Just not sure. SPEAKER D Oh, yeah, you think of the efficiency of that, the inefficiency of that. You could easily eat 10 meters of sugar cane in your dessert, and yet should you, this is ecologically damaging. SPEAKER A It's like juicing fruit. You're having three apples in. Imagine all the sugar in three apples in a juice. You see, this is the same problem. And we don't always think of those. SPEAKER B Things easily, easily get down more than one glass on a hot day. SPEAKER A I think another big problem are there's so many chemical sweeteners around, like splendor, and there's quite a few of them. And again, from what I hear, they're not good either. They can really do damage to the system. SPEAKER D Yes. So when you're trying to fool the system, it's a problem right away. So, for example, they've studied some of these artificial sweeteners, and the brain is supposedly confused by it and then you crave carbohydrates. But a lot of these chemical sweeteners which do not occur in nature, are not a part of the human diet. From the beginning are dangerous splenda. We worry about holes in the ozone from chlorinated and fluorinated hydrocarbons. Splenda is just chlorinated sugar. They took off all the hydrogen groups and replaced it with chlorine and it's like, how can a chlorinated hydrocarbon be good for me? SPEAKER A It's not. SPEAKER D And then you're NutraSweet or equal is the other one. And this is a methyl alcohol connected up with aspartate and phenylanine. And when it breaks down, you get methyl alcohol. Well, that's what makes people go blind as poison sounds soldiers. So you got to get away from the chemicals. I mean, the sugar is bad enough as it is and so sometimes trying to replace it with something high tech may backfire. SPEAKER A Not a good idea. SPEAKER B Well, for anyone tuning in that may be having lots of sugar or their children or family having lots of sugar, this must be very challenging to listen to. What should they be doing? Is it like, oh, that's all too hard, can't do it. SPEAKER A You can educate people if people are willing and if a parent has a child but is really a problem and it's the sugar that's the problem, they will put the effort in. And this is what I find and I educate parents to look at what we call low GI foods for their children and that includes your whole grains, your seeds, your nuts and your fruits. And there's a lot you can do with that where children when they need something to eat or in their lunches and that to have some of these foods. And it can be made, they can be enjoyable or make it fun for them and give them variety, will help them to stabilize their blood sugars and that means they will learn better. They'll sustain their energy through the day. They're not going to come home and climb the walls, as they say, or run amok. SPEAKER B That's right, John. Just want to clear up something a couple of times. You've mentioned that when people have these artificial sweeteners, they crave carbs. Now, there's a lot in the press out there about low carb diets. You're not talking about the good carbohydrates, are you? You're talking about the refined ones. That the confectionery type carbs. That's what you were referring to there, I would have thought. SPEAKER D Well, what they crave will be carbohydrate, whether it's refined or not. If we're looking at carbohydrates and the good ones, then you definitely want unrefined carbohydrates. The difference being for like here we're talking about our students is if you go and you eat like oatmeal, it's going to be a lot of carbohydrate, but it's not going to spike the blood sugar up and then it's not going to, as a follow up, spike the blood sugar down. It'll keep the blood sugar at a steady rate, sustained evenly. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER D Whereas if they eat refined sugar or even cornflakes and milk, it's going to send the blood sugar up real fast and it's going to come crashing down. And then if you're the teacher in the school and about 10:00, the students all crash, you're hoping you can send them out the recess before the lid blows off. The classroom. SPEAKER B It must be really challenging. SPEAKER A Yeah. I referred to the low GI factor, people who might know what GI is. It's a glycemic index that tells you how fast you burn food or how. SPEAKER B Fast food burns how fast. SPEAKER A So if you have foods that are slow burners, like we talked about, your whole grains and nuts and seeds and fruits, then it'll sustain the blood sugars for a long time. Whereas when you have the fast burners, which are refined foods and refined sugars, they burn rapidly, give the boost, and then drop off very quickly. So we want foods that slow down that blood sugar release. SPEAKER D So what you're looking for for breakfast, say, for your students, is something that's grain, that still has all the fiber there. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER D And you might be thinking, well, my box cereal says it's whole grain, but when they make something into flakes or o's or whatever, they have to cook it o's? SPEAKER B O's, like Fruit Loops or okay, sure. SPEAKER D And you cook it until you can spray it out into funny shapes. You have cooked it beyond the point of being a complex carbohydrate anymore. It refines it, it makes it high glycemic index. And so this is why most box cereals will send your students with high blood sugars. And so what you want is to be able to recognize the morning cereal. So musli would be much better where you can recognize, oh, there's an oat, there's a raisin, and then fresh fruit is good. And you can pick different fruits. Some are less on the glycemic index. Apples are going to be lower than, say, figs. So you choose good fruits, and whole plant foods are generally going to be much lower. Glycemic index much more tolerated, much better at keeping the blood sugars, even for the student. Give them better grades than your refined foods of any kind. SPEAKER B Yeah, very good. Well, I hope that hasn't been too much of a blow to anyone who's tuning in to become aware of all the places where sugar is hidden in the soft drinks and even in the breakfast cereals and fruit juices and all of that. And when it all adds up, it's really a lot. So thank you. It's good to have that advice on the lovely fruit that we can have. We've got some sweet taste buds, and I'm sure they're meant to be satisfied, but not in the way that we've become, that we've been doing. SPEAKER A There's a lot you can do, and maybe people, and particularly parents, can focus on what they can have, not what we can't have and start replacing that small steps principle again. That's right where they go and, okay, well, let's change the breakfast menu and add in things and switch things around and put more fruit and more whole grains. SPEAKER B And I have found that if you cut up fruit and put it out on a platter, it will just disappear. You put out whole fruit. People who aren't accustomed to having much won't really go for it very much. And I've done this many a time, and I'm astonished at how much fruit people will eat when they're not even accustomed to doing it. They'll eat a dinner plate of fruit if it's there and it's all wrapped up. So that's our program for today. And if you'd like a fact sheet of the program, or you'd like to watch our programs on demand, just visit our website on 3abnaustralia.org.au and then click on the watch button. And John and Jennifer are happy to answer your questions personally. Just email them [email protected] We look forward to having you join us next time on Healthy Living when we have other subjects which I feel sure will interest.