By Douglas Bishop

Version 1.2.2 (2011.10.28)

THE FRONT MATTER

This book is copyright of ME!
2011 - Douglas Bishop. This book -- FRACTURED BY FRUCTOSE, The End of Heart Disease, Type-2 Diabetes, Obesity, Fad Diets, and Cancer -- is distributed on Kindle and via Scribd.com. No other distribution of this book is allowed without previous written permission. Thank you. Published by ME! ISBN: n/a LOC#: n/a Edition 1.0.1, First distribution (see version history) This book is, to the best of my knowledge, accurate and based on two years of research into biochemistry, nutrition, medicine, and corporate reports. This book includes URLs that may expire over time due to the natural repopulation and elimination of Web pages that occurs on the Internet. Future editions will provide new links when necessary. Not a single link in this book was paid for. All fructose levels are provided courtesy the United States Department of Agriculture and are free and available to the public on their Web site. I have personally altered my diet in the ways outlined in this book. Eliminating fructose from your diet cannot cause you harm. Glucose and dietary fiber are essential for good health, so be sure to get both. If you're tired, eat more foods with glucose. If you're constipated, eat more dietary fiber. As with any change in diet, make sure you balance your meals to get all your vitamins. Losing weight can be dangerous for people on medications or habitual illicit drug users, as the change in body weight requires a change in dosages. See your doctor at each 25lbs lost so you don't accidentally overdose. This is especially important for type-2 diabetics using insulin and/or pharmaceuticals, as eliminating fructose cures type-2 diabetes negating the need for these measures.

VERSION HISTORY
Changes in this book
v. 1.0.1 - 2011.07.01 - The original version of the book v. 1.1.1 - 2011.07.15 - Added version number on front cover; removed "Acne" v. 1.1.2 - 2011.07.27 - Added Appendix M: Meal Plans; Sleeping fad diet v. 1.2.1 - 2011.10.08 - Added fruit+bacteria=fertilizer; revamped diet portion of book; simplified "80% excess weight loss" section v. 1.2.2 - 2011.10.28 - Added "Zero Waiting"; moved "solution" up front

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction The Solution
Zero Waiting 80% Excess Weight Loss Exercise The Relapse The Palliative What to Eat What to Eat... Maybe For the Love of God, Don't Eat That! The Organic World Easing into the Pool Counting Sweets Vitamins and Minerals 16 17 20 22 23 26 30 32 41 42 43 47

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The Science
Everything is Poisonous The Toxic Map A Tale of Two Sugars Starches How Fructose Affects the Body Liver Mortis The Rush Insulin Proper Fructose Levels Body Fuel But I Can't Live Without Fructose

50
51 55 57 63 66 68 72 74 76 81 82

The Symptoms
Confusion By Design Heart Disease

87
88 89

Diabetes Mellitus Non-alcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH) Bacterial Infections Viral Infections Obesity Depression Joint and Tendon Damage Cancer Irritable Bowel Syndrome Arthritis Leukocytosis

94 98 100 102 104 105 107 108 111 112 114

The Lies
A Brief History of Fructose The Smoking Gun Au Natural Lacing Up Alcohol and Fructose Babies, Diabetes, and Fructose Exercise and Fructose Family Values Sucrose vs. HFCS Smokescreens Kitschy Fad Diets

115
116 119 123 124 128 129 133 135 139 141 147

The Profiteers
A New Drug Whisper Down the Pain Naming Names In Conclusion

155
156 160 166 175

Appendices and stuff at the back of the book!

INTRODUCTION
Welcome to my book.
You've been had.

Who me?
Yes, you.

Wow. How are you reading my thoughts?

I have mystical powers that can read your thoughts via your fingertips.

Really?
No you dunce! I know what you're thinking because I've had this conversation with dozens and dozens of people before you.

Oh, really? Then what am I thinking right now?

You're wondering: if you were in an auto accident right now, would your underwear pass your mother's oddly passionate checklist of cleanliness and moral acceptability?

Actually, that's not what I was thinking at all, Mr. Smartipants. Of course, now that's what I'm thinking.
Well don't worry. If you were in an auto accident so bad that someone saw your underwear, you'd have shit yourself -- negating the aforementioned checklist. And when you arrive at the hospital, the first thing the nurses are going to do is cut off all your clothes and toss them in the garbage. So it won't matter at all, now will it? Tell your mom I said, "Hi."

Such language!
Deal with it.

All right, vulgar author man -- what did you mean, "I've been had"?
Once upon a time:

You're eight years old. You're outside playing in the snow. You come inside. Who's that in the kitchen? It's your grandmother. Hi, Nana. What'cha doin'? The answer: baking chocolate chip cookies. (You'll have to do the voice in your head because only you know what Nana's love sounds like.) Awww! Nana loves us. Or does she!?! (da, da, dummm) Is it Nana's fault that she's mistakenly personifying her love by filling your body with toxic levels of chocolate chips and powdered sugar? Of course not. It's what her grandmother did for her because her grandmother did it for her. It's what she saw on a TV ad: loving grandmothers feeding their grandkids cookies (or butterscotch candies or milk spiked with chocolate bliss). In fact -- as the ads would have it -- there's no such thing as a quality family moment without something sweet. What's Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie? Can a person actually come in from the cold and warm up without a huge steaming cup of hot cocoa? Can children love a mother that doesn't dish out frosted toaster pastries before sending them off to school? Why do you think Nana -- a woman with no teeth of her own -- has all those taffy candies in her purse? They're for you, silly; tiny stretchy pieces of love. Now what do you do? Remember, you're eight and she's a hundred and seven. Do you tell your possibly senile smack-peddling grandmother to hit the bricks, giving her a Ph.D. in liver damage, diabetes, and heart disease on her way out the door? Or do you eat the cookie? Oh my God! You ate the fucking cookie, didn't you? You sick freak... we just talked about this. For shame!

Actually, my grandmother was a vicious harpy who fed me heaping spoonfuls of self-loathing dipped in cyanide.
Fine. Ruin a perfectly good fake childhood memory. Well then you probably have more questions to ask before you consider purchasing this book.

Questions like: who is this guy, what do I care, and why does every television ad for a sugary product feature a skinny child actor?

Right. So, who are you anti-sugar man?

I'm some shlub who read a couple dozen books on nutrition, hundreds of Web pages, and watched ten documentaries on food and it's relationship to obesity, cancer, and general malaise.

Wow, how bored were you?

Well, I felt I needed to lose a little weight. And I succeeded. I lost 75 pounds and then I wanted to help my friends lose their weight. Hence the book.

Wow! 75 pounds. Nice job. But, you're not a doctor? Or a professor?

No. If those monikers are a prerequisite for trust, then this book isn't for you. I'm sure you can find one of a hundred how-to fad diet books on the shelf next to this one that will tell you all about how much chocolate cake you can eat and still lose "a whole dress size" or how you can eat only baked potatoes and wheat germ and look great just in time for that big high-school reunion you've got coming up. And they're written by doctors... who are also professors. That's a two-fer! This book isn't about making your loose-fitting jeans -- you know -- loose; it's about creating a four-alarm closet crisis where you're trying to tie your pants onto your skinny ass with belts that have special holes way away from where the normal belt holes are.

So this is a weight loss book?

No.

But you just said -- the whole four alarm closet thing...
That's because this book is also for people who are thin yet dying of horrible diseases, even if they don't know it yet. In fact, since you clearly feel quite

strongly about me summing up this book in a single line, this book answers the following question: "Why are so many people dying at fifty-years-old?"

Well I'm not dead. And I was looking for a weight loss book. What makes you think this book is for me?
Well, let's look at you. When you get up in the morning, do you bound out of bed totally refreshed? Do you see no point in the existence of ice cream? Do you avoid soft drinks like the plague? Are you immune to the allure of cartoon-adorned boxes of cereal and angered by the number of children who appear in frosted cereal ads? Do you deliberately ask people to sneeze on you to prove how glorious your immune system is? When you take off your shirt, do people bow down and beg you to smite them so the last thing they see on this planet are your gorgeous abs? If you answered yes to most of the above questions, go write your own goddamn book and put mine back on the shelf in front of something that says "Twenty Pounds in Twenty Days on Twenty Calories". However, this book is especially useful for pregnant mothers who don't want to accidentally poison their fetus, athletes who don't want to blow out a tendon, and, yes, anyone who is insulating their midsection with a sheet cake they ate in 1997.

You're a cranky little monkey, aren't you?

Actually, I'm a barrel of laughs. But this book is going to reveal a dark river of propaganda and misinformation that has tricked you into believing that the food you've been eating is safe in exchange for years of your life and gobs of your hard earned money -- by people who, in most cases, are being duped by the same lie as the people they are unintentionally poisoning. I feel I need to prepare you accordingly. First, I'm going to give you an associate's degree in nutrition and biochemistry by explaining the science of obesity -- something your pay-by-the-missing-pound

weight loss food purveyor would never do because once you knew the truth you wouldn't need to pay them anymore. I'm going to show you how the food you've been eating is turning your body into Swiss cheese (metaphorically speaking). I'll show you the river of lies, explain from whence it originates, and finally tell you how to avoid a prolonged and grotesque death from heart disease or diabetes. Oh yeah, and I'm going to cure cancer while I'm at it.

WHAT!?! That's absurd!

This book is that good.

Clearly you're a megalomaniac who enjoys impugning the reputation of my dear Nana. Before I put it back on the shelf (in front of that "20/20/20" thing) and walk away laughing, give me one good reason I should continue reading this book past this point.
The lives of your children depend on it.

Wow. The dead children card. I could think no less of you.

It's true.
Laughing Gas, Viagra, and Lipitor: the human stories behind the drugs we use, by Jie Jack Li, Oxford University Press US, 2006

What's that?
A notation. Oh, perhaps you don't recognize such things. Unlike other weight-loss and/or nutrition books and/or save your life books where the author simply spouts off his or her opinions at will without a single scientific report or authority as proof, my book sites numerous scientific facts and the studies, books, and web sites from which they originate. Anything not notated is my opinion or "common knowledge".

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So what exactly were you notating just then?

In the book Laughing Gas, Viagra, and Lipitor by Jie Jack Li, Li talks about how diabetes has been known even back to antiquity -- type-1 diabetes (formerly known as juvenile diabetes) being the most common and most common fatal disease in children... bar none. Li's book speaks to the point that children have been dying of diabetes for all of recorded history. I'm going to connect the dots to show you how type-1 diabetes can be prevented and type-2 diabetes can be cured. I'm also going to blow your mind when I prove to you that diabetes isn't even a disease -- it's a symptom.

Chilling, though I like the notation thing. Very novel. Got any more?
In a study released in 2011, adults in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area were surveyed on six separate occasions over the course of 27 years to determine if a relationship exists between consumption of added sugars in their food and gains in their body mass index (BMI). In addition to proving a direct relationship between sugar and a rise in BMI, the study also shows an alarming increase in consumption from 1980 to 2006, but then a sudden 10.5% decline from 2007-2009.
Lyn M. Steffen, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D.; Xia Zhou, M.S.; Lisa Harnack, Dr. P.H., M.P.H., R.D.; and Russell V. Luepker, M.D., M.S., funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

British sailors are known as "limies" because they eat limes to prevent scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency. Equally interesting, Japanese sailors who eat only white rice develop beriberi (endemic neuritis), curable by adding vegetables or B-1 (thiamine) tablets to their diet.
Contribution of Anaxagoras in the field of nutrition and diet, http://www.freehealthchannel.com/resources/2861-Contribution-Anaxagorasfield.aspx

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Ants, attracted to fructose, will seek out the urine of diabetics. In fact, doctors at one time used to taste their patients' urine to diagnose diabetes.
Laughing Gas, Viagra, and Lipitor: the human stories behind the drugs we use, by Jie Jack Li, Oxford University Press US, 2006

Ew, that's disgusting.

I also present corrections to inaccurate findings. For instance, other anti-fructose people love to point to the work of Franois Magendie, a French scientist and Chair of Medicine at the College of France, who killed several dogs using a diet of pure sugar water. However, Magendie's experiments were about how animals (including humans) can't survive on certain specific food sources alone. A dog can't live solely on table sugar. Nor on just olive oil. Nor white bread. His experiments were not about proving the toxicity of sugar, but rather the importance of a balanced diet -- which they'd know if they kept reading past the part they felt proved their point.
An Elementary Treatise on Human Physiology, by Franois Magendie, 1855

The fact that the dogs Magendie fed sugar died fastest is interesting, though inconclusive given the limited scope of his study. Note that this paragraph comes after the notation (hence, it is my opinion). There's a popular story that goes like this: In 1793, five shipwrecked sailors decided to eat and drink the sugar and rum they had been transporting while waiting for rescue. When they were found nine days later, they were close to death... proving that eating sugar is worse than eating nothing.
Fructose Blues, by William Dufty, Chilton Book Co./Warner Books, 1975

I have searched extensively for any reference to the actual shipwreck, the name of the ship, the name of the sailors or it's captain, or any actual reference in several archives and period news clippings. I have found nothing. This story was, in my opinion, made up to help sell the point that sugar is bad for you. However, I look forward to being proven wrong.

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So this isn't the only book like this?

Well, there are plenty of books out there on how the fructose industry is trying to trick you into using their product and plenty of other books on how to lose weight by cutting various things out of your diet. In fact, people have known that sugar was deadly since the 1700s. But here's what makes this book unique. We now have the science to prove -irrefutably -- that "sugar" will kill you. This book reveals a direct connection between the over-consumption of fructose (a type of sugar) and several major "diseases" (the ones you hear most about on pharmaceutical commercials). And as I touched on before, one of these is cancer. You may have heard of the others: heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. I provide evidence going all the way back to Hypocrates -- whose famous "do no harm" doctor-oath quote you may have heard a couple hundred times on TV, but whose "Our food should be our medicine" quote is rarely uttered by anyone... least of all a medical professional. I will talk about how you can cure them all -- even if you're on death's doorstep -by simply altering your diet. Other authors (your precious doctors and professors) refuse to go out on such a limb because they would lose the kickbacks (golf outings, vacations to the Caribbean, cash in a black duffle bag) they receive from pharmaceutical companies for peddling their drugs.

How cynical.
You know, cynicism gets a bad rap. A cynic assumes that everything they hear is a lie until proven otherwise. It's a cautious stance. That doesn't sit well with the happy-go-lucky types who want to go through their utopian lives without a care in the world -- turning a blind eye to anything unpleasant... like the idea that your parents and grandparents unwittingly poisoned you with toxic baklava or that giving your sweetheart a box of chocolates for Valentine's Day is a great way to say, "This isn't working... I hope you drop dead."

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For some, the possibility that they've been lied to their whole life is too scary to consider. It's much easier going along with the crowd and pretending that we're infallible -- or un-foolable if you prefer. Consider, though, that to move with that crowd, you're going to have to carry an extra fifty pounds in body weight. Or that in the race of life, you may end up baling out twenty years before the finish line when one of your arteries pulls a Mount Vesuvius. Then, it's different. You should consider this my final warning before starting this book. If you take this information to heart -- after double checking my facts (as you should any author) -- you'll live a longer healthier life and you'll look great doing it, but you will be acutely aware of the 300-years of lies, propaganda, and kid-centric advertising that is killing everyone else around you.

Hey, why are there so many skinny kids in sugar commercials?

That's the spirit! Let's begin...

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THE SOLUTION
Here is the new eating pattern you'll want to adopt to live a long and healthy life.

10 things you're going to learn...

American chefs, by in large, suck at their jobs. Ogling trainers is the best use of a gym. Walk, walk, walk, walk, then walk some more. You will contemplate "murder for candy" before it's all over. "Diet" is a sexy word that replaces "fake" in advertising. Rinse and spit applies to candy. Well, more like spit and rinse. The honey in honey mustard isn't honey. Yogurt would be in the mayonnaise aisle if it didn't have the sugar. Healthy living comes in stages. Vitamins and minerals are everything.

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ZERO WAITING
A change in plans
This book used to be quite boring. I once sold a copy to a man onboard a train traveling from New York to Baltimore. When he tried to read it, he passed out and woke up in Miami. Needless to say, I refunded his money. Why? Well, as it turns out, a significant portion of the American population has zero interest in why something works -- only the procedure and getting straight to the results. So I'm not going to make you wait to find out my miracle weight loss "diet" that's going to revolutionize the world -- I'm putting it right up front. And I'm okay with that. I understand that not everyone is as enamored with science and defrocking liars who hide behind pseudo-science and making sure that pregnant women have healthy babies and making sure athletes don't blow out their knees as I am. So if you simply want to find out how to strip away the majority of your excess fat and don't care about the additional bonuses (immunity to heart disease, curing diabetes, being able to spot the lies in an ad for frosted nutty fruit puffs), then you now only need to read three more pages. But if you're anything like me, this book is going to crush your world like an empty beer can and then recycle it into a shiny new bike. Aw!

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80% EXCESS WEIGHT LOSS

The new way to look at food if you want to live a long life.
To maintain a healthy lifestyle, eating can't become a mind-numbing chore. That's how eating disorders happen. Having worked with and achieved results for many of my friends (and total strangers) for almost a year now, I have simplified my advice into three simple rules to live by. If you're not into examining food labels and math, this section is for you. It will allow you to lose 80% of your excess body fat and you'll be slim, trim, and much healthier. These steps are in order of difficulty.

Step one is the most basic step you can take -- easy yet effective. Step two is a little harder, but will yield better results. Step three is the crusher that everyone hates
Following all three steps is required to yield the benefits. This is gradual weight loss. It took me one full year to drop 75 pounds. If you're looking to drop thirty pounds by the end of next month, I hear injecting heroin into your veins will do the trick. Weight loss should be the visible benefit of an overall change to a healthier lifestyle, not some gimmick that will leave you sick in bed. So here we go!

Step #1 - Stop Using Condiments

Most people aren't eating the chicken nuggets -- they're eating the sweet and sour sauce. Most people aren't eating the burger -- they're eating the ketchup. Most people aren't eating ribs -- they're eating the barbecue sauce. Most people think they get fat because of "fast food". They do. The fast food is drenched in fructose-heavy condiments. I eat chicken nuggets from McDonalds (0g, fructose) all the time -- just the nuggets, no sauce. Now, you may be thinking, "Just the nuggets! What the hell is wrong with you? Do you pick out the marshmallows from Lucky Charms and just eat the oat bits?" I don't think we should go there because it's only going to upset you further.

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The reason why this first step is important is that it's a little one that will introduce you to a fundamental truth of living in America -- most of what we eat is crap. Our food is prepared by chefs who have no idea what the hell they're doing, but we eat it because once you slather it in fructose even a car tire will seem delightful. You'll gain an appreciation for quality food, understand exactly what a cheeseburger tastes like, and lose a little bit of weight: about five to ten pounds.

Step #2 - Stop Eating Dessert

Most people can cook themselves a meal, but almost none of us have any idea how to make a cake or a pie. That's why most of us go out to eat: the proprietors were nice enough to build a massive glass case full of pie. How considerate! But, the question I want you to ask yourself is this: why are you eating dessert? Are you eating it for the vitamins? No. Are you eating it for the energy? If you read the whole book... not anymore. Are you eating it for protein? Not possible. So why are you eating it? Candy bars, cookies, cakes, pie, strudel, ice cream, chocolate milk, and all the other bad boys of flubbery offer nothing in the way of nutrition. Instead, they slam your body with toxins that ruin any health benefits they may have bestowed. The reason why this second step is important is that I want you, for the rest of your life, to ask yourself why you are eating something before you dig in. Is it for the protein? For the energy? Because you're physically hungry? Because you need vitamins? Because you need amino acids? Any of these are acceptable. The wrong answer is because you want to taste something sweet right now or because some commercial told you their product will make you look sexy. Eating smarter by eliminating dessert will take off fifteen to twenty pounds.

