Episode 118 Summary
What is the problem with sugar? Our bodies can tolerate small amounts of sugar. Humans were not designed to eat the large quantities of it that we are now consuming in the modern world. Two of our organs in particular are overwhelmed by this excessive sugar intake, the liver and the pancreas. Basic sugar, cane sugar, is comprised of one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. The fructose is what gives cane sugar its super sweet flavour.
Fructose can only be metabolised by the liver, which converts it into fat. A large influx of fructose can cause the liver to become inflamed and lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Nutrition is not simply the sum of the nutrients. The structure in which that food is delivered to your body makes a huge difference. It's something that can't be accounted for if you're just focusing on calories, or even just focusing purely on macros, the structure matters. An example of this is the huge difference between fructose in fruit and fruit juice. Whole fruit in its cellular form is metabolised in an entirely different way to fruit juice. Fruit juice is a concentration of sugar and water with a little bit of flavour. It is a huge dump of sugar for your poor liver. We’ve evolved to eat real food, which is why an orange is orders of magnitude healthier than processed orange juice.
Glucose is a fuel source and all of our cells can use it in small quantities. When we have a lot of glucose over time our body needs to produce a lot of insulin to process it. Eventually the pancreas may become overwhelmed from having to produce more and more insulin and we end up with a condition called insulin resistance or hyperinsulinemia. This is an underlying mechanism for metabolic syndrome, type two diabetes, fatty liver disease and other metabolic diseases.
Processed foods comprise a significant portion of most peoples’ diets. The marketing goliaths behind the processed food companies want to convince you that their products are healthy, and an acceptable part of a “balanced” diet, or that you can exercise to “burn off” any excess sugar. They will hide sugar in various ways with various names and try to convince you that their processed foods are “healthier” than those containing cane sugar. They are not. The processed food industry uses these confusing names and tactics deliberately.
Processed food can be 100% natural™ and still not be good for you. For example, cane sugar is “natural” too. It comes from a plant. Arsenic, opium and digitalis are also “natural”
“Health Food” companies are now putting a highly processed form of the prebiotic fibre “inulin” into many of their products. It has a sweet flavour. It’s just another highly processed powder, it ferments in our gut and causes bloating, gas and gut pain. Humans are not meant to eat inulin powder, but food companies are adding “fibre” to get more health stars. We cannot outsmart mother nature with our manufactured processed foods. Real food, in as close as possible to its natural state, is always better.
We encourage you to not let the processed food companies dictate your health. Learn to read labels and spot the hidden sugars. Don’t trust the health stars on the packaging. There are many different types of sugars, and they are all sugar. None are “healthier” than the others. Ingredients which are “syrups” are also sugars. Agave Nectar, molasses, coconut nectar and maple syrup are all sugar. “No added sugar” may still contain fruit juice concentrate or dates or another non-cane sugar form of sugar.
Foods like yoghurt, granola and cereal are health-washed - We often believe that they are healthy, full of essential nutrients and good for us, but when you look at many yoghurts they contain a similar nutritional profile to ice-cream. We don’t need cereal or porridge to get our fibre, you can find plenty of that in delicious low carb veggies.
Beware of savoury sugars! Highly processed foods such as wheat flour are comprised of starches, which are just chains of glucose. They do not taste sweet, but when we ingest starches, including wheat flour, oat flour, rice flour, potato starch we are sending a huge whack of sugar straight into our blood stream. We’ve been told for so long that carbohydrates are an essential part of our diet but the way they affect our metabolic hormones, it is just like sugar. Even wholemeal flour is still processed white flour with a little bit of bran added back in. It is still savoury sugar
We want to empower you to have the right skills to reclaim your health, to overcome metabolic disease and to manage your beautiful mind. Remember that you are the boss of you. If you decide to still eat sweet and savoury sugars that’s your choice and your right, but you will do so with awareness that most people do not have. When you are aware and educated, then you are empowered.
Change can be hard, beautiful people. We know that. But change is made much easier with the right guidance, support and community. We've got a perfect little challenge coming up at the end of January. It's called our No Sugar Challenge.
