Sugarproof: Protect Your Family from the Hidden Dangers of Excess Sugar with Simple Everyday Fixes - Softcover

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Michael I. Goran, PhD, is one of the world's most widely recognized experts in childhood nutrition and obesity research, with more than 30 years of experience as a researcher, mentor, and educator. He is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine, Co-Director of the USC Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute and leads the Program in Diabetes and Obesity at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. He holds the Dr. Robert C and Veronica Atkins Endowed Chair in Childhood Obesity and Diabetes. Michael is a native of Glasgow, Scotland, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, UK.  Emily E. Ventura, PhD, MPH, is an experienced nutrition educator, public health advocate, writer, and cook. She completed her Master's in Public Health and PhD in Health Behavior Research at the University of Southern California. She was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach Public Health Nutrition in Italy and is a mother to two young boys.

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Chapter One

Growing Up Sweet

Can Turn Sour:

All Our Kids Are at Risk

From the outside, Melissa looked healthy. She was a slender, athletic thirteen-year-old who loved playing basketball and soccer. Yet something was clearly wrong. Despite her long afternoons of sports practice, Melissa had trouble falling asleep. During the night, she woke up multiple times, and because of this, she'd become moody and dark circles emerged under her eyes. On top of everything else, Melissa felt constantly bloated and had frequent stomach cramps.

Under her normal-kid exterior, Melissa's body was silently developing the signs of chronic disease. And behind this disturbing transformation stood one clear factor: the sugar in her diet. Melissa's sugar habits over the course of the day had gradually worked up to a breaking point. She had juice most mornings at breakfast, a cereal bar on school days for a snack, tea sweetened with sugar most evenings, ice cream every other day for dessert at home, and the occasional candy bar from the convenience store down the street from her house when out with friends. Also, Melissa was chewing "sugar-free" Trident gum every day, which is sweetened with a variety of sugar alcohols and other sweeteners.

Melissa doesn't fit what we think of as the profile of a kid on the verge of serious health problems. Melissa wasn't overweight; she wasn't drinking soda; she was physically active; her parents tried to emphasize healthy eating habits. But sugar is now so pervasive, and food marketing so insidious, that during the course of her busy days, Melissa ended up consuming unsafe quantities of not just sugar but also other sweeteners without her parents' full awareness. Because Melissa's parents eventually realized how much sugar Melissa was consuming, they were able to help their daughter reshape her eating habits, and Melissa started to feel energetic and happy again.

Melissa could easily be any child growing up in the United States today. She could be a child in one of our families, or a child in yours. That's exactly the point. No matter whether they are slender or overweight, whether they are active or sedentary, whether they live in a food desert or in a farming community, whether they live in suburbs or cities, all our kids are at risk because they are living their lives immersed in sugar. They're at risk for the familiar downsides of sugar-the energy rushes and the crashes. But with our combined fifty years of experience, we know both from our research and from our professional interactions with families that children are at risk for other dangers, too. As a parent, you might attribute symptoms like mood swings, poor sleep, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, or other health issues to stress, hormones, a growth spurt, or an underlying disease. The reality is that all of these problems, whether they seem minor or major, can be connected to too much sugar. Sugar could be causing much more damage to your child's body than you imagined. Compelling new research has shown us that sugar is more dangerous than anyone ever knew, affecting nearly every part of a child's developing body.

The Perfect Sugar Storm

Marco is another kid who seemed pretty healthy from the outside. At age seventeen, he was a big guy. He was overweight, but he was also strong and athletic-looking. And in fact, Marco spent several hours each day playing ball after school and didn't have any other complaints about his health. But underneath his sporty exterior, our evaluation led to a disturbing diagnosis-Marco was very sick.

Because he was overweight, Marco's pediatrician referred him to one of our clinical research studies. Our initial dietary intake uncovered some alarming news. Marco and his family thought he was making reasonable food choices for an active teenager, but in fact he was drinking juice, soda, and a couple of sports drinks every day, which comes to a whopping 100 grams of sugar. That's around 25 teaspoons daily-more than three times the maximum amount we recommend for boys Marco's age. Without realizing it, Marco was delivering a very dangerous sugar load to his liver, more than his body could handle. Part of our study was focused on studying the effects of sugars and excess body weight on liver health in children, so Marco had an MRI of his liver. Marco, his family, and his pediatrician were all stunned to hear the results: Marco was suffering from an extreme case of fatty liver disease, with measurable signs of damage to his liver. If Marco didn't make changes soon, he could eventually find himself in need of a liver transplant.

Fatty liver disease used to be a problem reserved for adult alcoholics. These days, we're no longer surprised when we discover that kids in our clinic are in advanced stages of liver trouble. Not to mention kids with type 2 diabetes or other metabolic disorders. Why? All of us, adults included, are susceptible to the harmful effects from too much sugar. But research shows that children in particular are at increased risk. This risk is caused by three critical conditions: kids' inborn preference for sweet flavors; today's high-sugar food environment; and the unique vulnerability of kids' developing bodies to the effects of too much sugar. These three conditions have come together to create a perfect sugar storm for our kids.

Born This Way

How long has it been since you had a package of Pixy Stix? Pop Rocks? Grape Bubble Yum? If you loved these sweets as a kid and have tried them as an adult, you probably wondered how you could ever have enjoyed dumping so much sugar straight into your mouth. But you probably did love it when you were a kid. Here's why: Kids have a stronger built-in preference for sweet flavors compared to adults. They are more attracted to both real sugar and low-calorie sweeteners. Given the choice, kids will typically select the sweeter option, and then want more of it. Even amateur scientists have documented the phenomenon. My (Michael's) daughter's elementary school science class performed a simple experiment, asking both kids and teachers to taste five different lemonades of varied sweetness. The younger kids preferred the sweetest version and the teenage kids and adults preferred the less sweet versions.

As your kids have probably informed you, their taste buds really are different from yours. Their inborn love of sweet tastes makes evolutionary sense. It ensures that infants will like breast milk, which is sweet. As they start to wean, their preference for sweets helps them avoid bitter-tasting foods that could harm them. A child's love of sweets is not a moral flaw. Kids who clamor for Pixy Stix and Pop Rocks are just being kids. But as you're about to see, this natural attraction to sweetness makes kids highly vulnerable within our modern food environment.

Our Kids Live in a Sugar-Saturated Environment

Alyssa lives in the heart of South Los Angeles and within a food desert-a neighborhood with few options for healthy, fresh food. Alyssa could easily walk to convenience stores and fast-food restaurants from her home and school, but if her family wants to shop at a grocery store that offers produce, they would have to drive twenty minutes or take a long bus ride. Because Alyssa was concerned about her family's history of diabetes, she agreed to participate in our sixteen-week research study, which was designed to help teens eat less sugar. Alyssa shared with us a view of her neighborhood and the impact it had on her food choices: "Right across the street I have the doughnut shop, I have the gas station, the liquor store, and then one block over you have the Burger King, Subway, and an other gas station. Another block over you have your Taco Bell/Pizza Hut, and McDonald's. So say . . . I was hungry, and I had...