Step #3 - Stop Drinking Sugar

So this is it. The Big One! You're allowed to drink water, coffee (black or with cream), tea (straight or with cream), and milk. That's it. Period.

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Every other beverage is poison. Sports drinks are pure sucrose in a plastic container. Fruit juice is the fructose squeezed out of the fruit. Soda is salt mixed with fructose to make you thirstier. Juice boxes are chemicals (not juice) marketed straight to your kids. Alcohol is converted into acetaldehyde; it does the same damage as fructose. The reason why this third step is important is that the fructose beverage industry is killing you. Point blank. Your liver uses up any vitamins and glucose it may obtain as it attempts to shovel the fructose out of your body. Any health claim is bullshit. You'll lose anywhere from twenty to fifty pounds.

Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole

At this point, if you stopped reading and followed these three steps, you'd lose 80% of your excess weight and would be healthy for most of your life. In your 70s, you may have heart trouble, but by then you'll have all your affairs in order. Beyond this point, you'll find the nitty-gritty of total weight loss -- the truth about exercise, how to beat cravings, a list of things to eat and not eat, some information on why eating local and organic is important, a fructose counting system for people who love to eat by the numbers, an explanation of vitamins, and the conclusion of the book where I attack everybody you've ever met. I encourage you to keep reading, but for those of you who are content to finish here, thank you for reading and I look forward to seeing less of you. Ha!

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EXERCISE
Time spent in the gym is best spent checking out the trainers.
You want to hear some great news? You don't have to work out in order to get thin. This may seem bittersweet (no pun intended) to those of you who have been walking up the same fake hill for half a decade. I lost all my fat weight without a single day at the gym. Now that I've lost all the weight, I'm working out to tone and shape my muscles and develop my cardiovascular health. I've gained three pounds since starting, but I'm not complaining because they are three really sexy pounds.

Gym Rats Like Me

I'll be the first to admit that I used to be a gym-addict. I worked out for five years at all kinds of gyms: franchise gyms I paid for, gyms at the job where I worked, gyms in the complex where I lived, and I even worked at the front desk of a gym making minimum wage because it came with a free membership. In all that time, I never got below 200 pounds (I'm now 175). Exercise is the most misunderstood part of weight loss, mostly because there are thousands of people trying to sell you bullshit weight-loss machines that you can use while sitting on your sofa watching Weeds reruns. Based on ten years of reading health magazines and personal experience, here are the only things that I know to be 100% true about exercise:

Sit-ups and Crunches

Abdominal muscles are marvels of engineering designed for maximum efficiency. A sit-up consumes almost no energy and cannot be used for weight loss. Ever. So stop doing sit-ups until you're thin and can, you know, see your abs.

Running or Jogging
If you were thin, would you spend all kinds of money on running shoes and headbands? Would you run five miles for fun? If the answer is yes, great. If it's no, that's okay too. Now answer this: if you were thin, would you run five miles
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while carrying a fifty-pound backpack? The answer is no and you know damn well why: because you'd destroy your knees. So why on earth would you try to lose fifty pounds by going out for a run? That's asinine (stupid).

Muscles
Working out muscles is important so they don't atrophy. Use free weights, change exercises every two weeks (muscle confusion), drink water before you workout, and eat protein after. Building muscle increases metabolism -- a byproduct of which is your body sweats out more toxins. Also, lifting weights releases the maximum amount of stress, which helps prevents cancer. Women should not worry about accidentally becoming a crazed muscle-bound Thor. It takes serious amounts of gym time and hormone supplements to become a muscle chick. Three sets of curls with fifteen-pound weights won't make you look like Arnold -- it will make you look like Cameron Diaz.

Sports
Play sports when you're thin. The wrong turn on a basketball court with fifty extra pounds clinging to your midsection can shatter an ankle instead of just sprain it. Golf with a gut and baseball with a bulge are great ways to throw your back out of alignment. There's a reason the best goalies in hockey aren't fat anymore.

Getting Beat
You can do more push-ups listening to Flo Rida's Right Round than you can counting to twenty-five in your head. Get music.

Walking
I never understand why people who pay to walk nowhere in a gym come home and then drive to the corner to pick up milk at the convenience store. Walking is what humans do. It's what we're built for. Walk everywhere. Walk whenever you can. Around in a circle for miles if it suits you. Walk for groceries. Walk to pay bills. Walk to dinner and then to the movie. Walk, walk, walk.

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THE RELAPSE
You're not perfect; never beat yourself up.
"What if I relapsed and the cancer came back? I still believe I would have gained something in the struggle." - Lance Armstrong, It's Not About the Bike, 2000

So, yesterday you woke up and you absolutely had to have chocolate chip pancakes. Or you were walking through the mall and bought a bleached bun filled with cinnamon and frosting. Or maybe you were standing in line at the food store waiting for a 90-year-old woman to cut a check for thirty-eight cents and now you're the proud owner of three candy bars and a pack of gum.

Relax
First, don't freak out. You're human. More importantly, you're a human who's hooked on a white smack (sucrose). Especially when you get started, it's going to be hard to say no to all these "tasty" morsels. Expect and plan accordingly.

Whats Past is Not Always What's Prologue

Don't think of it like you've fallen off the horse and don't care about what you did yesterday. Focus only on today and tomorrow. If right now you're craving some sweets, here's what you do: take a handful of chocolate chips or a spoonful of whipped cream or a hunk of candy bar, put it in your mouth, chew, swirl it around, then spit it out. Repeat until the urge subsides. This won't save your teeth (which you should brush and floss immediately), but it will save your body. This works because psychologically, all food habituation starts with the process of tasting the food. It's the trigger that begins the satisfaction cycle in the brain. By triggering this cycle without actually eating the food, you limit the damage.

The Good News

In time, this will become less of a problem. In fact, some day you'll pick up a can of soda at a party -- the same soda you drank for years -- and spit it out in disgust as the taste of 26g of sucrose is so noxious your body will reject it.

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THE PALLIATIVE
Less fructose is the only way to get to no fructose.
Palliative -- an eight-dollar word. It's any object or substance that you use to ease off of another object or substance. The most well known example of a palliative is methadone: used to curb withdrawal symptoms in patients addicted to opiate drugs like heroine. Picture a stairway with steps too steep to climb without falling and someone hands you a little stepladder. It's the opposite of cold turkey and, chances are, will probably be the way in which you save yourself from the addictive hold of sucrose.

The White Smack

Sucrose is habituating. This is not a problem with other forms of fructose. You don't hear about people who are strung out on avocados. Even if someone likes bananas a whole lot, they could go a week without one without wanting to blow their brains out. A daily chocolate cake user, however, will experience harsh withdraw symptoms if they simply end it cold turkey. So what's the palliative?

What's for dessert?

Imagine you go to your favorite restaurant and you have several dessert options which you find equally appealing: the piece of chocolate cake you always have (125g of sucrose), a thinner slice of chocolate cake (60g), three scoops of all natural light mint chocolate chip ice cream (30.5g), and hazelnut cheesecake topped with syrup covered nuts (71g). You love chocolate cake. You understand that sucrose is dangerous, but it's only like day four. And that chocolate cake looks good. Real good. Since you like them all the same, judging solely by the sucrose content, which dessert should you go with?

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Hard Habits
Most of you will want the chocolate cake, but you should fight it if you can. Your body won't collapse if you give in to a single piece of cake; it's years of cake that kills you. Over time, you won't be able to stomach chocolate cake and you'll begin to see it as poisonous.

Just a Bit Off the Top

Half a slice is acceptable if you can handle that. It may leave you jonesing for more in about an hour, though, and you'll need to fight that craving when it arrives. Don't give in and, if you succeed, don't reward yourself on the following day with the other half of the slice. By eating less, you're still doing damage but you're starting down the right path.

Great Balls of Wired

I don't want you to choose the ice cream. Those of you who were math majors will be all like, hey, that's the one with the least amount of fructose. Why wouldn't I go that route? Ice cream has zero redeemable qualities. Its sole purpose is to get/keep you hooked on fructose. I would never want you to replace an already pre-existing habit (chocolate cake) with a worse or equally bad habit (ice cream).

Nuts About Nuts

The cheesecake was my choice for two reasons: first, the fructose count was high enough to control my urges yet still less than what I really wanted, and second, it introduces a positive food group into the mix. Nuts are a great source of vitamins, minerals, and protein. While in this case they are worthless because the caramel drizzle destroys all that, eating them for desert substitutes in a new habit: turning to nuts when you want to snack. Eventually, handfuls of nuts will become a meal. This choice is the best one because it sets up positive reinforcement in your mind while satisfying your cravings and slowly altering your past bad habits.

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The Hidden Choice

Ah, and then there is mysterious choice number five. What can it be? Most of you are thinking, "Ah, this is where he tells us to go fuck ourselves because dessert isn't an actual meal and we should have skipped it and suffered through the craving." Ha! You're wrong. Cravings are serious and are the death of any change in diet. You have to gradually evolve into a new diet; not just start all at once. So what is this hidden choice? It's the worst one. The hidden choice is to suck down four diet sodas or eat a serving of low-fat, low-carb, low-taste "diet" brownies or begin sucking down fake fructose right out of the little pink packets sitting in the cup next to the napkins at the end of the table. Chemistry is chemistry and replacing real fructose with the fake stuff only fools your brain temporarily. You will end up eating the fake brownie and then stuffing your face with more fructose later, doing twice as much damage than if you had given in to the real ice cream in the first place. Every menu has sugar substitute desserts to satisfy the fad dieters and diabetics. You are not one of these people. Not anymore. So between now and the time when you look at the spinning dessert case and shake your head in disappointment, don't get fancy and don't pump your body full of chemicals. Take your time and find the pace that works for you.

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WHAT TO EAT
The safest place to hide from the sucrose monster.
Any food can be laced with fructose, so you constantly want to be reading labels to make sure that a) the product you're purchasing doesn't contain sucrose, and b) that the manufacturer of something you've been eating for years hasn't changed their recipe to add sucrose now that it's getting popular. However, here is a list of acceptable foods and their fructose data.

Fresh, Local, and Raw

Three words that describe the best foods.

Meat
Meat is everything. Humans are carnivores that get the building blocks cholesterol and protein from dead animals. You can't survive without it.

0g - bacon 0g - burgers 0g - chicken 0g - eggs 0g - ham 0g - scrapple 0g - steak 0g - turkey 1g - sausage

Home-made burritos fried in taco powder (0g) or tacos (depends on the shells). Unless it has barbecue sauce on it, always eat the skin; tearing the skin off of chicken is a crime against your taste buds.

Gravy
Gravy is almost always fructose-free. Add liberally to dry meat: especially turkey, which is difficult to cook for a novice. Though some restaurants add sucrose to their house gravies or au ju, these are one-time encounters. Don't sweat it.

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Pasta and Rice

Pasta and rice are the main staples of a fructose-free diet. They are pure fuel. I would venture to say that I eat it at least five to seven times a week. I do alfredo sauce (0g) because I prefer it to red sauce (5g), with either box or fresh pasta (0g), and topped with fried chicken (0g) or SPAM (that's right, 0g). Brown rice fried in a pan with some butter and some spices (1g), I can eat a whole bowl. I do that about once a month for some variety to my regular diet. White rice is bleached, so it contains no vitamins or nutrients.

Beans
Beans (0g) are a staple diet around the world. They appear mostly in soups and chili. Baked beans (12g and up) are an American bullshit invention that packs standard stewed (not baked) navy beans with as much sucrose as possible. Avoid them. You're looking for regular beans and a recipe to make them tasty.

Nuts
Some nuts are rolled around in table sugar (3g, fructose) or dipped in "syrup" (7g) to make them addictive, but most aren't (1g). Nuts are a great source of vitamins, nutrients, and protein. However, as you can imagine, people with nut allergies can't participate. My favorites are cashews: a single handful of raw cashews can provide almost an entire day's worth of vitamins and amino acids.

Seeds
Some seeds (like flaxseeds) have large amounts of dietary fiber -- which helps remove fructose from the body. In addition, they're packed with vitamins.

Pizza
It's a staple. I eat one every two to three weeks (that's four two-slice meals, 4g). The key here is to ask for, "light on the sauce". Toppings: avoid pineapple and sausage; both have fructose.

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Milk, Butter, Plain Yogurt, and Cheese

Milk contains lactose, so when you read the label it will say 12g of sugar. This is perfectly fine. A single glass of milk provides much-needed calcium and a dose of natural glucose. In addition, milk is often fortified with essential vitamins, like vitamins A and D. Some cheeses may contain fructose and high levels of salt. While a plate of cheese-covered fries shouldn't be a problem, don't eat a whole block of cheese by yourself. Also, some cheeses contain preservatives, which (while not discussed in length in this book) are, in fact, toxic.

Plain Cereals
Plain oats (3g, maltose). Plain wheat. Plain rice. Plain... well I can't tell someone to eat just plain bran, but look for something decent. Plain corn if you absolutely must. More so than any other food group, read the labels.

Soup
I love clam chowder -- New England more than Manhattan -- as well as chicken noodle, beef stew, and pasta fagioli. Basically, if it has a potato and a carrot, I'm good to go. I keep a can or two on-hand for variety or for days when I'm in a hurry or too lazy to go to the store to buy more food. Each brand is different, but the ones I eat have no fructose.

Raw Vegetables
Raw vegetables are a fantastic source of dietary fiber and vitamins. Cooking them cuts the fiber and vitamins in half. Unlike fruits (which are undeveloped plants), vegetables are full adult versions of the plant. This means that they contain very little fructose (see Appendix V: Raw Vegetable Fructose). Broccoli, potatoes, spinach, and mushrooms all work for me.

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Coffee/Tea
Coffee and tea (black, with cream, or mixed with dextrose) are both perfectly acceptable. Both are high in caffeine -- a stimulant which helps break down fats into usable components though is mildly addictive.

Water
Water is a tough subject because pollution is everywhere. Should you drink water? Yes, you should drink water. When? Whenever you are thirsty. How often will that be? I'm not you, so you'll have to make that call, but I can tell you that it won't be eight to ten times a day. I drink maybe five glasses a day. The bottled water industry has paid off some very influential people to make sure that American's believe that if they don't drink eight to ten bottles of their product every day, we'll die tragic, fucking-horrible deaths. This just isn't so. The only time you need ten glasses of water is when you are reducing the duration of a cold or flu by flushing your system. At any other time, all you are doing is flushing essential nutrients out of your system. This has the dual effect of making you both malnourished and, ironically, more thirsty. In addition, do not ever drink water (or anything else for that matter) out of a plastic bottle. In addition to the horrific environmental impact to the planet, they leach horrible toxins into whatever they contain. This effect is multiplied when the bottles are left to sit in heat (like in the trunk of a car) and, as of this writing, the quality of bottled water is entirely unregulated. This means that if a deer pisses in the lake right before they bottle it, they're sending it to you anyway. Tap water is highly regulated, continuously checked, and generally safer, though it may contain heavy metals from factories and pharmaceuticals pissed out by the people living upstream. Restaurants are great places to drink water. Most are required by law to filter their water with expensive filter systems that remove all the worst stuff. Always drink the water when you dine out.

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WHAT TO EAT... MAYBE

The tricky side of eating healthy.
I never said this was going to be easy. Some categories of food are so complicated that -- depending on the brand -- you need to take extra care when shopping for these types of groceries.

Bread (Whole Grain)

There are very few of us who have the time to bake our own bread. Thus, most bread in America is store-bought and supplied by large, name-brand bakeries. White breads are the worst and the bleached flour -- enriched or not -- is equally worthless to your body (read: toxic). So avoid white bread altogether and read the labels carefully for thin, whole-grain breads with as little fructose as possible.

Fish and Shellfish

Our oceans are heavily polluted. There are millions of gallons of plastic floating in the gyres as well as heavy metals being dumped into our rivers by corporations looking to inexpensively dispose of their industrial waste. In fact, there's a huge section of the Chesapeake Bay that literally can't support life anymore because there's no oxygen in the water.
Large part of Chesapeake Bay is dead zone, United Press International (2005) http://www.physorg.com/news5459.html

The big concern is mercury, which can build up over time (hydrargyria). Toxic levels would require you to eat a fish a day, but shellfish is more toxic because they live on the ocean floor. Whale and dolphin meat can poison you instantly. I suggest eating shellfish once a month at most. This pollution will not be corrected in our lifetime. That said, once a month or so, I have a can of tuna in water (0g) -- never ever in vegetable oil (trans fats). I've been known to occasionally eat tilapia (0g) and salmon (0g) in restaurants when I go out with friends. My clam chowder (see soup, above) counts as shellfish as do shrimp (0g) and crab dip (3g).

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Honey
If sucrose is sugar manufactured by humans then honey is sugar manufactured by bees. Substitute it for sucrose and high fructose corn syrup when necessary. Honey contains fructose because bees -- bringing home fructose in the pollen they pick up -- can't use it either. But the levels of fructose in honey are smaller than in your other options. Sucrose is 50% fructose and HFCS is 55% fructose. Compare that to honey, which has an average fructose level somewhere in the 30%-40% range depending on the pollen. So it's only slightly better for you.

Raw Fruits
The USDA food pyramid encourages us to get plenty of fruits and vegetables during the course of our day. This is because America is an agricultural powerhouse and billions are spent every year to subsidize massive industrial farm-grown fruits and veggies that then are converted to money to pay off members of Congress -- who increase farming subsidies. A fruit is one or more seeds wrapped in a massive dose of fructose. It's designed that way so the seeds can get the best start on life. The key to fruit is dietary fiber -- which will carry off the fructose before it can be absorbed and leave behind the vitamins. The more dietary fiber, the better. As a general rule of thumb: berries are better than melons, melons are better than regular fruit, and dried fruit is goddamn awful. Olives are perfect; zero fructose. Lemons, limes, avocados, raspberries, and blackberries are all fine (see Appendix F: Raw Fruit Fructose for a complete list).

Beer
Drink dark beers. You'll drink less because dark beers are thicker, sipping beers as opposed to piss water you can chug. If you drink Mexican piss water with a lime jammed in it, you should be beaten with a switch. When it comes to beer, fructose isn't an issue, but the alcohol in beer has similar side effects so go easy.

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FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T EAT THAT!

Foods to avoid at all costs.
"I fear my upas roots have led me out of bounds." - John Boyle O'Reilly, The Upas Tree

Some foods are completely worthless to the human body, as they contain massive levels of fructose and little to no nutrients, vitamins, protein, or fat. This is a list (starting with the worst thing you can eat, then in declining degrees of horrible) of the heavy hitters: foods designed for the sole purpose of slamming your body with sucrose to achieve a mega-high.

Ice Cream
This is the worst thing you can put in your face. People have been flavoring snow since it first began falling onto mountaintops in 56,000 BC. At first, it was more like a water-ice situation: fruit juice squeezed onto shaved ice for flavor. But like most things, capitalism ruined it. The first "ice cream" was a mixture of milk, rice, and various fruits or dried nuts. It dates as far back as China in the third century BC. Twelve hundred years later, the Arabs began to create sucrose and in the process of adding it to everything they could think of, they were the first to offer what would today be recognized as ice cream. The Quakers were the first to introduce it to the United States and First Lady Dolley Madison was the first to introduce it to the government in 1813. The recipe is simple: take pure sucrose, a pinch of salt, milk, and all your flavors. Stir in a bowl submerged in a larger bowl of ice until desert becomes frothy. Add milk fat for creaminess. The final product is about 1/2 water and 1/8 sucrose or corn syrup. Suck it off a cone until you drop dead. Most labels give you half-cup measurements, but few people eat just a half-cup. A full cup of French chocolate will provide you with 30g of sucrose per cup. Black cherry will run you 32g. Vanilla bean and chocolate chip will run you about 26g. So on average, a cup of ice cream has about three tablespoons of table sugar.