We invite you, (and your family if you choose), to undertake seven days without sugar. There are a few levels to this. You could do the entry level which is just cutting out obvious processed foods and focusing on real food. You could go up a level and you could do a low carbohydrate real food version of the challenge for seven days, eating the way Dr Lucy and Dr Mary eat. Or if you’re an established low carber and you’d love to challenge yourself, we encourage you to do that and eat a delicious low carb real food diet with the added challenge of no alternative sweeteners and no alcohol.
And it's 100% doable. You get beautiful content with fabulous little bite size episodes with fantastic information. You get our wonderful Facebook community and you get amazing recipes. You get a masterclass given by Dr. Lucy on all things sugar and a masterclass delivered by Dr Mary on the physiology and psychology of weight loss. It's wonderful. It's incredibly crazy good value. It costs $7. AND you can join us for future rounds for free!
Sign up at www.rlmedicine.com/nosugar
Click here for the 7 Day No Sugar Challenge
Show notes:
Episode 118 - Sneaky Sugar
Dr Mary Barson: (0:11) Hello, my lovely listeners. I'm Dr. Mary Barson.
Dr Lucy Burns: (0:15) And I'm Dr. Lucy Burns. Welcome to this episode of Real Health and Weight Loss.
Dr Mary Barson: (0:23) Good morning, lovely listeners. This is Dr. Mary here. And as ever I am joined by the beautiful blonde Dr. Lucy Burns. How are you, Dr. Lucy?
Dr Lucy Burns: (0:34) I am spectacular today Dr. Mary, absolutely spectacular. We are recording this and it's summertime in Australia. And as you know, I do love, love, love a bit of sunshine. It makes me happy. And Melbourne has just turned on a bit of glorious weather. I mean, I know we talk a bit about controlling the things that you can control and all of that jazz, but there is nothing like a sunny day to make you feel good.
Dr Mary Barson: (1:01) You are controlling the fact that you are taking pleasure in the weather. I think that's fine.
Dr Lucy Burns: (1:08) Excellent.
Dr Lucy Burns: (1:09) Certainly you don't want to let the weather dictate your entire mood. But enjoy it while it lasts. Gratitude, my friend. That's excellent.
Dr Lucy Burns: (1:17) Yes, yes. Well, I'm very grateful for a very pleasant summer so far. So I think that we should be chatting a bit about sugar. The shackles of sugar in this episode, which in fact, I thought we might label with one of my favourite phrases of 50 Shades of Sugar. Because it is sneaky, how sugar is just everywhere. And I think it's look, I mean, you know you and I could bang on about it for hours and hours. But I thought we'd just start with a few, maybe a few points on what the problem with sugar is. And then how to find where the sugar is hiding. And we use that word hiding deliberately. Because it is hiding and marketing giants, marketing juggernauts hide it on purpose. What's your phrase for that?
Dr Mary Barson: (2:09) Sneaky sugar subterfuge.
Dr Lucy Burns: (2:11) Yes, absolutely it is. It's there. And they do it on purpose. Because they know that people are busy and you know, when you look at a product, and often there are four different names for essentially sugar, just in different words. So anyway, we're gonna chat about that.
Dr Mary Barson: (2:30) Absolutely. And I love the 50 Shades of sugar Lucy, but you probably need it to be about, you know, 450 shades if you want to make it more numerically accurate.
Dr Lucy Burns: (2:39) I know. So if we're thinking of basic sugar, when we use the word sugar people think of, you know, white, or brown crystals. That, you know, standard table sugar. And sugar is one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose or fructose depending on which side of the river you come from, joined together. And fructose is what makes sugar very sweet. So glucose by itself is not super sweet, but add some fructose in and it's very sweet. So the problem - well, I guess there's a couple of problems - look, in small amounts, it's fine. And it really is. Like our bodies can tolerate small amounts. But the problem has come that we eat large amounts of sugar then we have both, I guess two organs that are overwhelmed with it. One is your pancreas and one is your liver. So the pancreas manages the glucose component of sugar, and the liver manages the fructose component of sugar. So, if we were to think about the liver component of sugar what is the problem with excess fructose?
