What is your Tolerance for Sugar and Sweet?
Last week I was running errands and caught Dr. Robert Lustig speaking on the radio. He was talking about his usual favorite topic: sugar addiction.
However, what caught my ear was his use of the word tolerance.
He said we all have a tolerance for certain types of addictive substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and of course sugar.
The number one question my clients ask me in the office is “what can I use for sweetness?”
Our quest for sugar and sweet seems unquenchable. It’s almost impossible to purchase beverages or products that contain no sugar, sweeteners or at least a minimal amount. Although I’ve written a number of blogs on rewiring your sweet cravings I wonder if focusing on lowering your tolerance for sweet is a good idea.
If this is something you want to achieve here’s some ideas:
Resolve to eat foods without a label such as veggies, raw nuts/seeds, some fruit and protein sources.
Dedicate yourself to looking at the ingredient list of every food you consume with a label – if it has a word that is code for sweetness consider not eating it, or starting to wean yourself off these foods.
Although many words for sweet are recognizable such as sugar, sucrose, dextrose, fructose, corn syrup, etc. some may not be recognizable such as monk fruit, mannitol, and agave.
Look for names for non-nutritive sweeteners are Aspartame (NutraSweet and Equal), Acesulfame-K (Sweet One), Neotamem Saccharin (Sweet N Low), Sucralose (Splenda), and sorbitol. They are all many times sweeter than sugar and increase your tolerance for sweet.
Lowering your tolerance for sugar and sweet can take time and diligence. However, the reward is freedom to enjoy the taste of real whole foods in their natural form.
Lowering your tolerance means you won’t ever have to add sugar or sweeteners to your fruit to make it taste good or feel addicted to any form of sweet – and what could be sweeter than that?
February 1, 2014 @ 1:06 am
With the proliferation of refined sugars in the last few decades, losing this addiction gets harder and harder. I?m personally fond of using coconut sugars when I bake, and I make sure my snacks are fruits in case I have a bit of a sweet tooth.
It used to be in the old days that fruits and vegetables were the sweeteners, after all. Carrot cake, for example, was invented because of sugar rationing during the war and bakers discovered the natural sweetness in the carrot was an excellent substitute.
If only we could see that this need for things as sweet as we have today was never a natural state of being.