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Soda
This is the second worst thing you can put into your face. Sodas (27g) began back in the early 1800s as imitation mineral water. From there, ginger was added as a way to make it taste like something. In 1874, people began mixing soda water with ice cream. From there, it was a race to develop the most toxic beverage in history. The first cola beverages -- named after the kola nuts from which they originally got their flavor -- proved to be only moderately addictive. From there, they jumped straight to cocaine, but that proved too addictive (and subsequently illegal) so the search began for a more moderate toxin. The 1900s saw a massive boom in distribution, packaging, and flavor options. The decade saw the invention of the vending machines, the six-pack, and the use of massive quantities of sugar (making them "soft" drinks). But the problem is that sugar is expensive and prone to market shortages because America isn't a leader in sugar production. Enter high fructose corn syrup in 1972. Cheap. Equally addictive. Grown in the United States. Then, enter polyethylene terephthalate ("plastic") bottles a year later. Cheap. Sort of durable. Leaches chemicals like antimony and formaldehyde, but who cares we're making money. Cheap, cheap, cheap. In fact, today -- thanks to high fructose corn syrup and plastic bottles -- soda that would normally cost twenty-one cents per serving to make now only costs seventeen cents to make. The formula of today's sodas also contains massive levels of sodium. This is to make you thirsty. You're drinking a beverage literally designed to make you thirstier so you'll drink more soda. So don't. Ever.

Toppings
I object to all dessert toppings on principle. Since I don't like desserts, I consider adding toppings to your dessert morally depraved.

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Caramel is the worst. It's literally fructose that has been heated until it browns and liquefies. This means that fructose-free caramel is a fake chemical that has been browned and liquefied. Both are pure toxins. Hot fudge, syrup nuts, cherries marinated in sucrose, chocolate syrup, candy, chocolate rocks, gummy bears, sprinkles, and butterscotch (browned fructose and butter) are all combinations of sucrose, chemical dyes, and perhaps one or two other ingredients. Coconut shavings are sometimes mixed with sucrose (check the label). Fruit toppings are pure fructose. Whipped cream has only a little sucrose, so if you feel strongly about having a topping I'll give it a pass.

Cake, Pie, and Pastry

So here it is. Your child's ninth birthday. You've got a clown. You've got a pony ride. You've got gifts and streamers and little plates that will allow your child to eat off the face of their favorite television character. You know what else you've got? You've got a cake. Now, I'm going to skip the part where I tell you that your cake contains aluminum in the icing -- which accumulates in the brain causing Alzheimer syndrome -- and go straight for the fructose. One slice of vanilla cake with vanilla icing will run you 28g of sugar -- assuming that there are no flowers on your piece, it's not an end piece or a corner piece, it's not a layer cake, and there's no photograph or other machine produced graphic or logo on your cake. If you got the "H" from "Happy Birthday", we'll let that slide. Now, if it's chocolate (same conditions) you're bringing in 45g. If you get a corner piece with a fake sugar flower and the upper corner of the birthday boy's head, you'll be raking in a whopping 63g of sugar -- in a single sitting. Per slice. I'm sure you can think of a few people who have gone back for second slices. Now you're into the 90-120g ranges.

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Yang Wanli (11271206 AD), one of the four masters of Song Dynasty poetry, wrote the poem " (Ode to the Pastry). It's one that helped make him

famous, showing just how long the world has been worshiping pastries and pies. A pie, in theory, is corrupt to its core. It suggests that fruit, by themselves, aren't sweet enough. So we should add sucrose to the mashed up berries or caramel to the sliced apples in order to make them a dessert. It's also cooked, which destroys any dietary fiber the fruit may have contained, so you're getting pure fructose from the fruit and an additional blast from the added sugar. What's more American than apple pie? Nothing if you ask the guy who sells apple pie. Is there any other food that you've ever heard referred to in that way? Nobody ever says, "What's more American than a porterhouse steak?" One eighth of a 9" apple pie (20g) like the kind you buy at the store (which also contains vegetable shortening) represents all that's wrong with the American diet.

Pudding
Pudding (21g) is sucrose in a plastic cup mixed with chemicals designed to make it taste like other things. In fact, one such chemical mimics the taste of butterscotch -- a product normally made from sucrose. Now that's fucked up. Not only do you get the worthless chemical schmutz, but you also get it in a container that leaches trace amounts of petroleum byproducts.

Condiments (Sauces)
This one gets tricky. Not all condiments contain sucrose, but so many of the common "sauces" we get an restaurants do that I felt strongly in making sure it was high on the list of things to avoid. The number one sauce to look out for is barbecue sauce. This is usually glazed over ribs and other meats and is designed to maximize the amount of sucrose delivered with each bite. It's also used to give grilled meat that "brown" color.

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Honey mustard sauce is even trickier, because most "honey" mustards don't actually have any honey in them (they use high-fructose corn syrup). The rule: if it tastes like mustard it's good; if it tastes like honey it's bad. Soy sauce (1g) is good. Miso sauce (13g) not so much. At the end of the day, you should ask yourself, "Would I be eating this if it didn't come with dipping sauce?" I know a lot of people who "love" chicken nuggets... until you take away the dipping sauce. Then they get grumpy. This means that they're literally going into fast food restaurants not for the chicken nuggets (a normal thought) but to eat the dipping sauce (disturbing).

Cookies
It's called a cookie because it's made with sugar; a cookie without sugar is called a biscuit or a muffin or a bagel or a baguette. It doesn't matter what kind of cookie it is, because you're already over the limit. There are no veggie cookies. You don't sandwich a cheeseburger between two cookies. No one orders Pastrami on cookie. Their only job is to dispense fructose.

Candy
Candy is the perverse cousin of the cookie. Instead of giving you sugar cut with baking soda and flour, they're just giving you the pure sugar. In fact, they give you so much sugar that -- when combined with cocoa powder to make chocolate -- it lowers the melting point causing it to leak all over your fingers. It's the crack cocaine of the fructose industry and it's sitting next to every cash register in the country because when you're standing in line and you start to get annoyed, the one thing that will shut your kid up long enough for you to make it out of the store is a bar of coconut shavings and almonds covered in chocolate.

Sugar Substitutes
People who pour sugar into their tea or coffee should continue to do so if you can't stomach the stuff black or with just cream. Try to limit it to one teaspoon if

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you can. Do not, under any circumstances, switch to fake-fructose-like chemicals. Not only are they worthless to you from a nutrition standpoint, but they are incredibly dangerous -- both in raw form and when broken down. Theoretically, a sugar-substitute is supposed to save your liver from the burden of sugar while allowing you to continue to enjoy the products that you love. But instead of abating your cravings or satiating your appetite, sugar substitutes keep you hooked on the things you're not supposed to eat. And that's the crime. Aspartame is a sugar substitute known around the world by many brand names and can be found on the dining table in tiny pink and blue packets right beside the tiny white packets. It's also in candy, gum, and almost every diet beverage. Aspartame, when it comes in contact with water, breaks down into three different chemicals including formaldehyde -- a known carcinogen.
"Is Your Food Telling You the Truth?", Ideas & Discoveries Magazine, June 2011

Sodium cyclamate is another sugar substitute. It's thirty times sweeter than pure sugar -- hence it's popularity. Banned in the U.S. (we're corrupt, but we're not this corrupt!), it can be found all around the world in "sugar free" products like soda pop and canned fruit. When broken down by intestinal bacteria, it becomes cyclohexylamine... a corrosive chemical that causes cardiac arrest.
"Is Your Food Telling You the Truth?", Ideas & Discoveries Magazine, June 2011

Brandy, Rum, Wine, and Schnapps

Drinking is fun: I do it myself from time to time. Not as much as when I was a teen, but a shot of vodka or two every now and then makes me happy. When broken down by the body, alcohol turns into acetaldehyde (a poison), which among other things gives you a hangover. The only way to beat a hangover: drink water so your body can flush out the acetaldehyde. Brandy and rum are made from the fermentation of fructose. As a result, they contain trace amounts. Drinking booze that also contains fructose smacks your liver with a one two punch: first the fructose then the acetaldehyde. This makes you feel ten times as bad (brandy is an awful hangover) for twice as long

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because the liver spends time trying to expel both poisons instead of focusing on just the alcohol. Here are some rules of thumb. When it comes to wine, clearer and dryer is better. Merlot is the worst. When it comes to liquor, clearer is better. Vodka is the best. As always, sweet tasting means something's wrong, so avoid schnapps, crmes, and other flavors as much as possible. But even this can get complicated. Some places make margaritas, but most places make "margaritas". The difference? A true margarita is tequila, triple sec, and limejuice in a rock salt rimmed glass and garnished with a lime wedge. This will produce a clear drink. If your margarita comes to the table and it's pink, something is wrong! Margaritas are not red or yellow or indigo. They're fucking clear. "Margaritas" are made from store-bought margarita mix (24g) which is fructose mixed with red food dye (also toxic) and pineapple juice. The same thing happens with daiquiri mix (22g) and drinks that feature sour mix (16.5g) -- which is actually lemon and/or limejuice, sucrose, and water.

Chocolate and Syrup

Chocolate (55g) is a chemically altered product with little resemblance to the cocoa beans from which it's produced. Pancake syrup (21g) is chemical goo (mostly high fructose corn syrup) with little resemblance to any actual maple syrup (58g) that starts as sap from a tree. Clearly, chocolate chip pancakes are off the table, but this also includes oatmeal and cereals that contain "real maple flavoring" (debatable) and breakfast/granola bars that sneak chocolate chips into the mix.

Fruit Cups
A fruit cup is fruit filled with fructose that's been cooked to destroy the dietary fiber (making it mushy) and then bathed in sucrose to make it a snack.

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Dried Fruit
Dried fruit has been stripped of its natural water, making it smaller. The problem here is that a) the water you normally take in with fruit helps to flush the fructose away, and b) you will tend to eat more fructose in a single sitting because not only does the fructose stop the chemicals that tell your brain it's full, but the dried fruits themselves are physically smaller.

Iced Tea
Iced tea has very little (if any) tea. The iced tea container you buy in the store is mostly a massive bucket of sucrose filled with food coloring. If it has any tea, any beneficial elements were destroyed in the powdering process. Unsweetened iced tea in restaurants is usually made from soaking tea bags so it's acceptable, provided you don't add anything to it to make it sweet.

Flavored Water
Pouring chemicals into water to make it taste like something else is ridiculous. Even if they didn't have tons of sugar in them (which they do), it would still be a bad idea. You don't like the taste of water because you prefer the taste of sugar. Suck it up and learn to drink your water like a normal human being.

Not-Plain Cereals
Return the box in your hand to the shelf if it has one of the following words on it: fruity, smacky, honey, berry, crunchy, nutty, golden, cocoa, marshmallow, grapenut, raisin, super, or frosted. If someone on the box is smiling at you, if someone on the box is holding a toy, if someone on the box is offering you a puzzle or needs help finding a toaster in a tree, if someone on the box is wearing an outfit from before 1990 (pirate, riverboat ship captain, caveman, vampire, etc.), if someone on the box is an animal who speaks English, or if the box is clearly labeled with the logo design of a famous pastry franchise put that shit back on the shelf and walk away; these people are trying to sell you a bowl of death.

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Yogurt
Here's one of those topics that a lesser author would dance around because commonly accepted knowledge holds that yogurt is this fantastic health food that people can lose weight on and to say otherwise would insight rioting. Plain yogurt is a fantastic health food that people can lose weight on. You catch that? Plain. Plain yogurt. A chocolate-chip raspberry cheesecake swirl yogurt will probably be the last thing you see before the bright white light. For those of you hooked on the acidophilus myth... take the pills.

Jelly
Peanut butter and jelly; what could be more American than sending your kid off to school with a PB&J sandwich? Jelly is literally fruit puree in fruit juice thickened with sugar. It's a massive dose of fructose. In addition, jellies and jams also contain carrageenan -- a chemical added to make them more gelatinous. This chemical breaks down into poligeenan, a toxin that causes ulcers and amplifies allergic reactions.

Fruit Juice and Juice Boxes

Now, I've already told you that some fruits can be consumed in limited quantities because per serving they provide less fructose than others (see Appendix F: Raw Fruit Fructose for a complete list). So you might be thinking that certain fruit juices might also be acceptable. You would be wrong. Fruit juice is fructose squeezed out of the pulp (dietary fiber) that housed it. This is bad for your health, as the missing dietary fiber would normally have ushered most of the fructose through your body before it could be absorbed. Fruit juices is bad enough, but when you take it and chemically alter it to turn them into mega blasts of Frankenjuice and then stuff it into juice boxes with chemical liners that leach toxins and sell them to kids, you embody everything that's wrong with the food industry.

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THE ORGANIC WORLD

The new world of almost unprocessed foods.
Many people hear the word "organic" or see it on a label in a store and automatically assume that it indicates a product with health benefits. This is a misnomer. The word "organic" means that the product contained within was grown without the aid of chemical pesticides that contain petroleum or injected with hormones or pharmaceuticals. The idea behind the organic movement was to introduce foods that are inherently safer because they contain fewer toxins -- not no toxins. And they succeeded. I myself eat organic cheese crackers and drink organic unsweetened white tea. However, "fewer toxins" is only half the battle in achieving a healthy lifestyle and almost all of the products you'll find in the organic aisle contain fructose -because, as the rumor goes, sugar is "100% natural".

Blinded by Science
Most organic products come in plastic bottles to keep them competitively priced with their non-organic cousins. The net result of this is that, yes you've removed petroleum from the agricultural process, but you've packaged it in a container that leaks the very byproducts you were looking to avoid. Buy your organic drinks in glass bottles and get your meat wrapped in wax paper from a butcher or eat meats wrapped in plastic soon after purchase.

Fresh from the Fruit

Organic products are not health-food products. There's no guarantee that you'll lose weight eating them. As a matter of fact, most organic products use lots of "organic sucrose" or "evaporated cane juice" or (worst of all) pure "fructose crystals", which are not conducive to good health. Always read the labels to make sure you're getting products that will actually help you live longer.

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EASING INTO THE POOL

Danger: No Diving
If you went to the food store tomorrow and purchased an entire shopping cart of fructose free groceries, you'd be back two days later buying a second shopping cart full of ice cream. Then you'd go out to the parking lot, strip naked, and roll around in your ice cream until you had the mother of all ice cream headaches. You can't just rip this one off like a Band-Aid. If you're freaked out that you've been lied to for all these years or if your doctor has given you four weeks to live, channel that fear into resolve to beat the fructose industry at its own game. And you're going to do it one step at a time.

The Game
Let's play a video game. It's called Sugar Monsters. The object: steal back as much of your money as possible while simultaneously avoiding tempting soft drink beverages and handy little snacks being tossed at you by evil profiteering grocers. Your inventory: one particularly cleaver human brain and a feisty wallet named "Leatherface" with metal bear-trap teeth that can pick pockets. The mega boss: a guy who throws sheet cakes at your mouth.

Four Steps to Healthy

Spend a day tracking how much fructose you consume. Then pick a level.

Stage 1: < 40g Fructose per day, < 20g per meal Stage 2: < 30g Fructose per day, < 15g per meal Stage 3: < 20g Fructose per day, < 10g per meal Stage 4: < 10g Fructose per day, < 5g per meal Final stage for long life: zero fructose while getting as much glucose as needed to stay healthy.
As each level becomes comfortable, graduate to the next one.

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COUNTING SWEETS
A laypersons guide to counting sucrose.
Avoiding sucrose in prepared foods (like at restaurants) is almost impossible. These are people who pay their bills because you came in. They want you to come back and sweet foods get the job done. So when you go out to eat, just expect that you're going to eat a little sucrose. Don't go chasing down your server asking for nutrition charts because they're just going to scrub the kitchen floor with your steak. As long as you're not drinking soda or scarfing down black forest truffle cake you're golden. This section is more about everyday life. Cooking in your kitchen. This is where you're going to make all your serious weight loss and health improvements. When you go food shopping, here's how to do it right.

Divining Fructose
A candy bar has 12g of sugar listed on the nutrition label. How much fructose is that? If you remember back to the beginning of the book, sucrose is one part fructose and one part glucose. So you're eating 6g of fructose. A fruit bar with 12g of sugar could be tricky, but I don't want you to be concerned with the fact that it contains more fructose (because of the fruit). Assume it's 6g of fructose and don't drive yourself crazy trying to get the exact math right. An oatmeal bar with 12g of sugar is also tricky, but I don't want you to care about this one either. Even though it has less fructose because oatmeal is maltose (a good sugar; breaks down into two glucose), I want you to assume it's 6g of fructose for the same reason. There is one exception. Dietary fiber expels fructose before it can be consumed at a ratio of 2:1 -- meaning two grams of dietary fiber negates one gram of fructose. If you feel like doing the math, you can make those trades.

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Nutrition Labels
Your whole culinary life should be about food labels. As you walk down the aisle, look at the label for each package. First, look at the serving size. Then look at the fructose content. This will give you a general idea of how sweet the thing is. Finally, you want to have a look at the ingredients to find out what they put in it.

Size Matters
The number one way that food companies get around labeling their products is by the suggested serving size. Did you know that a can of soda is actually two and a half servings? That means that after you drink 40% of it, you should hand it off to your friend or put it away to finish later. I find it ironic that these companies are literally telling you not to finish their products, but we'll skip over that. Pick up a can of soda. It says it has 27g of sucrose. You think to yourself, "Gee, that's a little high, but I might risk it." Then you look at the recommended servings. It says 2.5 servings per can. That means that if you drink the whole can, you're actually drinking 67g of sucrose (33g of fructose). That's really bad. So you can see where labeling can be deceptive. After all, if the can said one can equals 67g of sucrose, even someone with no idea that sucrose is dangerous would be taken aback. And all companies do it; not just beverage companies. I've seen power bars that were two servings (think how small power bars are) and some single-serving cereal bowls claim two servings. This is a systemic practice. But these are examples of personal-sized containers. What about family sized bottles of sucrose? Take a two-litter bottle of soda. Again, it's 27g per serving. But this time, there are 25 servings per container. That's a total of 675 grams of sucrose. Holy shit! I know people who drink one per week (337g fructose).

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But ignore that for a second. Have you ever actually gotten twenty-five servings out of a two-litter of soda? I think not. Try it some time. Put a hash mark on the bottle every time you take a glass. You'll get to about eight or nine and the bottle will be kicked. So (assuming it's nine), you're actually drinking 75g of sucrose -more than if you were drinking single cans. This is important for two reasons. First, it shows how easy it can be to get carried away when pouring or serving out of a large container and trying to "eyeball" your servings. Second, it shows how deceptive the "sugar" listing can be because it fools you with funky math.

Sweet Success
Generally speaking, if a company has the balls to tell you their product has more than 5g of sucrose, they're basically telling you that they want to be your dealer. Put it back on the shelf. This will eliminate the majority of cereals, candy, breakfast bars, iced teas, sodas, desserts, and sauces. If you remain faithful to this, I guarantee you'll drop at least one pants size within six weeks.

The Usual Suspects

However, if you're looking for serious changes in health and body weight, then you have to dig just a little deeper. The 5g-per-meal limit is nice (Stage 4), but that's still a considerable level of fructose. I have eliminated almost all fructose and I recommend you do the same. After all: toxic is toxic. By law, companies that sell pre-packaged food must include a nutritional label that must have a) "sugar" content, b) serving size, and c) a list of ingredients. This list of ingredients is important for two reasons: first it must be complete and second it must listed ingredients in order from most to least. In other words, if you look at a container of raisins, you'll see ingredients. First is raisins because raisins are mostly raisins. Second, you'll see sucrose because the raisin people want their raisins to be the most addictive raisins ever (almost all commercial raisins have sugar). In fact, if you ever eat an actual raisin, you

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will probably said, "Ew, these aren't raisins!" because they'll be bitter and grapelike. Third, you'll see "natural flavors", which, if you call the company, means that they added juice from dates and figs to make the raisins more raisiny. As you begin to change your diet, look for foods where sucrose is further down the list. Then, look for foods where sucrose is near the bottom. Finally, some day you'll avoid all foods that list sucrose or HFCS like a leper colony. Then, you'll achieve maximum health. But, there's a catch! Companies are hip to the fact that many people are refusing to eat sucrose. So they change the name (see Appendix A: Secret Names of Sucrose for a temporarily accurate list of alternative names).