Dr Mary Barson: (3:55) The problem with excess fructose is that we are not designed to eat the large quantities of it that we are now consuming in the modern world that sugar has infiltrated. It is not just infiltrated, it has saturated nearly every aspect of our processed foods and processed foods make up an enormous amount of most people's diet. You know, in Western diet culture. If you are forcefully divorcing yourself from this and eating real food, then this doesn't apply to you and I would encourage all listeners to not let the food industry dictate their health. But generally speaking, most people have no idea how much sugar they're eating.
Back to fructose. So that's my baby in the background, just ignore the cute little babbles. Fructose is metabolised entirely by the liver. So if you had a can of Coke and let's just imagine that this can of Coke has 10 grams of sugar, just because I like math to be easy and in that 10 grams of sugar, five grams of it are going to be glucose and five grams of it are going to be fructose, and that's how you pronounce it fructose. And the glucose is going to be used by every cell in your body, but that fructose can only be dealt with by your liver and your liver has to metabolise this and it metabolises it by turning it into fat, and if it's just we're just doing this a bit, it's okay. But if we're eating a lot of fructose, then the liver can get overwhelmed. It can precipitate fatty liver, it can precipitate liver inflammation, and it ain't good.
Dr Lucy Burns: (5:37) No, no. And I think that we need to be really mindful of the fact that, you know, there's, as I said, there's sucrose or table sugar, which is 50% fructose. And then fructose is also obviously found in our fruit, that's what people call it, the fruit sugar. And that gets a bit of a health halo, because you know, if it's in fruit, it must be okay. But there is a huge, huge difference between fructose in whole fruit and fructose, particularly in juice. And the fruit juice industry have spent a lot of money making sure that we're confused and that we don't realise that fruit juice is actually unhealthy, even to the point where I mean, you know, you and I aren't big fans of the Health Star Rating because they're incredibly flawed. But recently, the orange juice got a downgrading from five stars to three. In my mind, it should actually get like one. But there was outrage by the juice industry, because suddenly fruit juice or orange juice was on par with coke. I don't even know how coke manages to get three stars honestly.
Dr Mary Barson: (6:51) Honestly, indeed, what? Yeah, there is a reasonably big difference between having an orange and the way in which the fructose is contained within the cells of the orange. It's what we call cellular carbs. And there is fibre and nutrients and lots of other things inside that orange as well as the sugar as well as the sucrose and fructose, certainly. And the way that it gets released into our bodies is slower. Still not saying that it's an excellent idea to eat a large amount of oranges, if you've got metabolic disease, or if you've got a weight loss goal, you know, oranges and fruit are something that you might want to reduce, but having the purely processed orange juice, where they've just essentially taken the sugar, and the water, and it's got a little bit of the acetic acid in there as well, the citric acid sorry, to give it that nice orangey flavour, that that is just a huge dump of sugar for your body and for your poor liver.
Dr Lucy Burns: (7:53) Absolutely. And I love the idea that your nutrition is not simply the sum of the nutrients, the structure in which that food is delivered to your body makes a huge difference. It's something that can't be measured, when you're just focusing on calories, or even just focusing purely on macros, the structure matters.
Dr Mary Barson: (8:18) There is great magic in real food. Of course, it's not magic, it's actual real science. But the introduction of industrial food processing has had a horribly detrimental effect on our health, both as individuals and as a whole species. And a large part of that is because we're eating too much sugar, but we're not eating food in its natural state. And there is this idea of this food synergy that we've evolved to eat real food, which is why an orange is orders of magnitude more healthy than processed orange juice.
Dr Lucy Burns: (8:54) Absolutely. So we've got the liver then dealing with the fructose component of sucrose or table sugar, and then the pancreas has to deal with the glucose component. So glucose again, glucose in itself is not bad. Like people go “Oh my god, glucose!” It's not. It's a fuel source and all of our cells can use it and in small quantities that can work extremely well. But what happens when we have lots of glucose is that over time, our body needs lots of insulin to process it and depending on you know other factors like particularly your genetics, it may be that your pancreas gets overwhelmed and it's having to make more and more insulin to essentially metabolise this glucose. And so, we end up with a condition called insulin resistance, or hyperinsulinemia if you want to be fancy, and that is the underlying mechanism for metabolic syndrome, which can lead to type two diabetes, fatty liver disease and all the other metabolic diseases. So therefore, I'm hoping that we've painted a picture that excess sugar is indeed harmful. And coke and various other food companies would like you to believe that you can just exercise it off. And you can eat the product as long as you exercise and you'll be fine. But Mary and I are here to tell you that that's actually garbage.