Doing Your Best

Counting sugars isn't an exact science and you have to accept that sometimes companies are going to slip one by you from time to time. You also need to accept that "sugars" as listed on the food label includes all five sugars (fructose, glucose, lactose, maltose, sucrose). So if you have a handful of honey-roasted peanuts and the box says 6g, how much of that is from the peanut (maltose) and how much of that is from the table sugar they rolled it in? There are several possibilities: send food to a lab and pay them to give you a chemical breakdown or you can find out how much sugar is in a handful of regular peanuts and ballpark it yourself. One of these is very expensive and impractical and the other one involves math and is a huge pain in the ass. The USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference is online and has listings for thousands of foods -- including (occasionally) fructose and sucrose listings that you won't find on regular food labels. But you don't need to do research. Eat the nuts. Are they really sweet? Sweeter than they should be? Finish the container (don't waste food) and then never buy them again. You can drive yourself mad obsessing over fructose and your diet should be about thinking dollars not pennies.

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VITAMINS AND MINERALS

Don't forget the basics.
"A patient should get large doses of vitamin C in all pathological conditions while the physician ponders the diagnosis." - Dr. Frederick Klenner, pioneer in vitamin C mega dosage therapy for the treatment of viral infections.

Vitamins and minerals are the essential building blocks of life -- and very few of us know that when we get sick, it's almost always because we're missing one or more of these micronutrients. Your diet should give you adequate levels of every vitamin, but a few could always use a little extra attention.

Vitamin C
Among its long, long laundry list of things it can do, the most important one to you is this: it's an antitoxin. Vitamin C aids in the inactivation and removal of the dietary toxins stored in your fat cells. In fact, that's why the body chooses to store toxins in the fat cells in the first place -- it's the most convenient place for them to wait for the vitamin C molecules you're sending to destroy them. That means that vitamin C is essential for emptying your fat cells (losing weight). Vitamin C is essential to your immune system as well. It's a preventative measure -- meaning that you have to take vitamin C before you catch a cold or flu, not after. After you get the cold, you would have to receive it intravenously to have it take effect.
Vitamin C and the Common Cold, Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel Prize winner and a guy who died at the age of 93, 1970

Make sure you get plenty of vitamin C -- whether by food or by supplement -- one a regular basis. The more the better (vitamin C is water-soluble, so you'll simply pee out what you don't need). I take 2,000 mg once a week.

The Vitamin Bs
There are eight types of vitamin B that apply to humans. I'm sure you can find their names and numbers online and I've already talked about some of their

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benefits throughout the book. For instance, niacin (B3) cures depression and riboflavin (B2) metabolizes fats and sugars. The B-vitamins are delicate and should be balanced -- as they interact with each other. If you want to take B-vitamins, make sure you take a vitamin B complex so that you get the best balance of all eight Bs. Niacin (vitamin B3) is the only B-vitamin that has realistic overdose implications. The generally accepted limit is 3,000 mg per day. Taking more than this can hurt your liver. I take three pills of B-complex twice a week which provides me with all the B I could ever need, including 150mg of niacin. So I'd have to down a whole bottle everyday to even come close to the limit. However, don't shortchange yourself of Niacin either because it's the most important vitamin for weight loss. The liver uses niacin to cleanse itself. Doctors are currently prescribing new pharmaceuticals that are actually niacin mixed with various placebos for people at risk for heart attacks. FYI, B-vitamins turn your urine bright yellow; this is perfectly normal.

Vitamin E
Once a month I take three vitamin E capsules. Vitamin E is fat-soluble, so it sticks around for a while after you take it. It's an antioxidant.

Other Vitamins and Minerals

You should be getting more than enough of the other vitamins and minerals in your daily diet. If you're ever missing one, you'll develop a deficiency disease that (hopefully) will be easily diagnosed by your doctor. But these are rare. There are people who talk about zinc being good for reproductive health and calcium is important after the age of sixty to prevent osteoporosis. You do not need vitamin D unless you're locked in a closet; our bodies generate it via sunlight. Vitamin A is another vitamin that has a low LD50 and we get plenty in our diet so don't bother taking that either.

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Chew on This
Chewable vitamins are dangerous for your teeth because most vitamins are acidic -- meaning that they can destroy the enamel cells of your teeth. This is particularly true of vitamin C (Ascorbic acid). Ironically, your teeth can't survive without vitamin C, which -- when consumed in food or pill form -- is used to replenish the dentin cells of your inner teeth.
The Effect of Ascorbic Acid Deficiency on Enamel Formation in the Teeth of Guinea Pigs, Paul E. Boyle, D.M.D., Harvard Dental School http://www4.dr-rathfoundation.org/NHC/studien_pdf/old/the_effect_of_ascorbic_acid_deficiency_on_e namel_formation.pdf

Poisoning Concerns
You're going to hear a lot of flack about the dangers of vitamin supplements. First, your doctor will be on your case because no vitamin company will ever give him or her a yacht. Second will be the media, who sell ad time to Big Pharma. Where you won't find anything about poisoning by vitamins is from the American Association of Poison Control Centers. According to the 2009 Poison Center Statistics Report, which reports pharmaceuticals (sedatives, hypnotics, antipsychotics, cardiovascular drugs, and opioids -- in that order) as the most common causes of poisoning related deaths reports not one vitamin overdose.
2009 AAPCC Poison Center Statistics Report (Full Version) http://www.aapcc.org/

In fact, according to the documentary Food Matters, only 10 deaths by hypervitamintosis have been reported in 23 years.
Food Matters, Directed by James Colquhoun and Carlo Ledesma, 2008 (DVD, Documentary)

Compare that to deaths by cardiovascular drug overdose (280 in 2009 alone) and you can see that living healthy with vitamins is more sustainable (cheaper, safer, and healthier) than relying on drugs.

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THE SCIENCE
Here's an associate's in nutrition with a minor in biochemistry so you can live a long, healthy life. Don't worry; it's not as boring as it seems and you won't owe me any tuition at the end.

10 things you're going to learn...

Sugar is a meaningless advertising word. You can kill yourself by drinking water. Biology mixed with chemistry is icky. You can smoke till your eighty if you're careful. Tooth bacteria live in apartments made from their dead cousins. Vitamin C helps you lose weight. How to dodge a nightclub bouncer. Some people eat and drink their weight in sugar every year. I'm too lazy to test clam chowder for my own book. Sometimes dogs can't help when or where they drool.

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EVERYTHING IS POISONOUS
It's just a matter of dosage.
"What is there that is not a poison? All things are poison and nothing without poison. Solely the dose determines that thing is not a poison." - Paracelsus (14931541)

The most fundamental lesson of this book is this: when an animal has within its body too much of a chemical -- any chemical -- it experiences poisoning. Basically, the offending chemicals can't be expelled fast enough and the body experiences negative side effects. All chemicals can be consumed up to a certain point. After that, the dosage becomes toxic and the human is poisoned. Depending on the toxin, the effects range from minor things like nausea and tingling skin to horrible things like organ failure and death.

Asclepius' Rooster
Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, genius, and politician, was imprisoned as a scapegoat after his stinging rebuke of the declining Athenian empire in which he lived (note to self: don't upset the neighbors). Though presented with several opportunities to escape from his cell, Socrates instead chose to commit a symbolic suicide with a toxic cocktail of "hemlock". The leaves of the hemlock plant contain coniine -- a toxin that disrupts the chemicals in your body that operate the central nervous system. It creates a paralysis that begins in the feet and legs and ascends up through the body until it reaches the heart and lungs. It takes a human two to three days to filter the toxin out of the body, so without a ventilator the effects are fatal. No ventilators in Socrates' day meant his suicide was a smashing success.

The Toxic Horizon

Because each human is unique, the toxic horizon is the point at which you personally will experience poisoning for a particular toxin. This line in the sand is affected by your body chemistry, overall health, body mass, and frequency of

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exposure. Each of these factors can change over time leading to a build up or break down of your ever-fluctuating personal tolerance. For scientific and medical purposes, the median lethal dose (LD50) is the dosage at which half the members of a particular tested group -- mice, rats, humans -- will suffer fatality. It is commonly accepted that 100 mg is the LD50 for the coniine found in hemlock leaves. That means half the people who consume 100 mg of coniine will drop dead. But what is it for you? If you're in poor health, half of that may kill you. If you're fit as a fiddle or you've been accidentally chewing hemlock leaves regularly for several years thinking it was tea (tolerance), your body may be able to survive two to three times that amount.

A Massive Advantage
If Hemlock is too vague an example, then lets consider cocaine. Doing a line of blow at a party means different things to different people. A woman, five-footone, 120-pounds in poor health and no past experience with cocaine could kill herself instantly while a man of more than six feet, 250-pounds with years of cocaine abuse could experience almost nothing at all. If you're a big person (tall or fat), your toxic horizon is naturally higher because your increased body mass proportionally reduces the effects of a toxin. The botulinum spores found in a tablespoon of honey produce a toxin that is potentially lethal for an infant or toddler, but rarely affects adults. Same dosage, different results; the only difference is body mass. In fact, poison levels are expressed in terms of how much the person weighs -- in this case, a lethal dose for botulinum toxin is 0.0000001 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
Wikipedia - Botulism, Chemical overview and lethality, May 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin

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Obscure Poisons
The most important concept to grasp is that any substance on the earth can become toxic to a human if he or she ingests or injects enough of it to surpass their personal toxic horizon... even common everyday things. We can't live without water. Yet water poisoning is common in people trying to cheat drug tests by flushing their system with gallons of water in the misguided hope that diluting their urine will somehow cover up their dirty little secrets. Anaphylaxis is a severe allergic reaction to a stressor (such as bee venom) that floods the body with toxic levels of histamine -- a chemical the body makes itself. The body, panicked by the perceived invasion, literally poisons itself. Vitamin poisoning (hypervitaminosis) is incredibly rare, though possible with the help of modern supplements. As you might expect, each vitamin has a different LD50 depending on if the vitamin is fat-soluble (low) or water-soluble (high).

Homemade Brew
Humans aren't perfect; our bodies are set up to handle most problems -- not all problems. Some things are perfectly fine when they enter our bodies until they are sent to the liver for removal. These agents react with chemicals naturally found in the liver to form hepatic toxins. Fructose is one such agent.

Acute vs. Chronic

Every toxin has both acute effects and chronic effects. Whether you experience the acute side effects or chronic side effects is determined by how much you take, how fast you take it, and for how long. People (especially doctors) love acute effects because they're happening right now. You take a shot of vodka, you feel funny. You take two more shots of vodka, now you're woozy. The next day you wake up with a hangover -- an acute side effect -- and you say, "Wow, I shouldn't have drank so much."

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That's why prescription medications are so popular: you take a pill and it cures you of an acute problem you're having right now. You'll get to the side effects of the medication someday and hopefully they'll have a pill to cure those, too. In the meantime, you felt bad and now you feel good. Well... better, anyway. People (especially doctors) hate chronic effects because they're happening sometime in the future and everyone wants to believe that while we may be misbehaving right now, we'll eventually pull it together and fix our lives. The day after winning a beer-pong championship, you probably didn't wake up and say, "Hey, if this keeps up, I'm going to be dead from liver disease when I'm 51." It's only when you're actually dying at the age of 51 that you look back and say, "Wow, I shouldn't have drank so much."

Sweet Death
So, we've learned that we can consume too much of something to cause poisoning and we also know that our bodies can create too much of something with the same result. But what happens when both happen at the same time? We've reached the crux of what this book is all about: Americans, through a combination of ingested and body-produced sources, have reached and sustained a level of chronic sugar consumption that is, simply put, toxic. We are poisoning ourselves with sugar every day... whether we realize it or not.

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THE TOXIC MAP

Multiple poisons: a cloud of confusion.
"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it." - Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming (1982)

Humans love to focus on one thing at a time; it just makes life simpler. This is especially true of doctors, who prefer to look at disease as a cause and effect situation. You drank too much in life and now you have liver damage. Alcohol causes liver damage. Don't drink anymore. That will be $75. The very idea that two causes could combine to create disease or even death is heresy -- mostly because to come up with a cause and then to continue looking for additional causes is madness. If a guy drank two bottles of scotch everyday for twenty years, who cares what alternative ailments could be causing his cirrhosis. The man's a boozehound. But when someone dies from disease, it's almost always because of multiple toxins hitting the body at once.

A Tale of Two Biddies

Consider two smokers: female, born on the same day, almost identical lives, including a pack a day habit beginning at age 18. One dies of lung cancer at 52, the other dies of a heart attack at 82. A doctor will tell you that the first woman died because the cigarettes (containing nicotine plus another 598 potential additives) she smoked cause lung cancer. The same doctor will also tell you that the second woman was just lucky. Or he may praise her medications. After all, that's what doctors do: they're drug machines. The answer to the question is deceptively simple: one or more other toxins were also poisoning the smoker who died at 52. Which ones? Perhaps she ate a lot of fish (mercury)? Drank out of plastic bottles (petroleum byproducts)? Heavy drinker (alcohol)? Lived in a big city (Sox, Nox, CO2 - a.k.a. air pollution)? All of the above? None of the above?

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Yet as bad as those are, even these probably didn't bring about her early demise because the body, in perfect form, can cleanse itself fairly quickly of even this cacophony of poison. Oh, yeah. Huge fan of chocolate cake (fructose). That's the one. Without any of these other poisons (mercury, benzene, alcohol, air pollution, fructose), the body of the 82-year-old smoker only had to contend with the tobacco smoke -- no small feat, but manageable nonetheless. The human body can process and expel an amazing amount of toxins. For instance the bisphenol-A from a plastic bottle of water -- plus or minus depending on how long it's been sitting in the red-hot trunk of your car -- is expelled in your urine within 48 hours.
"Heat causes chemical to leach from plastic", Liz Szabo, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-01-29-plastic-chemical_N.htm "Bisphenol A May Linger in Body", Daniel J. DeNoon, WebMD http://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20090128/bisphenol-a-may-linger-inbody

But fructose -- the simple sugar that causes obesity -- clogs up the system preventing the natural expulsion of these everyday toxins. Because it allows all the other toxins to remain well after the body would normally have expelled them, fructose is the most dangerous of all the poisons we regularly consume in our everyday lives. Unless you rent a spare bedroom to barrels of nuclear waste, fructose should be your number one concern.

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A TALE OF TWO SUGARS

Similar, and yet very different.
"Sweet is the rose, but grows upon a brere." - Edmund Spenser, Amoretti. Sonnet XXVI.

Sugar is a marketing word used to describe several types of otherwise distinguishable saccharides. This is by design. If I tell you that people need sugar to survive and someone else tells you that sugar kills you, you wouldn't know what to do. If I tell you that sugar is unnatural and someone else says sugar is inside of every human, you'd be confused. And that's the point.

Out for a Run

After the battle of Marathon -- in which the Greek army successfully defended it's homeland from the massive invading Persian army -- a runner was sent back to Athens to give the good news. He ran 26 miles (the length of a modern day marathon) and when he made it to the city square, he thrust his fist in the air and screamed out "Nike!" (Victory!) and the Athenians erupted in cheers. Then the runner dropped dead of exhaustion.
Wikipedia: Pheidippides, May 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides

Without preparing himself properly beforehand or eating along the way, the runner used up his blood sugar and was forced to replenish it by stealing from his organs. Eventually, when his organs ran out of sugar, his body stole the protein that held the organs together and converted it to sugar (gluconeogenesis). This loss of protein caused his heart to fail. The point of my telling you this story would seemingly be that your body needs sugar in order to live, but the actuality is that your body needs glucose in order to live. In today's world of miseducation, you may think that you could survive on candy bars and vitamin supplements (that's sugar, right?), but such a diet would kill you. Why? Because candy bars contain fructose (the bad sugar).

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Being healthy is about understanding that the word "sugar" is worthless to you unless you can distinguish which type of sugar you're dealing with when you eat something. So here's the breakdown:

1 of 2: Glucose -- The Good Sugar

Glucose is a natural monosaccharide (single sugar) produced by every animal. Whenever a cow eats a leaf off a tree or a human munches on a cheeseburger, glucose is extracted. Glucose in animals is the source of all energy: the fuel in our gas tank. It is essential for all life. Your brain runs exclusively on glucose. Without it, your ability to reason or even stay conscious is altered. If you were starving in the desert, your body would cannibalize your muscles and organs -- turning them into glucose -- in an attempt to survive. Eventually, when it strips one of your organs so thin it breaks, you "starve to death". So the more you eat, the more glucose you obtain. Once your body achieves the desired level of glucose to maintain consciousness and provide energy for everyday tasks (your blood glucose level), your insulin will send a chemical message (via leptin) to the brain to stop thinking it's hungry. Then your body distributes the glucose throughout your body. Any extra glucose is stored in the liver until it is removed or used. The liver has infinite storage capacity for glucose, so this isn't a problem. While small quantities of glucose are converted into body fat, this will not lead to obesity. When someone goes to the doctor to have their "blood sugar" level taken, the doctor is actually measuring the ratio of glucose to blood cells in the patient. This is known as the Blood Glucose Level (BGL). This term is well known to diabetics, who must test themselves constantly to prevent organ damage, coma, or even sudden death. Glucose is sold commercially under the name dextrose. C6H12O6 - six carbon atoms and six water atoms. No additional water is required to break down this molecule.
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2 of 2: Fructose -- The Bad Sugar

Fructose is a natural monosaccharide (single sugar) produced by plants. It's in every stalk of corn, every apple, every berry. Plants eat the sunlight that strikes the earth every day and turn it into both glucose and fructose. When an animal eats a plant, most of the fructose is escorted out of the body via the dietary fiber -- indigestible complex carbohydrates that are also part of the plant. All animals do this, as fructose is toxic to all animals. If there is not enough dietary fiber to remove all the fructose, the remainder gets absorbed and converted into waste products by the liver to be disposed. Some animals do it better than others. Cows do it great; hence they have evolved to live on tree leaves and grass. Humans, on the other hand, metabolize fructose very, very poorly. This is because humans did not evolve to eat plants high in fructose (fruits). We evolved to thrive on grains, raw meat, and some vegetables (omnivores). When humans eat fructose, the body uses none of it; it all goes to the liver. The liver, to get rid of it, breaks it down into one of three hepatic toxins: uric acid to be expelled in the urine, Acyl-CoA to be expelled in feces, and an enzyme called c-Jun N-terminal kinase to be neutralized by other enzymes. All three of these waste products have negative side effects.
"Sugar: The Bitter Truth", Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Mini Medical School for the Public, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

This is the simplified "flip to the back of the book" version: I'm not going to bore you with the all the chemistry and I'll get to the diseases they cause later in the book. If you want the full chemistry lesson, including charts, professor Robert H. Lustig, MD, from the University of California, has a fantastic version on YouTube that has seen over one million hits (see link above). C6H12O6 - six carbon atoms and six water atoms. No additional water is required to break down this molecule.

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Fructose Free-Fall
Why, you may ask, do plants generate fructose? Do they eat it? No. Do they use it for building blocks? No. Is it an emergency energy thing? No. Fructose in plants goes directly to the fruit; it is the majority of what the fruit is made of. Why? Well, fruits are delivery systems for the seeds inside the fruit. Most fruit is round so that when the plant drops the fruit, it hits the ground and rolls away from the parent plant. When a fruit comes to rest on the ground, that's when fructose kicks in. By design, the fruit attracts bacteria, which descend and feast upon the fruit. The bacteria population explodes and the fruit rots into a massive pile of disease. But that's a good thing, because after all the fructose has been consumed, the bacteria die leaving behind just the inedible seeds and a pile of the greatest fertilizer you've ever seen. Isn't that tricky! Plants, in order to give their young the best chance at a new life, have designed a system to trick the bacteria that live on the ground into converting the casing around the seed into fertilizer wherever it comes to rest. Fucking awesome.

The Complex Sugars

Maltose is a natural disaccharide (two simple sugars chained together) of two glucose molecules. This sugar is commonly found in seeds and grains. Maltose is good for you. C12H22O11 - unlike in simple sugars, the one-to-one carbon-to-water ratio is short one water. Adding back the missing water molecule breaks the maltose unit down into two glucose molecules. Lactose is a natural disaccharide (two simple sugars) produced by mammal mothers to use as milk for their young. This sugar requires the recipient (baby) to produce an additional enzyme -- lactase -- in order to break the lactose into its

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component parts. In this way, it is similar to the maltose found in plant seeds -providing offspring with easy, prepackaged food supplies for the best start on life. Normally, humans only need lactase when they breastfeed as infants so it makes sense that eventually the body would stop producing lactase (lactose intolerance). However, since the invention of bottled cow/goat milk has allowed people to drink it well into adulthood, humans have trained their bodies to continue making lactase. Anyone who stops consuming milk products for a period of several months will develop intolerance. Lactose is good for you. C12H22O11 - again the one-to-one carbon-to-water ratio is short one water. Adding water and one unit of lactase results in one glucose and one galactose (an epimer -- don't ask -- of glucose) molecule. Sucrose is a manufactured disaccharide (two condensed simple sugars) that contains one unit of fructose and one unit of glucose. Because the turn of the millennium has brought with it an ever-expanding knowledge of the dangers of sucrose, there are now dozens of commercial names (see Appendix A: Secret Names of Sugar). Most often, it's known simply as good old "table sugar". It is produced by taking the syrup from sugarcane or a sugar beet -- two plants that store large quantities of energy in the form of fructose -- drying, refining, and then bleaching it to create the white powder in your sugar bowl. There are also so-called raw sugars that skip the refinement and the bleaching, but it's still pure sucrose. There's also brown sugar, which combines molasses (burned sugar) with regular white sugar. Sucrose is very bad for you. C12H22O11 - the one-to-one carbon-to-water ratio is short one water. But, adding water results in one glucose and one fructose molecule.

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Boring!!!
I know. Biology and chemistry mixed together: yuk! So what's the point?

Glucose is the good sugar created and used by plants and animals. Fructose is the bad sugar created and used by plants only. Lactose and maltose are good because they convert to only glucose. Just like the aspirin you take for headaches and the acetone you use to remove nail polish, humans manufacture sucrose (table sugar) in a factory. It is NOT a natural substance, despite what your food label might suggest and it breaks down into glucose and fructose. Finally, complex sugars (maltose, lactose, sucrose) require water to break down -- a side effect of which is dehydration. The more of these you consume, the more water you'll need to prevent dehydration.

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STARCHES
Public enemy #1 isn't so dangerous.
The most commonly held misconception among the people who ask me questions about how I lost all my weight is this: starches are bad. This misconception derives from the universal usage of the word "sugar" to describe all the different sugars. Before the advent of fire, humans didn't eat much starch because it's indigestible when uncooked. If you don't believe me, try choking down a dry spaghetti noodle sometime. But now, starch is a basic food group because once you cook it up, eating it delivers a slow, steady stream of glucose for hours after ingestion.

Plates of Pasta
When I get hungry, I eat massive plates of pasta. This flies in the face of everything you've ever been told about weight loss. First, you've heard that starches break down into sugar, seemingly violating all of my upcoming dietary guidelines. Second, you've heard that starches are high in calories, so you'd have to go to the gym for hours and hours to burn all that pasta off. Finally, you've heard that the one thing doctors who treat diabetics universally agree on is that diabetics should never eat pasta because it could kill them. So let's talk about these point-by-point.

Hidden Fructose
A starch is a long sting of glucose molecules connected together like a rope constructed of thousands of threads. It's the most common food in the human diet and can be found in pasta, potatoes, rice, wheat, and corn. All green plants produce starches as a way to store energy. Starches are broken down by amylases first found in your saliva and then again later released by your pancreas. When broken down, starches form pure glucose molecules that go straight into the bloodstream.

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The confusion comes because factory-processed starches -- which are mixed with acids -- can convert to fructose instead of glucose. In fact, that's how they make high fructose corn syrup and all the fructose alcohols. This is not the same as in the body; it's a very unnatural way to create white smack (fructose). Knowing that starch becomes glucose in your body is an important distinction. So much for point one.

Pesto With Just a Hint of Time

When you eat a single strand of spaghetti, your body breaks it down in about a minute -- a long time given the size of the meal. This is because the Alphaamylase/starch reaction is a relatively slow one. Now imagine how long a whole plate of spaghetti would take. Because this type of carbohydrate takes a long time to break down, it's perfect for working out because exerting yourself over an extended period of time lends itself to first eating a food source that will still be providing energy at the end of your workout -- right when you need it the most. Football players eat platefuls of pasta before taking the field so that the starch continues to provide energy during the big game. The idea that you have to burn off the calories you eat is a lie (see "calories are bullshit" in the "lies" section), so suffice it to say, you eat to work out -- not work out so you can eat.

This Message Will Self-Destruct

So, we've established that pasta acts slowly over time to provide continuous energy levels. For diabetics, this is a problem for two reasons. Firstly, diabetics are notorious for having no self-control. This isn't because they are weak-willed (a common misconception), but rather because their body chemistry is screwed up, causing the chemical signals that tell them they don't need to eat to fail them. Secondly, this is also a problem because usually diabetics have caused damage to their pancreas -- one of the organs from which the amylases originate.

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When a diabetic eats pasta, instead of feeling full and satisfied, they begin thinking about sweet things they'd like to eat next. So they have a tiny piece of candy. Then in three hours, it happens again so they eat another piece of candy. But they're still processing the pasta. So now you've got a double dose of sugar hitting the body. Then three hours after that, they're back looking for something sweet -- never realizing that the pasta is still adding glucose to their already glucose-elevated bloodstream. Now they have a second piece of candy and all hell breaks loose. Their blood glucose level shoots through the roof and they need medication to bring it back down. Now comes the scary part. A screwed up pancreas means one of two things: either it makes too much amylase or it makes too little. Too little means diabetics poo a lot after eating large bowls of pasta. Too much means diabetics break down starch into glucose at an alarming rate that can really screw them up fast. So, to be safe, anyone diagnosed with type-2 diabetes should forgo eating large bowls of pasta until they cure themselves (Stage 3, less than 15g fructose per day). By then the pancreas will have a chance to heal itself and diabetic shock will no longer be a problem. People diagnosed with type-1 diabetes can eat starch sparingly (once every three days) provided they resist the urges for fructose sweets.

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HOW FRUCTOSE AFFECTS THE BODY

Follow a fructose molecule as it winds it's way through your body.
You're eating a sandwich. BBQ pulled pork on a roll. Yum! A BBQ sucrose molecule enters your mouth and does one of two things: it either feeds the bacteria living in your mouth or it gets swallowed.

Tooth Dismay
We pick up oral bacteria from all kinds of places. Babies suck on rattles. Almost-pasteurized milk. Raw vegetables that haven't been washed all the way. Touching a doorknob then picking your teeth. A fly -- previously busy recycling a hunk of dog feces -- lands unseen on your picnic lunch. The good news is that these bacteria are doomed, as there's nothing in your mouth to eat -- teeth are hard as rocks and gums, as it turns out, are unappetizing -- and they can't survive the trip to your stomach. So you're in the clear. Unless, of course, you give them something to eat. What do bacteria eat? Sugar. Every time you eat a single grain of fructose or glucose, there is the possibility that you may end up feeding one of the bacteria in your teeth. That bacteria will eat the fructose and then poo out what it doesn't use -- an acid. One bacterium eating one grain of fructose means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Your body will smite him and then repair the damage (cavity) caused by his poo very quickly. But what if you eat a candy bar? Pandemonium. What was once one bacterium now explodes into an infestation of billions as the instantaneous flood of fructose nourishes both the original bacteria and now all of his millions of offspring. Now together, they eat and poo out grams of acid -- stripping the enamel cells of your teeth like a backyard deck. Unchecked, this process will end in tooth loss, gum disease, and crying.

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Unless you stop eating candy bars. Faced with the loss of their food source, the bacteria die off. Any damage they cause will be repaired over time as plaque will naturally chafe off, calcium will replenish your teeth, and gums will regenerate. Australian Aborigines existed in isolation for thousands of years without any dentistry skills -- and their teeth were perfect. No toothpaste. No checkups. Nothing. However, when modern food (think iced cream and bagels) was introduced to these remote locations, suddenly disease and dental problems that the Aborigines had never known before suddenly erupted en masse.
Weston A. Price, DDS, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Keats Publishing, 1939

In fact, consider that early man clearly had no toothpaste, mouthwash, floss, or dentists at all and yet survived just fine for tens of thousands of years -- with teeth strong enough to chew through a mastodon.

Down the Hatch

So, if this is the amount of damage a continuous amount of fructose can do to one's mouth imagine the sheer maelstrom that a continuous diet of fructose can produce to the rest of your body. Our friend the fructose molecule heads down the esophagus, it lands in the stomach. If he's absorbed, he'll be identified as an intruder and sent packing to the liver for a well-deserved ass kicking. If not absorbed, he'll head into the intestines where intestinal bacteria or parasites may gobble him up, creating stinky farts (flatulence) and baby parasites. Whatever is left at the end is woven into a tight packet and shoved onto a piece of feces. After it leaves the body, no one cares what happens to the fructose, but what about all the fructose that went to the liver?

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LIVER MORTIS
The bouncer at your nightclub.
" Everything in excess is opposed to nature." - Attributed to Hypocrates in the book Catholic Morality: Selected Sayings and Some Account of Various Religions (1915) by E Comyns Durnford

We see this in sitcoms all the time: the homely/nerdy/unworthy main character goes to a nightclub and tries to get in. Says the bouncer, "Sorry, we're at capacity". Merriment ensues as our nerdy hero tries in vane to enter the club as others leave. He finally succeeds and we applaud his determination. But the bouncer gets a bad rap. His job is to protect the interest of the owners by keeping out undesirable patrons. If your body is a nightclub, then your brain is the bouncer at the door and each organ is an employee that keeps the place running at peak capacity. By not eating crap in the first place, your brain proactively filters out the undesirable patrons from your nightclub. Well, the liver is the bouncer on the inside of the club. When some degenerate slips by the outside bouncer and sneaks into your precious nightclub -- breaking your shit and molesting the sexy vitamins -- the liver throws the bum out. But what if there are so many losers on the inside of your nightclub that your liver can't get the upper hand? The board of health will shut you down. Just so that we're clear here people, shut you down is code for "death ".

I'm not really into nightclubs.

That's a shame because I had this really neat analogy about how your pancreas is a sexy bartender. But, fine. Whatever. From a personal health standpoint, the liver is the most critical organ. Its primary purpose is to identify and dispose of toxins before they become a problem. The liver can grow or shrink depending on the volume of toxins it needs to handle and determines the fate of every type of icky thing.

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Group Therapy
So if you're a smoker, that means a cacophony of horrible chemicals... not the least of which is nicotine. Eat fish? Mercury. Alcoholic? Hangover-producing acetaldehyde. Public bus blows smoke in your face? You're breathing in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. In fact, in our everyday lives, whether we realize it or not, we're exposed to dozens of environmental toxins that a normal healthy body would simply handle: mold in your shower, acid in your rain, and amoeba in your tap water. That's why fructose toxicity is so serious: it gums up the works, preventing your body from cleaning out even the simplest poisons.

Sweet Liver
When fructose enters the liver, the liver must spend time processing it to get it out of the body. The more you eat, the longer it takes. If during this time you consume another poison -- alcohol for instance -- then two problems arise: your liver must go into overdrive to keep up and the second, more-toxic poison stays in the body longer. A sweet liver -- one that is full of fructose -- is constantly in overdrive. This is exhausting for the body (stress) and damaging to the liver (cirrhosis). It's one of the reasons why the obese are constantly fatigued as they age. Because the toxins are waiting longer to be removed from the body, they cause more damage. In addition, there's more of an opportunity for an interaction -creating bigger, badder toxins. The body knows this and has a backup plan. It will redirect fructose and toxins alike anywhere it can in the hope that someday the onslaught will subside. It stores it in the fat cells, muscles, joints, and skin -- four places that are considered expendable. When they can't hold any more, the body will pack the poisons off to your organs.

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But what happens when the liver, fat cells, and organs become full? Well that's just it. There is no after that. Once you reach your personal toxic horizon, your body will lose a critical organ (liver, heart, pancreas) and experience a debilitating collapse or instant death. So who goes first?

Wearing Your Heart in a Sheath

Heart disease is the number one killer in every country that consumes massive quantities of processed fructose. In the United States, heart disease (616,067 in 2007) and cancer (562,875) tower above all other causes of death. Historical evidence suggests that heart disease was actually quite rare prior to 1950 when America's obesity epidemic began.

Diplomatic Immunity
Next in line is the pancreas -- as evidenced by the disturbing number of diabetes deaths. Your pancreas is responsible for the processing of food and hormones: chief among them being insulin, which controls glucose usage. Fructose destroys the body's ability to understand it's own insulin, resulting in numerous health problems and -- eventually -- death.

Picked By Your Poison

If the liver never gets a break, it's next in line (liver failure). Like a massive prison break in which all the inmates escape back into the city, liver failure will instantly release all the guarded toxins -- fructose, heavy metals, everything -back into the body causing death by septic shock (septicemia). Stroke is common among fructose addicts because plaque buildup -- intricate crystalline fructose structures that trap calcium and other deposits like fish in a net -- in the tiny vessels of the brain can cause blockages and aneurisms. The same blood flow problems that incite strokes can also block critical blood flow to your most remote body parts: your fingers and toes. Lack of oxygen kills nerves and the resultant gangrene will force debridement or amputation. Untreated, gangrene is fatal as the dying tissue itself becomes poisonous.

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Eye damage (retinopathy) is also common, as the buildup of surplus fructose can harden the retinas. While not fatal, it is a consideration -- after all, if you're eating so much ice cream that you have no where left to store it but your own eye... fucking stop!

So Back to the Bouncer

Screw you. I love this analogy. So, your outside bouncer (brain) has been letting losers into your nightclub for years and now you're the lame place to hang out. Are you screwed? Absolutely not. Your nightclub has a well-planned loser evacuation plan that allows it to rehabilitate and reinvent itself -- and now thanks to this book, it's about to be under new management. By drastically cutting the intake of fructose, your body gets a chance to catch up. First your liver will begin to slowly deflate as it gets a handle on its more reasonable workload. Then, as your metabolism returns to normal, your body (recognizing the potential danger) will recover the excess fructose it has stored in your organs and arteries. Finally, the fat cells of your body release their stockpiles of fructose (weight loss). Sorry. Getting thin comes last, though you won't have to wait too long to see results. The first 10% and the last 10% of your weight loss will happen very slowly (about six weeks for each). But the other 80% will happen rapidly. For me, that meant over 50 pounds in less than eight months.

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THE RUSH
What's really happening in your brain?
A lot of people like to talk about the sugar rush that happens when you eat a candy bar or drink a soda. In fact, cereal companies are famous for talking about how their mega-sugary products give kids the energy they need to start their day. So let's look at the chemistry behind the so-called "sugar rush".

The Soda Pop

First, we have to clarify the "high" you get from a soda. This euphoria comes from the caffeine -- not the sugar. Caffeine is a stimulant found in coffee. After all, you don't see people getting high from drinking orange juice -- which has equal amounts of fructose. Caffeine is also artificially added to chocolate, which is how it finds it's way into your kid's morning cereal.

Fast Energy
Because sucrose and high fructose corn syrup are comprised of fructose and glucose, the body experiences a short increase in glucose when it breaks down a bowl of Fruity Frosted Cocoa Smacks. Of course, you're eating your Smacks with milk: also a source of glucose. This is what the companies are referring to when they say their products provide "energy to start your day". The problem is their products also provide fructose -- which requires the body to consume energy in order to process and remove. The energy required to clean out the bad sugar (fructose) is more than the energy acquired from the good sugar (glucose). Had you eaten just the dry cereal, you would have lost energy. But we pour milk on cereal to prevent this from happening -- the added glucose from the milk is what actually provides the energy to "start your day". So had you sent your child off to school with just a glass of milk, you would have given him or her more energy than with a bowel of cereal without the side effects.

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The Crash
Soda -- whether it's made with sucrose or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- is also both fructose and glucose. As the glucose level rises, your body releases insulin -- the sugar hormone -- to deal with the spike. The insulin moves glucose to the muscles, fat cells, and liver as necessary. However, even after all the glucose from the soda is dealt with, the pancreas -expecting more of the same -- continues to produce insulin. Now bored and looking for something to do, this new insulin focuses on the normal glucose found in your blood. This lowers your blood sugar. In addition, the caffeine in the soda causes you to pee (diuretic). This requires not only all the water that came with the soda, but also some of the water from around your body. This water contains nutrients and vitamins -- which are now expelled in your urine. In addition, the soda contains high levels of salt -- to make your thirsty for more soda. The salt uses up additional water. The loss of water and micronutrients to urine and the lowered glucose levels due to excess insulin combine to disrupt your body chemistry -- the result of which is lethargy and fatigue. However, because the caffeine creates a chemical "high", you don't notice the lethargy until it wears off. Once it does, you experience the drop from euphoric high to dehydrated low as a "crash". This sugar crash lasts until you drink some water and your body readjusts it's blood glucose levels using glucose from your fat cells.

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INSULIN
Healthy living from the pancreas or the refrigerator.
"A diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony." - George Carlin, Brain Droppings (1997)

Insulin is one of the most misunderstood hormones in the human body. It's produced by your pancreas to direct the flow, usage, and evacuation of glucose molecules in the body. Without insulin, glucose would build up in your bloodstream until it was literally thick like syrup. Of course, that wouldn't matter because your muscles and organs wouldn't function because they had no glucose. So you'd be dead. That's why having insulin is important. It keeps you from dropping dead. But policing sugar isn't insulin's only job. It's also important for cognition (thinking) and vascular health (blood vessels). It helps tell you when you are hungry (via ghrelin) or aren't hungry (via leptin).

Diabetes and Insulin

Diabetes is damage to the pancreas that prevents it from producing appropriate levels of insulin. Sometimes it produces too much, causing glucose levels to drop sharply (hypoglycemia); sometimes it produces too little, causing glucose levels to spike (hyperglycemia). When the pancreas heals itself, diabetes ends.

The Drug Companies and Insulin

Synthesized insulin is a multi-million dollar per year chunk of the pharmaceutical industry, but it pales in comparison to the hypoglycemic drugs. They offer no permanent solution to diabetes or its underlying cause. Instead, it's all about treatment over time and the cost to you is a lot more than just your cash. Continuous usage of sulfonylureas -- hypoglycemics that kick your pancreas into overdrive to force more insulin into your bloodstream -- can permanently damage your pancreas. When this happens, only a pancreatic transplant can
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save your life. Of course, this is great for the doctor who prescribed the medication in the first place because he can bill you for the transplant, too. Insulin sensitizers (biguanides) disrupt the liver's ability to inject glucose into the bloodstream -- the net effect is a lowering of your blood glucose level. Amylin analogues screw with your pancreas by destroying one of the hormones (glucagon) it creates. Alpha-glucosidase inhibitors stop your body from breaking down starches so your spaghetti goes right to the bacteria in your gut. Not one of these medications does anything to eliminate the toxic fructose -- only to curb a pair of its side effects: insulin resistance and elevation of blood glucose. And they all do it by fucking with your body's natural chemistry.