Dr Mary Barson: (10:34) We are not simple buckets of calories, and you can't outrun a poor diet. Exercise has many, many health benefits, it's extraordinarily good for you to move your body and to move your body regularly. However, if you're having to run a lot to try and lose weight, then there is definitely something wrong with your diet. And weight loss is all about health, taking a step back. Metabolic health is all about hormones, and processed foods, high sugar foods have a detrimental effect over time. And if the dose is too high, they have a detrimental effect on the balance of your metabolic hormones. And exercise does not mitigate that. It just doesn't. It's good for you, in many, many ways. However, you don't need to choose between exercise or diet. Really, you need both for good health.
Dr Lucy Burns: (11:38) Absolutely. Absolutely. So part of you know, and did a little, you know, sort of nod of the head to coke. But I mean, I think that most people have got the idea that coke is not healthy. And they're not trying to tell anybody they're healthy, what their messaging is that you can drink Coke as part of a balanced diet. And that if you exercise then you know you can drink Coke, which again, there's actual garbageness about that, which is my new word. But in companies there's two. There's a way I like to do it. There are two sorts, there's you know, overt junk food companies, nobody is going to tell you that a Mars bar is healthy, or a Snickers is healthy. I don't think.. Nobody is going to fall for that. But there's also the health food companies who pretend their food is healthy when it's really just junk food with some additives that meet criteria to give them health stars. So we need to get wise to this marketing because if we rely on the packaging to tell us whether a food is healthy, then we're never going to be able to navigate our way through a supermarket. So one of the things we often encourage people to do is read the back of labels. You don't have to do it forever because once you know, you know, but read the back of labels. So if you're in a supermarket and you need glasses, take your glasses to the supermarket.
Dr Mary Barson: (13:02) Good tip!
Dr Lucy Burns: (13:04) So that you can read, absolutely, because I can tell you now those labels are designed to be tiny, because then we go, oh well can’t read that, I can read the giant stars on the front. So Mares I know that you know a bucket load of different names for sugar. So can you think of some off the top of your head
Dr Mary Barson: (13:25). There are so many. So that you've got the ingredients that sound like sugar, that's how I like to think of it. There are so many. So this is a bit more obvious. That's your beet sugar, burnt sugar, brown sugar, corn sugar, date sugar, golden sugar, grape sugar, icing sugar, you know, your yellow sugar, white sugar, raw sugar, palm sugar, that's obvious that they’re sugars. And I'm here to tell you that they are all sugar. There is nothing inherently more healthy about date sugar just because it comes from dates, that is marketing mischief. Cane sugars are no healthier than raw sugar, no healthier than turbinado sugar. Sugar is sugar.
Organic sugar, organic sugar, absolutely. They will try and trick you into believing there's a health halo around these sugars, but there isn't. Then the next thing is you've got syrups and most of your syrups are also going to be sugar. Maple syrup, probably most people would know maple syrup is just sugar with some delicious maple syrup flavouring. So is rice syrup really, and carob syrup and corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup. High maltose corn syrup, oat syrup, refiners syrup, buttered syrup, I think that's an American thing maybe? Buttered syrup. I haven't seen it in Australian ones, but it is one that came up when I was doing some research. All these, they’re sugars as well. So you've got your sugars and you've got your syrups, go on!
Dr Lucy Burns: (14:49) Yeah and agave, agave syrup. Sometimes it's not even called syrup. It's just called agave.
Dr Mary Barson: (14:55) Yes. I put agave in the next category, just the ones that sound natural but they are still sugar and this is where it gets super sneaky. And I'm going to go through the ones that I can think of Lucy, that listeners should be aware of and you add to this. So definitely agave, agave on its own, agave nectar. Agave Syrup. It’s sugar. Molasses is sugar. Coconut nectar is sugar. Dates, dates or sugar. If they’ve got dates in the ingredients, if it’s processed food, it's sugar. Dried fruit, fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate, honey, maple syrup, molasses, they're all sugar, but they sound natural.