Vitamin C and Insulin

According to a study conducted in 2002, obese mice that were given vitamin C in their drinking water received an 80% decrease in the percentage of sugar-filled (glycated) insulin compared to a control group of equally obese mice. This resulted in overall weight reduction with the vitamin C group.
PubMed.gov, Vitamin C supplementation decreases insulin glycation and improves glucose homeostasis in obese hyperglycemic (ob/ob) mice. (2002) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11912563

So what does this mean? There's a relationship between vitamin C intake and the efficiency of your insulin. This is important because taking vitamin C while you're trying to lose weight will allow you to lose weight faster. But why does this work? It works because vitamin C is an antitoxin that eliminates the toxic byproducts created by fructose consumption. Of course, not eating fructose in the first place means that the vitamin C can focus on more important things: like protecting your life. So ease off the fructose. Now!

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PROPER FRUCTOSE LEVELS

So, how much is too much?
" How can anyone think so insanely that the human life has the same value and mankind, the same morality, independent of numbers?" - Pentti Linkola, The Doctrine of Survival and Doctor Ethics (1992)

When Columbus stepped off his ship and said, "Ha! Welcome to India," he was wrong. Then when he realized he was wrong, he said, "Ha! A new world," and he was wrong again. The people who were standing in front of him (native Americans) were living here already and the people who had already found the people who were living here already because they had sailed here before Columbus (Vikings, Irish, Scotts, Danes) didn't get any credit because they weren't standing next to him when he said it. The point of that little anecdote is that I would love to officially set the bar and say, "less than 1g of fructose per day per ten pounds of body weight or you'll drop dead". But that research doesn't exist yet -- so I can't steal it. So until someone proves me wrong, my rule is: eat as little fructose as possible. Period. Now, I have no interest in forcing you to eat cardboard for the rest of your life and what you're going to find as you read this book further is that your food will taste great -- even without the sugar.

Math Class
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the United States sweetener market is the largest and most diverse in the world. That's bad, but there's hope: they also say that, "since 1999, per capita sweetener deliveries have decreased by 14.3 pounds to 137.1 pounds in 2008."
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Fructose/Background.htm

Now, think about that number. 137 pounds per person per year. That's 62,142 grams. Of sugar. Assuming the average person eats every day, that's 169.8 grams per day (2008 was a leap year). Now, head on down to the Department of Motor Vehicles and have a look at the average person. Right. 169.8 is too much. And given that it's an average, for every person who eats only 40g per
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day, there's someone else who's clocking in at a mind-blowing 280g per day (they're called morbidly obese diabetics). But let's put that in perspective. Surely achieving 280g requires serious quantities of food. That's got to be like five pancakes, two bowls of cereal, and some pizzas, and like some burgers with barbecue sauce and stuff, right? Well, a piece of chocolate cake has 120g of sucrose (that's 60g of fructose). So these people are basically eating two and a half slices of cake every day. I'll give you a minute to let that sink in, but I suspect that you're starting to appreciate just how easy it is to poison yourself with sugar. I currently average about 30g of glucose/2g of fructose per day (no chocolate cake for me). This can fluctuate up to about 50g/10g because, of course, occasionally I'll try something new that it turns out later has sucrose in it so I stop, but nowadays that's very rare.

So you eat like a bird?

On April 5, 2011, I had a fresh blueberry bagel (6g glucose, 3g fructose) with butter, eggs and bacon (0g, 0g), a slice of meat-lovers pizza (4g, 1g), a handful of cashews (2g, 1g), pasta (10g, 0g), and a bowl of clam chowder from a franchise restaurant (???). I can't tell you how much fructose is in that last one because their Web site conveniently lists everything you could ever want to know about said soup except how much sugar is in it, but I assure you it wasn't sweet. And no, I do not eat like a bird. That plate of pasta was the size of a hubcap. For beverages, I drank water with each meal and drank a glass of milk (12g, 0g). So for the day, I had 34g of glucose and 5g of fructose -- plus the soup. The pizza sauce and the blueberries in the bagel contain fructose and the nuts were both maltose and fructose. Because I ate several products I didn't cook myself, I may have consumed trace amounts but it's not worth worrying about.

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At the Market
The next time you go food shopping, pick up a box of cereal and look at the nutrition facts label. Get to know it well; it's your new best friend. In America, here's what you'll see: serving size, servings per container, calories, fat and it's breakdowns, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates (under which sugar and dietary fiber are listed), and protein. They all have by-the-gram levels, as prescribed by law, but not all of them have percent daily value. Why? Percent daily value is the amount you must have in order to live healthy or the maximum amount you can eat without becoming sick as defined by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Full explanation of the nutrition label system: http://www.fda.gov/food/labelingnutrition/consumerinformation/ucm078889.htm

Eating over the max or under the minimum for several days in a row will cause your body to become ill. For example, sodium causes high blood pressure. Eating 110% of the dailyrecommended value for a whole week will elevate your blood pressure by a few points. Alternatively, potassium is essential for the body to function properly. Eating only 90% of the daily-recommended value for a whole month will result in deterioration of the nervous system and cell damage across the body. As the system goes, the things you want to limit in your diet so you don't get sick are at the top and the things you want to make sure you get enough of (dietary fiber, vitamins) are at the bottom. So why is sugar down with the vitamins and the fiber? Politics.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Let's reconsider sodium. There is a max value, implying that too much sodium is a bad thing. According to the FDA web site, "Eating too much fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, or sodium may increase your risk of certain chronic diseases, like heart disease, some cancers, or high blood pressure."

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Full explanation of the nutrition label system: http://www.fda.gov/food/labelingnutrition/consumerinformation/ucm078889.htm

But you must have sodium in order to live. If you eliminated all sodium from your diet (hyponatremia), you would be dead in short order after your brain turns to mush and you experience the worst two weeks of your life.

So why is there no max value for sugar?

Ah. The answer to the question depends on whom you ask. If you ask the good people at the FDA, they will read the following answer off their Web site: "No daily reference value has been established for sugars because no recommendations have been made for the total amount to eat in a day. Keep in mind: the sugars listed on the Nutrition Facts label include naturally occurring sugars (like those in fruit and milk) as well as those added to a food or drink. Check the ingredient list for specifics on added sugars."
FDA rational on fructose listings: http://www.fda.gov/food/labelingnutrition/consumerinformation/ucm078889.htm

If you ask a conspiracy theorist, they'll point out that the people who work at the FDA are usually chosen because of their long resumes that feature many, many food companies and point to the high-paying jobs in the food industry they get when they leave (and they have names and salary figures to back it up).
Sourcewatch.org: Government-industry revolving door wiki http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Government-industry_revolving_door

In my opinion, that category should be split into fructose and glucose -- like in the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. Their listings (in most cases) split sugars into fructose and glucose so you can see exactly how much of each you're getting. The daily value of glucose should be 25g and fructose should be 5g. However, if that was the case, the frozen fructose industry would collapse because the percent daily value (%DV) of fructose in ice cream would be somewhere in the 400-700% range and no one in their right mind would eat something that deadly. To put that in perspective, the %DV of sodium is

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2000mg. 500% of that is 10,000mg -- the equivalent of fifteen cans of solid white tuna fish in water in a single sitting. If you ate fifteen cans worth of sodium in a day, your blood pressure would shoot so high your eyeballs would pop out of your skull. Imagine what that much fructose does to you. The point is, the government has no interest in specifying a maximum amount and it's not going to appear on the label anytime soon, so being vigilant is the only way to live healthy.

The Caveat
Sugars are considered a subset of the "total carbohydrate" category of the nutrition label -- a category with a percent daily value. According to the labels, the %DV for total carbohydrates is 300g. That's fine for pasta and foods that offer multiple carbohydrate sources. But for a half cup of chocolate ice cream, total carbohydrate is 16g and sugar is 16g -- making the %DV of carbohydrates 5%. This is confusing (whether deliberate or a byproduct of a failed system is up to you) and dangerous. If a person does the math and decides that 300g of sugar works out to 100%DV of carbohydrates, they could end up eating themselves into a coma.

Twenty Grams and Counting

Today, I eat absolutely no sucrose whatsoever if I can help it. If the words "sugar", "sucrose", or "fructose" appear anywhere in the list of ingredients, I avoid that product like the plague. (See Appendix A for a list of additional alternative marketing names for sucrose) When I began my new dietary lifestyle (at 250 pounds), I was raking in a seemingly reasonable 72 grams of sugar per day (36g fructose). As I began counting, I first limited myself to 50g per day. And that was hard, because I was really addicted to chocolate chip pancakes. Then, after I got used to it, I reset the bar at 35g. Oddly enough, that was easier. By the time I reset the bar to 20g, I had dropped 65 pounds and my life had changed forever.

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GLUCOSE
The fuel for your engine.
In the introduction, I talked about "bounding out of bed" in the morning. Here's where that comes in. While eliminating fructose is important, you must also remember that glucose consumption is essential to keeping your body running properly. You will wake easier (assuming you have a regular sleep schedule) and have unlimited energy throughout your day when you have enough glucose for your organs (and specifically your brain) to do their thing. Mini-shots of vitamins and energy drink companies prey on the fact that you're a sugar addict -- a byproduct of which is that your energy level dips as your body consumes glucose in order to get rid of the toxins you ate for breakfast. If you eat plenty of glucose and no fructose, you won't need a "snack" or a "blast" to get over the hump because there won't be a hump to get over. Anything with maltose (like cereal), lactose (milk), starch (pasta, rice, grains), or dextrose in the label all breaks down into glucose that allows your body to function. Appendix M: Meal Plans is a general example, but the key is to balance your personal diet between:

Foods designed for fuel (glucose) Foods that provide building blocks (cholesterol and protein) Foods that provide micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids).

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BUT I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT FRUCTOSE!!!

Addiction in a nutshell.
"Crossing color, class, gender, and generational lines, the communities of addiction and recovery are as democratic as America gets." - John Leonard, "Can't Get Enough", New York Magazine (May 1998)

Addiction comes in two forms: the body can depend on a foreign substance to perform a task normally handled by a chemical in the body (chemical) or the emotional core of the brain finds the act of doing something enjoyable and habituates it (process). Fructose consumption is a process addiction that has been engrained in you since infancy. It's associated with some of your fondest memories and celebrated moments. But this is actually the good news, because the hardest addictions to kick are the chemical ones. Now I'm not suggesting that giving up chocolate cake will be easy, but kicking this addiction is something you've got to do if you plan on living to 90.

Chemical Addiction
Chemical addiction is the easiest to understand and easiest to solve (relatively speaking). The body is a delicate chemistry set -- filled with a specific amount of important chemicals. Above all else, the body is always looking to balance the scales, maintaining optimal levels of every chemical. Introducing outside chemicals to the body -- whether drugs, food, or environmental toxins -- puts a thumb on the scale. This sudden change in body chemistry causes the processes that normally produce the affected chemicals to act in odd ways or stop altogether. Cocaine is a perfect example of chemical addiction. When someone freebases cocaine, the drug travels through the lungs and introduces (among other things) pharmacodynamics to the brain. These interfere with transporter cells responsible for carrying the neurotransmitter dopamine to the neurons of the

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brain. That's like trying to fit two basketballs into a little red wagon that can only hold one basketball. Because dopamine stops the production of prolactin, the hormone that controls sexual stimulation, inhibiting this process encourages the brain to pump out extra prolactin that registers as sexually pleasurable. Hence the "high". It's part of the reason why ecstasy makes people horny. The body is always looking to balance the scales. Habitual cocaine use causes the brain to actively increase the amount of dopamine being created -- even when not high on cocaine -- in preparation for the addict's future use. It's like leaving a fire truck parked outside a house that catches fire on a regular basis even though it's not ablaze at the moment. Withdrawal symptoms stem from this anticipated overproduction. When someone stops using cocaine cold turkey after years of abuse, the overproduction his or her body has become used to now sends the chemistry set spiraling out of control. It's like taking your thumb back off the scale. If there's enough weight built up on the opposing scale, you can send the whole thing crashing to the floor. The good news is that assuming the shock of removing the chemicals from your system doesn't kill you, your body will repair the chemistry set and return you to perfect health. But it doesn't erase the memories...

Process Addiction
Inside the massive ball of chemicals and neurons that is the human brain lay billions of convoluted pathways that interconnect and intertwine to make you who you are. It is impossible to follow the pathway of any one string of thought as it overlaps and carries through the overpasses and onramps of a thousand other thoughts. But it's the intersections that cause the complications. A cigarette smoker quits and begins his cleaner life. Three years later, he puts a pen in his mouth just for a second and becomes flooded with emotions that he

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can't even explain -- chief among them the longing and desire for his old friend the cigarette. The feeling of having a pen between ones lips can reactivate deep buried pathways years after they've become seemingly dormant. The scientist Pavlov had a dog. He would sit the dog down, ring a bell, and then show the dog food. The dog would salivate. Then he would feed the dog. This went on for some time and eventually the dog would salivate simply when he heard the bell. These are the purest forms of physical addiction -- simple associative behaviors based in past experience.

When Addictions Collide

The difficulty arises when a chemical addiction meets a physical addiction. That's why detoxification is such a massive undertaking that fails just over one out of every three times. Addictions that go on long enough will ingrain themselves in the brain. A mother fights with a father. Pissed off, the father goes outside with a six-pack and wonders around the house throwing rocks at trees and drinking, continuing his version of the argument in his head until he wins. Their son sees this and repeats the pattern when he and his girlfriend fight. But one day the son decides to stop drinking -- as it adversely effects his health. But the next time he argues with his girlfriend, the physical impulse to go outside to vent collides with the chemical need of drinking a now-missing beer. So what happens next? The aplasticity of the brain allows you to rewrite the pathways at will, but the process is difficult and requires dedication and an alternative reward. So for 37% of people in the above scenario, mental determination allows them to rewrite the old pathway and find a new, non-alcoholic outlet for their rage. Perhaps they go to therapy, or the mall, or develop talking skills to resolve conflict. Or maybe they try an even worse habit and find a darker path.

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The majority, 61%, will revert back to the old habit -- a testament to how hard it is to change one's thinking. A final tiny percentage will be changed by happenstance: a tree will fall in the backyard on the exact spot where the person would have been had they been out walking with a beer or a friend with a similar problem will kick the bucket. The shock of knowing that they might have died while walking down a habitual path will instantly end the physical portion of their addiction. They will still crave beer (chemical), but never in the backyard (process).

Push Your Luck

Occasionally, you can help luck along. By introducing a shock to an addict's thought process, you can give them the push they need to abandon their addiction for a cleaner life:

You can show an alcoholic a photo of a diseased liver. You can show a cocaine fiend a guy who can run a shoelace through the hole he burned through his nose from years of snorting. You can host an intervention in which family members talk about the pain they have felt watching a loved one make the wrong choices.
It is my hope that this book will act as such a device (see the "Lies" section for the shock), but in American society, the shock of fructose addiction and its adverse effects has been muted by a concerted effort to make talking about fructose addiction politically incorrect. News agencies often warn of the dangers of diabetes, but rarely take hard-line stands against obesity. They even fail to link type-2 diabetes directly to fructose intake in favor of family predisposition or the more juicy "unknown environmental factors".

Hey, do you have any anecdotes?

Funny you should ask. Before the switch, I had a single can of soda everyday with lunch; the same brand for almost seven years. After achieving a consistent twenty-gram food plan for several weeks, I tried drinking the same soda (20+ grams of fructose in a single can). I spit it out. It made me nauseated. Not only

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that, but it coated my mouth and it took several rinse and spits with water to make the taste go away. I will never drink soda again. Point of the story: like with drugs, your body gets used to the sweetness of your foods and it becomes very difficult to comprehend just how disgusting a candy bar or three scoops of ice cream are until after you wean yourself. But you can (and will) wean yourself off eventually.

The Recipe for Success

So here it is: don't entertain your brain with food. Eating isn't about having fun; it's about nourishing your body so you can -- you know -- live. Ease off of fructose slowly (but steadily) using small treats here and there when absolutely necessary to fight the cravings as they creep up. This formula won't be as hard as you think as long as you constantly remind yourself that you're fighting to get off of an addictive poison. And pay close attention to the next section of this book -- because if you're eating as much fructose as I think you are, this next part's gonna kill you.

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THE SYMPTOMS
You may think the spare tire (or half-keg) around your midsection is the only symptom that matters. But you'd be dead wrong.

10 things you're going to learn...

Anyone who says LDL is the "bad cholesterol" is a moron. Before 1921, getting wasted was a bad thing. You can't kill a cold with antibacterial soap. You can't kill a flu with antibacterial soap. Anything that kills a cold or a flu also kills you. Any doctor who prescribes antibiotics for a cold or flu is a moron. Being fat is okay -- if you don't want to live past 65. Don't eat when you're depressed; eat right so you don't get depressed. Candy bars can hurt basketball players. I'm the guy who thinks he cured cancer.

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CONFUSION BY DESIGN
The difference between disease and symptom.
"The King is only fond of words, and cannot translate them into deeds." - Sun Tzu

If a man came to you and said, "Please give my organization twenty dollars so that we may continue our battle against Runny Nose Disease and rid the world of this heinous affliction," you would look at him like he was crazy because you know full well that runny noses are a sign of colds/flu/infections. But that's what education does: it allows us to identify con men and morons. This is how I feel when someone asks me to donate money to fight diabetes. Or heart disease. Or cancer. That's because each of these is not a disease in it's own right, but rather a symptom. Though sometimes caused by physical damage or symptomatic of genetic mutation, almost every instance of these "diseases" is the result of poisoning. Keeping people in the dark about the nature of fructose and the dangers of overuse requires some deceptive wording when it comes to addressing some of it's side effects. Those who work in the fructose industry (we'll get to those bastards later) carefully craft the language surrounding obesity and heart disease to draw attention away from their product and onto the imaginary phantoms they've created to fill the void. It's actually quite stunning how many different aspects of our bodies can be affected by chronic poisoning -- a testament to both the delicate balance of the body's chemistry and the interconnection of the body's systems that work together to make up the whole of you.

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HEART DISEASE
Breaking down the walls between us.
" If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain;" - Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Heart disease (cardiopathy) covers a large number of possible maladies that affect the heart. Among them is arteriosclerosis -- the narrowing of the blood vessels that supply blood to the heart. This happens one of two ways. You can either consume or breathe in something that causes the cells in your arteries to expand (caffeine, for example), narrowing the channels in which your blood flows, or you can develop a buildup of plaque which can grow from one side of the artery to the other, closing off the flow like a valve. Plaque buildup is the most common form of arteriosclerosis and is primarily caused by eating fructose (alcohol does the same thing). This is important because any disruption to the regularity of blood flow causes the heart to beat irregularly (palpitations). The loss of oxygen to the rest of the body causes shortness of breath, dizziness, and radiating pain in the limbs. In a panicked state, your brain will attempt to clear any obstructions in the pores (profuse sweating), provide an instant sensation of fatigue so you stop doing whatever you are doing to conserve oxygen, and accelerate your heartbeat to force adequate levels of oxygen to circulate. Hopefully you're well on your way to the hospital by this point, but this could have been prevented.

Hey, could you hold this for me?

So what role does fructose play in all this? Well, it all starts years and years before you're actually lying on your bathroom floor clutching your left shoulder hoping you'll live to meet your grandchildren. It usually happens before the age of twenty. It starts with a million molecules of fructose ingested in a single sitting at a birthday party (think cake topped with ice cream topped with hot fudge). Your body goes to work on the fructose, moving it to any body part willing to take it while the liver fights vigorously to remove it. To do this, the brain needs

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something to carry these molecules around the body via the bloodstream. Perfect for the job: low-density lipoproteins (LDL). Normally assigned to carry much larger cholesterol molecules around the body to billions of cells so they can repair themselves, fructose-hijacked LDLs shrink to form tiny, tightly-packed bullet-like pellets that rocket through your bloodstream -- which is moving faster than normal because you're blood pressure is higher.
A great explanation of LDL, Australian High Cholesterol Food Blog http://www.highcholesterolfoods.com.au/ldl-cholesterol

These millions of pellets act like the stream from a sandblaster -- cracking the walls of the arteries and veins like a sidewalk. Under normal circumstances, cholesterol molecules will eventually come along to repair the cracks. But there's a problem. Your liver has created a ton of uric acid -- one of the three hepatic fructose toxins. The acid burns your newly-cracked walls like a blowtorch. Today, there's a lot of birthday cake flying around and some of the LDLs wedge into the cracks. And then a little bit more. Soon the cracks are too wide to fix. Now, they're permanent. Now, they're plaque. So twenty to fifty years go by. Other cake, other cracks, other plaques, but that first one is the whopper. Depending on how poorly you treat yourself, more LDLfructose, normal LDL-cholesterol, some scar tissue, some white blood cells, fat platelets, trans fats, and anything else that happens to be floating around in your bloodstream becomes imbedded in or attached to the obstruction. The plaque builds up. Now at this point, you still have a shot. If you don't over-exert yourself and start eating right (no fructose), you may never know how close you were to doing battle with the Widowmaker. But if one day you decide you're going to take up jogging for no particular reason, or you yell at someone in traffic who cut you off, or you get frisky with your spouse, or you decide that third scoop of cherry water ice completes you as a human, that's when things get... interesting.

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A Night at the Operating Room

Flip a coin: either the plaque stays or the plaque goes. If it goes, you won't have to worry about your heart anymore because the plaque is now an embolism, which will probably go to your lungs or brain and kill you instantly. If you're lucky, it will lodge itself in your leg and you'll scream in pain for several days (necrosis) until they send you home from the hospital a little lighter than when you arrived (amputation).
Medline Plus: Arterial Embolism http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/imagepages/18076.htm

If it stays, you're in better shape. The top of the mound explodes, causing your body to think you've just taken a bullet. It will try to clot the wound. Doesn't work. More clotting. Eventually, you clot so much that it blocks the flow of blood. Now you're having a heart attack and if you're a good person, someone will care enough to call an ambulance.
"10 Reasons to Lose Just 10 Pounds.", Tuesday, October 26, 2010, cool diagram of heart attack, see reason #3. http://rustylinville.blogspot.com/2010/10/10-reasons-to-lose-just-10-pounds.html

They'll take you to the hospital and (after you're stabilized) a surgeon will stuff a balloon into your artery and blow it up party-clown style until it re-opens the pathway (angioplasty). Depending on how bad you've been, he may do all of your arteries and only charge you the group rate. Occasionally, if the balloon refuses to inflate (every guy has been there), they may have to suck a vein out of your leg or one of several barnyard animals to build a new path (graft a bypass) through which your blood can flow. Hopefully, all this happens fast enough that only a little bit of your heart muscle dies. If not, you'll be in congestive heart failure for the rest of your life.

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Damned Lies and Statistics

Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States followed closely by cancer. After that, the list drops off sharply. The bottom of the list features more exciting things like sharks and bolts of lightning. So to fight this public menace, the medical community has been doing some research. They have dissected thousands of samples and discovered that LDL is the most common component of arterial plaque. So now, everyone and their mother is trying to sell you drugs to kill the "bad cholesterol" before it kills you. First of all, it sucks that even your family doctor refers to LDL as the "bad cholesterol" as it is neither bad nor cholesterol -- it's a lipoprotein (think cargo ship) created by the body. Unlike HDL (the so-called "Good Cholesterol"; also a lipoprotein), which only has the job of retrieving spent cholesterol molecules from your cells, LDL carries everything your body needs. So killing LDLs is probably a bad thing, what with your interest in living and all that. Second, it turns out that LDL is NOT the primary component of plaque. What is, you ask? Our teeny-tiny white blood cells -- you know, the ones that run our immune systems. So why aren't we killing off white blood cells to prevent heart attacks? Because that would kill you immediately and pharmaceutical company CEOs can't buy new yachts if you're dead.

Shipping Problems
Heart doctors love handing out meds (especially the hundreds of free samples they get) that reduce LDL production in the body -- removing the danger of "bad cholesterol" and preventing any further attacks. And it works because not having LDL limits the growth of plaque.
American Heart Association, Good vs. Bad Cholesterol http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/Cholesterol/AboutCholesterol/Goodvs-Bad-Cholesterol_UCM_305561_Article.jsp

Except it creates a new problem -- low LDLs means delays in the body's shipping department. Fat and cholesterol molecules -- essential for new cell growth and,

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you know, not dying -- can't get to where they have to go. That's why antihyperlipidemic drugs (lipoprotein killers) have such horrific side effects: pain in the mouth, intestines, muscles and joints from cell death as well as problems breathing, altered mental state, urinary tract infections, and bleeding from the gums or rectum.
Frightening. This is what our colleges are teaching our doctors... http://www.dmu.edu/medterms/medicinecabinet/antihyperlipidemics.htm Lipitor Side Effects, Pfizer Inc. http://www.lipitor.com/aboutlipitor/sideeffects.aspx

But you can eat all the sugar you want. So that's a good trade off, right? Eat chocolate cake and bleed out of your anus. You're going to be really popular with your grandchildren. The eagerness to profit from the sale of new drugs combined with a clear misunderstanding of the actual cause of heart disease is a problem that's not going to be corrected anytime soon. It's up to you to know these things and prepare accordingly. Killing off LDLs will make you look and feel older than you are while doing absolutely nothing to eliminate the toxins in your system or repairing the damage caused by wallpapering your innards with candy bars. Eliminating fructose from your diet and quitting smoking and heavy drinking (nicotine and acetaldehyde also produce uric acid) is the only way to prevent heart disease.

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DIABETES MELLITUS
Note to self: stop eating fructose.
"The proof of the pudding is in the eating." - English proverb.

Occasionally, your body will actually send you clear warnings that, in no uncertain terms, spell out what's going to happen to you if you continue a particular bad habit. People who play tennis every day for thirty years get tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis), people who snort their cocaine will burn a hole between their nostrils (septal perforation), and people who slam back fudge brownies with an eight-lump coffee chaser (flavored creamers) develop diabetes. Diabetes mellitus is the disruption in the ability of your pancreas to control your blood glucose level via insulin -- the hormone responsible for distributing glucose to your organs and muscles. This occurs when either a) the pancreas fails to produce adequate levels of insulin because it's programming is screwed up on the genetic level (type-1), or b) your muscles and organs fail to respond properly to the insulin when it arrives (type-2).

Life With Diabetes

Diabetics inject insulin directly into their bodies when their blood glucose level skyrockets. Without these injections, side effects can include low blood glucose, liver failure, retinal damage, gangrene, and nonketotic hyperosmolar coma. Of course, there are peripheral problems, too. For instance, in Australia there are nine amputations per day as a result of diabetes. Mostly it's a toe or two, but every now and then it's everything below the knee. And sometimes it's even worse: the peripheral neuropathy also manifests itself as erectile dysfunction.
2008 Diabetes: Australian Facts 2008 http://www.aihw.gov.au/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=6442454991

Making the Band

For the morbidly obese, gastric bypass surgery (GBS) can cure type-2 diabetes. How? Well, GBS is a procedure where surgeons wrap a rubber band around the very top of the stomach. This forces food to remain in the top

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chamber, preventing the bottom half from holding food. The food presses against the top of the stomach sending a signal to the brain that the person is full: the person is forced to stop eating by his or her natural involuntary signals. Gastric bypass surgery helps those who refuse to stop eating on their own. While it is possible to eat a half a doughnut twelve times a day, most people who have GBS -- now unable to slam their systems with mega-doses of sucrose -eventually give their pancreas enough of a break that it can repair itself.

An American Problem
According to the IDF Diabetes Atlas, diabetes is more prevalent in America (12.3% of the population, national) and Canada (11.6%) than almost every other country. The winners were Saudi Arabia (13.6%) and several of its neighbors (14.4% to 10.8%).
International Diabetes Federation (IDF) http://www.diabetesatlas.org/map

Regardless of whether or not you know anyone who bakes sticky buns for a living, the Centers for Disease Control has classified diabetes as an epidemic. The World Health Organization calls it a pandemic. So what you need to ask yourself is this: is "maple" syrup on your pancakes and oatmeal raisin cookies at two in the morning worth your life?

Saved by Science
So how exactly does fructose fit into all this? Well understanding the science behind diabetes is a piece of cake. For instance... you eat a piece of cake. A slice. Chocolate. 30g of fructose. It enters your system and the fructose is sent straight to your liver for removal. Once inside the liver, it is converted into c-Jun N-terminal kinase -- one of the three hepatic fructose toxins. Now, this toxin affects other things too, but in this case, it phosphorylates the receptors in the liver that accept insulin. This is known as liver-insulin resistance and it is the key to understanding diabetes.

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Your blood glucose level is dictated by a conversation between your liver and your pancreas via insulin. Resistance to insulin means your liver is unable to understand what's going on around it. This creates problems and as a result, the liver releases extra glucose (hyperglycemia) into the blood stream. The second thing that happens is that the pancreas sees the problem and jumps into overdrive -- sending your blood pressure soaring and flooding your bloodstream with extra insulin. Now your glucose level falls (hypoglycemia). This up-down trend is unhealthy. Among other things, the extra insulin will direct the extra glucose to your fat and muscle cells as a way of getting it out of your bloodstream. This is part of what makes you fat and will lead to muscle-insulin resistance if left unchecked.

What a waste
Diabetes used to be known as wasting in the days before 1921 when synthetic insulin was developed to help people survive. That was because, in the ultimate irony, the final stage of diabetes is a massive, rapid weight loss as a last-ditch effort by the body to expel the poisonous supply of fructose. Muscle, fat, and some organ tissue are all expelled to remove as much toxin as possible. In 1921, "wasting" was changed to diabetes to recognize the fact that wasting is not unique to diabetes. Wasting occurs in viral infections and cancer, too. The liver of a wasting diabetic receives no signals at all from insulin because there's either a massive void of insulin or the liver actually becomes insulinresistant. As a result, the liver says, "fuck this" and begins dumping everything -vitamins, minerals, fat contents, toxins -- wholesale. However, wasting is not always fatal. Anyone who immediately changes their diet and removes other toxic habits (smoking, drinking, etc.) can avoid death.

The "Fight" Against Diabetes

So, who's on your side in the fight against diabetes?

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The American Dietetic Association -- self proclaimed largest collection of food and nutrition professionals -- according to their Web site are sponsored by (among others) both major soda companies, one of the world's largest chocolatiers, two of the largest kid-centric cereal manufacturers, a candy bar company, and a "natural sweetener" provider.
American Dietetic Association Corporate Sponsor List http://www.eatright.org/corporatesponsors/

Helping the American Diabetes Association cure the 25.8 million Americans suffering from this horrific disease: almost every major pharmaceutical company, several chemical sweetener companies, and various pharmacies.
American Diabetes Association: Corporate Sponsor List http://www.diabetes.org/donate/sponsor/our-corporate-supporters.html

Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International is partially funded by a company that makes testing strips for diabetics, a pharmacy, a convenience store, and a soda company.
Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International Corporate Sponsor List http://www.jdrf.org/index.cfm?page_id=101008

Hopefully, you're starting to understand that as long as the people who sell sugar or profit from the selling of sugar (convenience stores, pharmaceutical companies) are contributing to the diabetes research groups, they're probably not going to tell you that you can cure diabetes by not eating fructose.

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NONALCOHOLIC STEATOHEPATITIS (NASH)

Really? I'm sick?
There is a disease that gets no public attention to speak of. I've never heard about it on any news program, health class, magazine article, or from any doctor. And even if you have heard of it, I'm sure you'll agree that it's a distant footnote in the history of modern healthcare compared to the constant attention that heart disease and diabetes get. Yet it kills thousands every year. Steatohepatitis is a digestive disease in which the liver accumulates fat. It is incredibly common with alcoholics, who develop cirrhosis because of prolonged steatohepatitis leaving fatty deposits in their livers due to the breakdown of acetaldehyde -- the hangover toxin. But it can also affect non-alcoholics and it presents with almost no symptoms.

The Silent Killer

The non-alcoholic version of steatohepatitis (NASH) is rarely diagnosed; it's usually only found when cirrhosis develops in a person who rarely drinks alcohol. Hence, it's the silent killer. Liver failure is almost always the outcome. Liver failure was the number twelve killer in the United States in 2009.
CDC - National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 59, p. 30 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_04.pdf

The Fructose Connection

The prevailing opinion of medical professionals with poor nutritional education is that eating a high-fat diet translates into having a fatty liver. This is not entirely incorrect, but it is misleading. The fat that collects in your liver is formed there by breakdown of all the foods that enter the liver -- not just the fats. During the course of breaking down fructose, the body produces an enormous amount of Acyl-CoA -- one of the three hepatic fructose toxins. Most Acyl-CoA is shipped out of the liver to be stored in fat cells, but some of it congeals to form micro-droplets of fat inside the liver. This is the fat that causes steatohepatitis.

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Sugar: The Bitter Truth, Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology (2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Now, since all foods can result in the formation of such fats, we have to look at the levels. Proteins have very little to do with this process; unsaturated fats a little more; saturated fats can be a problem in high dosages; alcohol (a carbohydrate) is a major cause of these droplets -- as evidenced by the fact that alcohol-induced steatohepatitis effects most alcoholics. So here's where I blow your mind: fructose molecules produce levels of these fatty droplets at similar levels as alcohol. This means that from a liver disease standpoint, eating fructose is as bad as drinking alcohol.

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BACTERIAL INFECTIONS
They eat... they poo... you die.
" I find it hard to swallow that I have only ten times more genes than those lowly bacteria in my gut. I had always liked the fact that they have ten thousand times less DNA than I did." - Gottfried Schatz as quoted in Jeff's View on Science and Scientists by Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann (2006)

Some bacteria are helpful to humans. Some are ambivalent. Some are harmful. Those bacteria that invade the human body for dinner and a show but end up trashing the place are known as pathogens. Septicemia -- death by bacteria -- is the tenth most popular way to die in America (just above suicide). This happens mostly when people go to the hospital and contract some horrible little bug after surgery.
CDC National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 58 (2010) http://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_19.pdf

All About Your Neighbors

Bacteria are single-celled microorganisms that exist on every surface and in every body of water around the whole of the earth. Every door handle, blade of grass, tree, pavement, slice of bread. They use one of three things to make more of themselves: sunlight, carbon dioxide, and organic compounds. All pathogenic bacteria fall under this third category. However, every single bacterium in the world uses sugar for fuel. When scientists cultivate bacteria in a petri dish to diagnose a disease, they use agar -- a mixture of indigestible red algae (a place to live) and sugars that the bacteria can digest (something to eat).

Deadly Shit
When they eat, all microorganisms produce (read: poo out) a chemical. For instance, B. flavum and C. glutamicum eat sugar and then poo out the two chemicals that are used to create aspartame (a super-sweet sugar substitute).

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Pathogens are toxic to humans because they attack our cells to create the building blocks for the next generation of cells. It is simplicity itself. The chemicals they produce when they eat and/or die either a) interfere with one or more of our chemical processes or b) dissolve or shred the cells of our body.

Aiding the Enemy

So how does fructose fit into all this? Well, fructose doesn't feed bacteria directly unless those bacteria have invaded the liver. So if you have a liver infection, eating fructose can kill you instantly. But, we know from the chapter on diabetes that fructose raises the amount of glucose floating around in your bloodstream by creating liver-insulin resistance. Because the bloodstream -- the same place where the bacteria are living -- is now full of insanely high levels of glucose, the bacteria population explodes. This prolongs and intensifies every infection you contract. So it stands to reason that one way to reduce the severity of a bacterial infection (and by proxy the death rate by septicemia) is to reduce the amount of extra sugars floating around your body. In fact, some people can consume E. coli and salmonella bacteria (food poisoning) and exhibit only minor side effects. Unlike the three-day slugfest you went through after your last family picnic. The next time you're going in for surgery, eliminate dietary fructose entirely. And when the nurse comes in and offers you a cup of sweetened gelatin or apple juice, politely ask her to bring you a steak instead.

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VIRAL INFECTIONS
The most basic form of... life?
A virus is not a living organism. Yet it is alive. Confused? So is every scientist you'll ever meet. Viruses are tiny branch-like crystals of genetic code that float around the earth living -- if you can call it that -- off of other organisms. It's not alive because it doesn't have cells, it can't replicate on it's own, and it doesn't digest anything. Yet it is alive because it's offspring inherit its DNA and mutations (adaptation), it replicates, and it interacts with other organisms. Creepy.

Catching a Runny Nose

Compared to bacteria, viruses are about 1/100th the size. And they're found across the whole of the earth, including in the sea. Most of us catch a virus when, tiny as it is, it's sneezed or coughed onto us or we pick it up off a door handle. That's why your mom was all, "wash your hands before supper." Colds and flu are viruses -- which is why if you go to your doctor with a cold and he prescribes an antibiotic (from the Greek meaning "bacteria killer") you should flee from his office before he tries to take your blood pressure by wrapping the cuff around your throat. This guy is a quack who attended class in his pajamas. This is also why washing your hands with antibacterial soap is ridiculous unless you're about to thrust your hands inside of another human being as part of a preapproved life-saving surgical technique. Bacteria die in extreme heat and under extreme conditions: two words that best describe the digestive system. Bacteria invade predominately through cracks in the skin, scratches, puncture wounds, biting, and kinky stuff involving the touching of genitals.

Thieves in the Night

So how can fructose influence the growth of viruses?

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Well, colds and flu don't eat sugars like bacteria; they simply drill into the cells of your body like a corkscrew, break them down, and then manipulate their genetic codes to build new versions of themselves. To combat this, humans produce white blood cells (leukocytes) to kill and remove anything that doesn't belong in the body. These white blood cells are produced in your bone marrow using vitamin C and come in a wide assortment of very specific types. One variety, the cytotoxic T cell, is responsible for viruses. However, glucose and vitamin C compete directly for the same resources and enzymes within the body -- a process known as competitive inhibition. A diet high in fructose elevates your blood glucose level (see section on "Diabetes") by screwing with your insulin. This elevated glucose level interferes with many of the normal substrate jobs filled by vitamin C -- including cytotoxic T cell creation. A diet high in vitamin C will destroy viruses fast; a diet high in fructose interferes with this process, prolonging the stay of your uninvited guests.
Sugar, Vitamin C and Competitive Inhibition, DanTB http://www.dantb.org/define-tuberculosis.html

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OBESITY
A heavy burden.
"It is the doctor's duty to activate and re-activate the body's own healing mechanism." - Max Gerson, Physician and Inventor of the Gerson Therapy

My obesity problem was the genesis of this whole project. I hated being fat. I hated the cruel things people said to me -- sometimes without even realizing it -and I wanted to find a way to fix myself. Obesity is when your body carries around a ratio of fat disproportionate to what your skeleton can handle. There are plenty of fat people, but obese people are actually destroying their joints with each step because they carry so much extra weight that their ability to support their girth is unsustainable. It's why so many obese people, as they age, end up on canes and walkers.