Dr Lucy Burns: (15:38) Well, sugar is natural. It just comes from cane juice. In fact, you can get sugar cane juice, it's not unnatural. But you know, opium’s natural.
Dr Mary Barson: (15:51) Arsenic is natural.
Dr Lucy Burns: (15:55) Yeah, digitalis which comes from foxglove is natural. There's marijuana is natural, natural doesn't necessarily mean good for you. We've got to be really mindful of that. But it is very much a packaging or put a big star on the front and go 100% natural, whatever that means.
Dr Mary Barson: (16:14) Indeed! What does that mean? Processed food can still be, you know, 100% natural™ and still not be good for you. Then you've got the ingredients that sound like a chemical. Many of these have got the oats on the end of them like dextrose, fructose, galactose, lactose, levulose, maltose, sucrose, sucralose, these are all sugars. You see, it’s tricky. But there's others, there's dextrans, there's disaccharides, there is glucitol, and maltodextrin, I would put maltodextrin in with the sugars. These sound like chemicals. And they are also all sugars. say it's tricky. And with Real Life Medicine, you and I, Lucy, we are really, really passionate about empowering people to have the right skills, to reclaim their health, to overcome metabolic disease to manage their beautiful mind so they can stay on track for lifelong health. This is what we want for the whole world. But it is hard, you know, when you see all of these really confusing tools that the food industry will put into their ingredients. It really is really confusing names that the food industry will put in their ingredients, it is difficult to know what is healthy and what isn't. That's sort of the bad news. But I would say that there is really good news here in that you can totally take back the power and you can completely learn how to nourish your body with real food. And the first step I think, is to take a big step away from processed and packaged foods
Dr Lucy Burns: (18:04) Oh, 120,000,000% Absolutely. I think the even trickier thing is that there is sugar hidden in food that you wouldn't expect it to be. And in places where it never used to be. So you know, sugar is in tomato sauce, barbecue sauce, pasta sauce, bread. And this isn't just carbohydrates, this is actual sucrose. It’s been added to these products. Because for two reasons. One, we had this, you know, guidelines that told us that we needed to eat lower fat. So if you reduce one macronutrient you have to replace it with another and honestly a lot of products without any fat in them tested terrible. So the way to make them taste palatable was to increase the sugar. Now, they're sweeter. And look again if you've ever travelled to America or if you are indeed listening from America, I can tell you now your bread is much sweeter over there than ours. Our bread’s still sweet but theirs is sweeter, but your taste buds become so accustomed to it that you don't even realise. So it's not until you have a break from sugar that you can actually recalibrate if you like your taste buds.
Dr Mary Barson: (19:25) I've been astounded when I learned how much sugar can lurk inside of packaged meats. That one really surprised me. Yes, and cereals children's cereals even the ones that aren't sweet are still really… some you consider to be sweet like Froot Loops Cocoa Puffs. Yeah, sure. Okay. They're going to be packed full of sugar. But you know, so is Special K and others I wouldn't have necessarily have thought were loaded with sugar.
Dr Lucy Burns: (19:51) Ah, granola and again, these I think, they’re food products that people just assume are going to be healthy. So granola and muesli they have all got health washed, health washing it's often called when there's lots of lovely stars on the packet and messages of high fibre and high blah blah. They're muesli and the other one is yoghurt. So most of the flavoured yoghurts are not just natural yoghurt with a little bit of strawberry mix through it, they’re natural yoghurt with a little bit of strawberry and about 10 tonnes of sugar put in. So again, it's this idea that we go oh, well, ice cream. Yeah, though. That's not good for you. Oh, yoghurt. Yeah, yoghurt’s fine. And when you actually look at the ingredients, they're incredibly similar.
Dr Mary Barson: (20:37) There is as much sugar in a frozen yoghurt icy pole as there is in a paddle pop icy pole. But time was I'm sure I would have felt much healthier having chosen the frozen yoghurt icy pole.
Dr Lucy Burns: (20:47) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So again, this is not to say you can't have icy poles or you can't have fruit yoghurt. You can do whatever you want. You're the boss of you. But it is about becoming empowered with knowledge to make then decisions, both on behalf of yourself and potentially behalf of your family if you've got young kids. Be armed with the knowledge so that you're not going to be hoodwinked by these sneaky tactics.
Dr Mary Barson: (21:16) Lucy, you mentioned something earlier on, which I think is highly intriguing. You mentioned savoury sugar. Now, I know there will be some beautiful listeners out there saying, “Well yeah, but I don't have a sweet tooth, really, I could just take it or leave it. Cakes, nup. Ice cream, nup. So none of this actually is relevant to me.” Enter savoury sugar, please elaborate, my dear friend.
Dr Lucy Burns: (21:45) Absolutely well savoury sugar, so starches, so we know that sugar is a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule. Starches are just chains of glucose, which is why they're not sweet. But they are just chains of glucose joined together. And they get broken down in our stomach to just glucose in the same way that sweet sugar gets broken down to glucose and fructose. It just gets broken down to glucose. So the problem that we have is that the way we process our starches these days is quite different to the way they used to be eaten, you know, hundreds of years ago. Flour, I don't know how flour gets away with it. Because flour is highly processed, refined wheat, it's powdered. It sends glucose into our bloodstream in exactly the same way that processed sugar does. Even wholemeal flour. Like I used to buy wholemeal flour thinking I was being extra healthy. I had no idea that all wholemeal flour is, is white flour with some of the bran added back in, so it is just as processed.
Dr Mary Barson: (23:02) I feel so pious eating my pancakes made out of wholemeal flour. Yeah, no.
Dr Lucy Burns: (23:09) I know. So I think we need to be really clear that flour is just sugar, we call it savoury sugar, rice, and you will find that what's happened a lot is rice flour has entered the world. And the reason rice flour is so popular is that it is gluten free. But it is just the same amount of carbohydrates. It's the same level of sugar as normal flour. And so it's rice that is just chains of glucose, highly refined, turned into a powder and delivered easily into your body with a big as a big whack of glucose. There is nothing that is magical about rice flour being more healthy than wheat flour. If you're talking about carbohydrates, same with potato starch, again, it's just refined potato. It's not the potato. I mean, I tend not to eat potatoes these days. But if I was to ever eat a potato, I would eat it in its entirety and its wholeness its entirety with the skin. And as a whole lump, not refined, powdered, dehydrated, and then popped into a processed food item. It's quite different.
Dr Mary Barson: (24:29) Yes. And the effect that it has on our body's physiology and on our metabolic hormones is extremely different. If you were to, you know, go and chew on some grains of wheat if you could, you know, find some and chew on them and very, very slowly extract the carbohydrate out of them, that's going to have very different effects on your body than the incredibly processed white flour that just goes bang, straight into our bloodstream and bang causes our body to make all of these hormonal changes straight away. It is very different.
Dr Lucy Burns: (25:06) It is. It may be surprising to some people and it may even feel like “Ah God, how can this be?” Like we've been told for so long that carbohydrates are an essential part of our diet, that they provide all these extra things that you know, you need to have the fibre that comes with them, all of those things. So how do we then I guess unravel some of that messaging? Because you know, you and I both know that you don't need to get your fibre from flour. You don't need to get it from WeetBix you don't even need to get it from porridge
Dr Mary Barson: (25:45) . No, no. You and I are a big lover of eating whole foods. We love veggies. We are a big fan of veggies, veggies are good. You can get fabulous amounts of wonderful prebiotic fibres from your veggies. My little baby started his solids and he just loves broccoli, a bit random but he loves it. And at every mealtime you can see him. He sort of has this big broccoli floret hanging out of his mouth. It's quite cute.
Dr Lucy Burns: (26:15) I mean, the other day I saw inulin, you can buy inulin powder now, which is just… so inulin is different to insulin. So we talked about insulin being the hormone but there is inulin now. Now inulin comes from the chicory root originally, it’s in a few other bits and pieces. But now of course, because it is a prebiotic, it's used a lot in processed food. It's a prebiotic, so they get to write healthy prebiotics on the packet. And it is technically a fibre and it's also quite sweet. So it will be used instead of sugar. But when you look at it, again, it's just another powder and they put buckets of this inulin powder in products, which then ferments in our gut and causes all sorts of bloating and you know, farting and carrying on and people get gut pain from it. And it's like, no, we're not meant to eat inulin powder. It's just not meant to be. So I think we need to just sort of take a step back and sort of stop trying to trick Mother Nature, by you know, looking for shortcuts and, you know, coming up with ways to, I guess, have our cake and eat it too.
Dr Mary Barson: (27:38) Yep, I love that. It's going to be dealing with your beautiful mind and trying to understand why it is that you feel like you need to eat lots of cake in the first place. And instead feed your beautiful body and nourish your fabulous mind, brain, body, soul and spirit with real food. Delicious, healthy filling real food as close as possible to its natural state.
Dr Lucy Burns: (28:02) Absolutely. So Mares we do know, we know people sometimes need a little bit of motivation, a bit of incentive. So we have of course got our No Sugar Challenge coming up. So tell our listeners about it.
Dr Mary Barson: (28:16) Absolutely. So change can be hard, beautiful people. Change is made much easier with the right guidance, support and community. So we've got a perfect little challenge coming up at the end of January. It's called our no sugar challenge. And you can find more information by going to our website, www.rlmedicine.com/nosugar And it is a fabulous seven day challenge where we invite you and your family if you choose, to undertake seven days without sugar. And there are a few levels to this. You could do the entry level which is just cutting out obvious processed foods and focusing on real food. You could go up a level and you could do a low carbohydrate real food version of the challenge for seven days, kind of what Lucy and I would eat pretty much most of the time. And then if you want to really go hardcore, then we encourage you to do that, to eat a delicious low carb real food diet with the added challenge of no alternative sweeteners and no alcohol. And it's doable. You get beautiful content. We've got fabulous little bite size episodes with fantastic information that you can watch in the course, you get our wonderful Facebook community and you get amazing recipes. You get a masterclass given by Dr. Lucy on all things sugar and a masterclass delivered by me on the physiology and psychology of weight loss. It's wonderful. It's incredible crazy good value. It costs $7.7 bucks!
Dr Lucy Burns: (30:09) People always go, “Why is it so cheap?” And I just think because we love alliterations, we do love them. Seven days, Seven Bucks seems like a good idea.
Dr Mary Barson: (30:21) I voted for $777 for seven days, but you know, I was outvoted so it's seven bucks instead.
Dr Lucy Burns: (30:29) I know and of course you get and we give you a hypnosis so there's a little taste of basically all the things that we offer it Real Life Medicine. And yeah, we highly encourage you to join and if you've done it, if you're listening and you've done it before you get to go again you don't even have to pay the seven bucks, you just join in. You join in, you don't have to do anything, you don't have to sign up, you just come to the Facebook group and all the links everything's in the group so all great.
Dr Mary Barson: (30:55) So yeah, for people who haven't yet signed up, for your $7 not only do you get the seven day no sugar challenge this time, but you can have it in the future every time that we do it from now on out.
Dr Lucy Burns: (31:08) Yeah, really no brainer. No brainer.
Dr Mary Barson: (31:11) It's a bargain. Yeah.
Dr Lucy Burns: (31:14) Yes, I know. Oh well! We love to over deliver. All right, gorgeous one. Well, I think that that's, that's given people a really good understanding of the difference between sweet sugar and savoury sugar, the organs, the pancreas and liver that are involved in the metabolism of these two forms of sugar, all the different shades of sugar and an insight into some of the sneaky marketing tactics that are designed to keep you eating sugar.
Dr Mary Barson: (31:48) See you in the No Sugar Challenge, beautiful people. Check it out.
Dr Lucy Burns: (31:52) Okay bye gorgeous ones. So my lovely listeners that ends this episode of Real Health and Weight Loss. I'm Dr. Lucy Burns.
Dr Mary Barson: (32:07) And I'm Dr. Mary Barson. We're from Real Life Medicine. To contact us, please visit rlmedicine.com.
Dr Lucy Burns: (32:18) And until next time, thanks for listening. The information shared on the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast, including show notes and links provides general information only. It is not a substitute, nor is it intended to provide individualised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor can it be construed as such. Please consult your doctor for any medical concerns.