The Fructose Connection

So here's the primary side effect of fructose poisoning. I referred to Acyl-CoA -one of the three hepatic fructose toxins -- in the section on non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. But like all toxins, Acyl-CoA isn't dangerous when at reasonable levels. Its purpose is to distribute easily available energy to fat and muscle cells for use in the future -- for instance, when you exercise. It produces fat energy. When you compare glucose (good sugar) breakdown in the liver to fructose (bad sugar) breakdown in the liver, there's a stark difference in the amount of AcylCoA that's created and subsequently shipped off to your fat cells. In glucose conversion, about 8% of the sugar broken down eventually becomes fat; in fructose, that number is 64%. So you can see that while glucose clearly makes you fat if you eat enough of it, fructose makes you fat about eight times faster. The end result is a larger you with a lot more medical problems. And that's the entire obesity epidemic (and consequently my weight loss plan) wrapped up in a nice neat package.

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DEPRESSION
I'm just feeling... blah... today.
You've seen the commercials: a woman (statistically they buy more drugs) is saddened by her life, which is mundane and full of angst and the occasional aggravation. She looks directly into the camera. She's sad. She makes a frowny face. Above her head: rain clouds. She sighs. But oh, what's this? A pharmaceutical to the rescue. Maxapaxadraxil can cure depression by altering the brain chemistry of this poor woman. Side effects include suicidal thoughts or tendencies, a desire to end ones life, horrific dreams, trouble sitting for long periods of time, and chronic diarrhea. So, I'm just going to hit you with it. Depression is a symptom of vitamin deficiency (lack of vitamin B-3 and occasionally vitamin D). Period.

Mass Evacuation
When the body finds tons of sugar floating around the bloodstream and inadequate levels of insulin to handle the situation, it sends out orders for a mass evacuation. It flushes the bloodstream with body water, pulling out the sugar and redirecting it to the kidneys for immediate removal via urination. This works so well that doctors at one time used to drink the urine of patients suspected of being diabetic. But there's a problem. This process also drags with it vitamins, minerals, and anti-oxidants that were in transit to various parts of your body to start doing productive things like rebuilding cells and, you know, keeping you alive. These innocent bystanders get flushed out with the garbage leaving a nutritional void. Now, people suffering from depression no longer have the precious few vitamins they need to keep their brains under control. Their brainwaves go apeshit and depression ensues.

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Pharmaceuticals to the Rescue

You can cure a depressed person with doses of niacin (vitamin B-3) -- best taken as part of a vitamin B-complex unless the B-3 shortage is caused by some other underlying condition. What kind of underlying condition, you may ask? Well I'll tell you. The liver uses niacin to expel toxins. So if you're, say, an alcoholic, who has consumed horrific levels of alcohol for years, you might be just a little depleted in the niacin department. Now, don't confuse this with the depressive effects of alcohol as you're drinking it. That's a completely different chemical reaction that depletes serotonin and norepinephrine levels in the brain. Chronic alcohol abuse causes depression; acute alcohol abuse makes some people sad for a couple hours. A good example of the effectiveness of this treatment was Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who was prescribed 3,000mg of niacin per day by his doctor to combat his depression and withdraw symptoms. It worked and he encouraged usage among members of his group. Sadly for millions of alcoholics, that advice has since then been relatively ignored. The dosage of niacin varies depending on your diet and body size, but anything greater than 3,000mg is too much (may damage the liver). It works -- try it yourself if you don't believe me -- and (unlike anti-depressant pharmaceuticals) only a dozen people have ever died of niacin poisoning.

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JOINT DAMAGE
The old ball and socket.
Athletes will be interested in this next bit, though it applies to everyone. Ask any diabetes specialist and he or she will tell you that tendon pain and damage is one of the first (often undiagnosed) symptoms of diabetes. A tendon is made up of fascicles -- rope-like structures comprised of thousands of fibrils of collagen (the most plentiful human protein). They are fed by the smallest blood vessels in the body. This architecture means that your tendons normally receive the least amount of blood of any body part. That's actually okay because collagen fibrils are designed to be incredibly durable.

The Fructose Connection

When you overload your body with fructose, your body begins shipping it to various organs and fat cells. But some of the delivery trucks (the smaller LDLs -you know, the ones carrying fructose or triglycerides) get lost and take wrong turns -- jamming themselves into these tiny vessels and depriving your joints of what little blood they would normally get. The lack of oxygen causes the collagen fibrils to thicken and stiffen up -- ripe for an injury. In addition, collagen is produced using vitamin C. As we discussed in the viral infections section of the book, glucose competes directly with vitamin C for entry into our cells. So the end result is that eating excessive amounts of fructose, which then artificially raises your blood glucose level, prevents your collagen from rebuilding itself. Over years, the reduction in collagen grinds your bones together at the joints creating horrific injuries. Athletes who drink sports drinks and power bars during their events should be aware that the massive doses of sucrose you're receiving are hitting your joints at the worst possible time.

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CANCER
Here's the part where I cure cancer.
I know you've been waiting for this since the introduction, but let me assure you it was worth the wait. Everyone is scared to death of cancer, but you shouldn't be and here's why: you've got cancer. No, no. I didn't mean it. Don't get excited. Breathe. Breathe. Head between the knees. The knees. The knees! Welcome back. Don't worry, you passed out for a minute but you didn't bump your head so we can keep going.

Under Rated
Cancer happens in our bodies every day and every day it's cured. At any given time, there are at least three cancerous cells inside of your body. This is because when the billions of cells in your body do their thing -- eat, divide, eat, divide -- sometimes they fuck up. It just happens. Call it the imperfection of the human meets the law of large numbers. If a billion cells divide all at once, one or two of them are going to screw up their programming either because they are damaged physically or they are damaged chemically. When this happens, a healthy body says, "Hey, white blood cells. There's a crappy cancerous cell in quadrant ten, section four by the middle finger. See what you can do about that." Then off go the white blood cells (NK cytotoxic lymphocytes) to the crappy cancerous cell -- which they promptly murder and bury somewhere in your colon for evacuation. One of the biggest lies the cancer-fundraising community clings to is the idea that cancer is rare. When something is rare, it's special. In addition, the rarity of cancer helps explain why in thirty-seven years of marches and ribbons no one has found a cure. The only time when cancer isn't rare is when someone is asking you for a donation; then it's all, "It could happen to you tomorrow."

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It Could Happen to You Tomorrow

So how is it that so many people are dying of cancer -- the second most common cause of death only to heart disease -- if their bodies are designed to prevent it? One word: stress. You see, cancer is not a disease; it's a symptom. Your body develops cancer because it's under so much stress from the poisons you eat, the polluted air you breathe in, and the daily stress of living day-to-day that it simply cannot cleanse itself of the cancerous cells before they over-multiply and become tumors. What's truly frightening about cancer is how easily it can get out of control if you stop taking care of yourself.

Understanding Stress
So let's talk about stress. When you smoke a cigarette and your body spends hours and hours trying to pump nicotine and embalming fluid out of your lungs: stress. When you stayed up all night watching the late-late-late-late show and then woke up at the crack of dawn to fight through traffic to get to work: stress. When you live in a house built on top of an oil refinery waste site for twenty years: stress. When you drink a massive one-liter soda followed by a plastic straw filled with dyed fructose and top it off with an el grande choco-chip death muffin: stress. When you're stressed, your body goes haywire. It fails to do properly the simple, everyday tasks that we should be taking for granted -- like proper digestion, vitamin absorption, and ugly pre-tumor cancer cell removal.

Smoke and Mirrors

Cancer is sneaky. It appears to "metastasize" (move from organ to organ like a virus or a bacteria), but this isn't because the cancer cells sprout legs and become parasitic. It's because toxins kill the cells then ride their corpses like rafts through the bloodstream until they find something else to poison.

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Prevention is Everything; Elimination is the Cure

The number one thing you can do to prevent cancerous tumors is reduce the amount of fructose you consume in your diet to the lowest level you can -- zero grams per day -- allowing your body to go about it's daily routine of billion-cell cancer screening. But what if you already have a tumor? Well that's the best news of all: if you remove the things that are preoccupying your immune system and causing the cancer in the first place, the tumors will be "eaten away" by your NK-cells. All cancer can be cured with lifestyle changes that remove the stressors. But it's not just about one toxin. Removing just nicotine may stop the growth of lung cancer, but removing nicotine, alcohol, fructose, oil and plastic byproducts, heavy metals, and any other pollutants will end the cancer. If your house has toxic mold: move. If you eat more than 12 oz of fish in a week: stop. If you like fish: protest the fuckers who are poisoning the fish. If you like chocolate cake: get over it. If the only water you drink comes from poisonleaching plastic bottles: switch to the tap. Your life depends on it.

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IRRITABLE BOWEL SYNDROME

When your icky is sticky and your buns are burnin'.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is the catchall doctorspeak for any symptoms, which require you to spend all your time in the bathroom. Your doctor offers up this diagnosis when he or she either doesn't know why or refuses to tell you that it's because you have a horrific diet that only Willy Wonka would recommend. Your bowels -- small and large intestines -- are infested with not only the good bacteria that are supposed to be there (to help break down food), but also all the bad bacteria that you've picked up. Every dirty carrot, apple, and pea. Live culture from a yogurt you ate three years ago. The fly you ate while riding a motorcycle. Germs that happened to be on the fingers you licked clean while eating Szechwan chicken at T.G.I. China. These all contribute to your unique intestinal microbiota (the phrase "intestinal flora" is a bullshit marketing misnomer coined by the morons at the advertising agencies working for the flavored-sugar yogurt companies). Now you go and drop an entire candy bar into your colon and say, "have at it boys". And they do. And things get... irritable. Now, there are rare diseases that can cause IBS-like symptoms. If you've successfully eliminated fructose from your diet and are still having problems, you'll want to see a qualified gastroenterologist (or rheumatologist) -- who will get to the bottom of your problem.

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ARTHRITIS
A pain in the mass.
There are over 100 different types of arthritis -- the breakdown of cartilage in a joint. These conditions are classified into four categories: general wear-and-tear, broken bone, autoimmune disease, and viral/bacterial. Fructose doesn't directly cause arthritis, but instead it amplifies all four of these processes.

Tough Break
Fructose can cause problems for your bones by interfering in the process that allows them to absorb calcium. This process doesn't affect the calcium already in your bones, only the body's ability to transport adequate levels of calcium to the bones.
Dietary Fructose Inhibits Intestinal Calcium Absorption and Induces Vitamin D Insufficiency in CKD, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (2009) http://jasn.asnjournals.org/content/early/2009/12/03/ASN.2009080795.full.pdf

Clearly, the amount of physical activity you engage in will have an effect on the strength and stability of your skeletal system. But chronic fructose abuse undermines this by sapping you of calcium you need to support your weight.

Stupid Germs
The bacteria that can infest the knee will consume any glucose that comes their way. The problem multiplies exponentially as blood glucose levels rise. The acids these buggers poo out destroys the intricate threads that hold tendons and cartilage together, causing acute pain and dangerous bone-on-bone grinding. In addition, as discussed earlier, your depressed immune system will be incapable of destroying these bacteria, causing the problem to remain.

The Big Problem

In terms of general wear and tear, each pound of fructose you don't need to be carrying on your waist adds that much extra pressure to your cartilage. What's worse, your trainer at the gym (who's an idiot) told you that running a mile

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everyday would help you lose weight. Now you're slamming your joints while carrying fifty extra pounds. Hope you enjoy walking with a cane. The cartilage of the knees and elbows grows very slowly. The rate at which cartilage grows isn't fast enough to adapt to the increasing load it now has to cushion. The result is that obese persons often suffer knee damage.

White Wash
Fructose consumption raises your white blood cell count to epic levels -- in the same way that post-traumatic stress does. The elevation of white blood cells is the initial catalyst of autoimmune diseases that affect the joints. This is known as leukocytosis, and it can really put a crimp in your style.

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LEUKOCYTOSIS
When your body is afraid of... itself.
Depending on your body mass, you're supposed to have a certain number of white blood cells to maintain health. Clearly having too few is a problem, but having too many is also a problem. Leukocytosis is an overabundance of white blood cells that -- when they get bored -- decide to wreck havoc on your body. Dr. Paul Kouchakoff, M.D., conducted a study in 1930 in which he found that consuming processed foodstuffs (known in the study as the "3rd group", including sugar, wine, etc) artificially elevated the white blood cell count in humans. Eating raw foodstuffs repairs this damage.
Influence of Food Cooking on the Blood Formula of Man, by Dr. Paul Kouchakoff, Institute of Clinical Chemistry, Lausanne, Switzerland (1930) http://bhan.getswc.com/special.cfm?pagenum=949

The genesis for this is the heating of the food, which breaks down dietary fiber (which sweeps away fructose before it can cause problems) and destroys most of the vitamins and minerals we need to live on. Consuming raw foods replaces these elements and releases the stress choking our system.

Gesundheit!
If you suffer from allergies, it's because you've been stressing out your body with the processed crap you eat. The most common abnormalities include asthma, hay fever, drug allergies (including penicillin), and systemic autoimmune diseases (of which Lupus is an example). Each of these can have other causes, but all most commonly result from poor diet.

Eat Yourself Raw

When half of the food you eat is raw vegetables and other unprocessed foodstuffs (fresh milk, raw nuts, raw eggs, oats, figs, butter, etc.), the leukocytosis will disappear. In some cases, this can save your life but for most people it will simply allow you to sit in the same room as a dog or a cat.

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THE LIES
In the fructose industry, good salesmanship is all about lying your head off.

10 things you're going to learn...

Pagans make great doctors. In nutrition, the word "natural" means nothing. Babies make horrible crap because you feed them horrible things. Sorry, mom. Eating sweets does not ruin your appetite. The only thing worse than alcohol: alcohol mixed with sugar. Soft cheese can cause miscarriages. Nana just can't catch a break. Birthday parties are killing your kids. Calories are meaningless. Cholesterol makes you pretty.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF FRUCTOSE

From cave man to man cave.
Everyone has an interest in eating something sweet. It's one of the four flavors you can taste on your tongue and a healthy supply of glucose (the good sugar) is essential for perfect health. However, the history of sugar suggests that from the very beginning, sugar has been seen as a highly valuable commodity and, as such, people have been desperate to sell more of it for over 2,000 years.

Busy, Busy Bees

Sweet, in antiquity, meant honey or fruit. Merchants sailed all over the earth looking for new spices and exotic fruits that they could bring home to sell to anyone with a sweet tooth. Diabetes (Wasting) was incredibly rare, but a recognized disease resultant from the over consumption of honey.

The Sun Rises in Turkey

In the dark ages, Christians decided that anything the Roman's did, thought, or honored was offensive because it was derived from the worship of pagan gods. They abandoned all knowledge in favor of blindly donating all their paychecks to the Church in exchange for promises and free tickets to the occasional Fridaynight witch burning. This self-imposed ignorance included knowledge on hygiene, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and nutrition. Luckily, the inhabitants of the Middle East -- the Saracens -- were not so picky. They accepted this knowledge gratefully and expanded upon it in turn. Eventually, the Crusades happened and while the Christian invasion of the Middle East to set up an all-inclusive, 9-station tourist trap remains the single most offensive act in human history, the sole benefit that came of it was a reintroduction of all that forgotten knowledge back into Christian Europe -- the prelude to the Medici Renaissance.

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Honey Without Bees

The crystallization of sugar cane first started in India a thousand years prior to the Crusades and was perfected by the Arabs. Tales of knights returning from the Holy Land fascinated the peasants of Europe with stories of "honey without bees". Too poor to buy sugar, generations of European surfs dreamed of someday being able to eat sugar with impunity as a sign of affluence. In 1372, sugar was worth more than gold and silver.
The Irrigation Age, Volume 8, American Irrigation Federation (1895) http://books.google.com/books?id=wZ4VAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA24

Because of it's cost, only apothecaries (pharmacists) stocked it. An "apothecary without sugar" is a common phrase in modern France that refers to a person who is unprepared to do his or her job. In fact, during the dark ages, sugar was used for medicinal purposes. Of course, so was lead. Several towns, islands, and countries owe their establishment and rapid growth to the explosion of sugar. Among these, the island of Madeira in Portugal, which literally grew out of the sugar fields. In fact, wherever European explorers went, they brought sugarcane. Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Suriname, and Barbados. However, nowhere did sugarcane have more success than in Haiti, thanks to a perfect growing climate and a massive force of imported African slaves. In fact, because sugarcane is so labor-intensive, the industry today is entirely indebted to the institution of slavery. When the slave laborers overthrew the French colonial government in Haiti, the loss of the sugar plantations made the French colony of Louisiana worthless so they sold the entire thing to the United States for $15 million dollars, doubling the size of the country at rock-bottom prices.

Three Hundred Years War

When the English refer to sugar as "white gold", they're not kidding.

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The three hundred years of colonization (1500-1800) saw hundreds of battles in parliaments, boardrooms, and pirate ships around the world as governments set tariffs, taxes, and quotas on imported sugar. Many companies (and the families that owned them) became extremely wealthy via the sale of refined sugar and many governments fought to get their "fair share". The Sugar and Molasses Act (1733) became the American Revenue Act (1764), which was an attempt by British authorities to tax foreign sugar sources to encourage reliance on British sugar sources -- which were owned by members of Parliament. The 1764 law was the start of the path to the American Revolution. In 1812, Napoleon funded his war machine with beet sugar while simultaneously taxing the crap out of foreign cane sugar sources to eliminate the competition.

Missiles for Marshmallows

In the 1960s, Cuba was the highest producer of sugar in the world. But the United States didn't like Fidel Castro because he had confiscated a lot of the Cuban vacation homes of the rich and influential. So we embargoed Cuba. Now desperate to sell their massive sugar crops, they turned to the Soviet Union.

Nixon Steps In
So one day in the 1960s, Richard Nixon decides he's going to run for president. While campaigning, he notices that there are more corn farmers than sugar farmers and that subsidizing the corn farmers instead would "win" more votes. His cheap food platform became an important part of his campaign and true to his word, he deregulated the corn market and spirited the adoption of high fructose corn syrup -- a cheaper sweetener introduced in 1957 -- to replace sucrose in things like baby food. And no one knew that fructose was dangerous. Well... actually they did.

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THE SMOKING GUN

The wrong choice at the fork in the road.
Very rarely do you find a single moment in time when you can pull out an event and say, "This is what started it all." Usually, there are nuances and multiple events that all combine to trigger a poor decision by a particular group of people. However, in America, everything we currently believe about nutrition began with one single report spearheaded by one single man.

This is what started it all...

In 1958, Ancel Keys began conducting a study to link dietary fat with cardiovascular disease (CVD). This study is known colloquially as the Seven Countries Study. At the time, Keys was a government-connected scientist who, among other things, had invented the K-ration -- the specially designed prepackaged meals paratroopers would carry into battle. What was in a K-ration? A breakfast unit had eggs and ham or a veal loaf, biscuits, fruit bar, water purification tablets, cigarettes, gum, coffee, and some sugar. A dinner unit had a similar entree and biscuit, followed by caramels (burned sugar), more sugar, salt, more cigarettes, matches, gum, and a flavor pack for water. There was also a third unit that came with a dinner, more cigs, more gum, more sugar, and a chocolate bar. That means that while they were fighting hard to free Europe from the German stranglehold, WWII paratroopers were living on fructose and nicotine. But I digress. Keys went on to even bigger and better things... like starting a fad diet called the Mediterranean Diet. The diet faded, but the study still haunts us to this day.

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Legacy
The Seven Countries Study is taught in every medical school in the nation. Doctors have cited this study in hundreds of subsequent pharmaceutical studies: all for "medications" that cure cardiovascular disease. So why is this a problem? Well, it has lead to a belief among most Americans that eating fat is dangerous for you because your doctor said so. So for some forty years, Americans have been on a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. We are constantly warned about eating "fast" or "fried" foods and encouraged to only eat "lean" portions and "plenty of fruits and vegetables". The problem? Most people alive today will die of cardiovascular disease (500,000+ per year) and plenty of others are dying of non-alcohol related liver failure (50,000+ per year), both of which are directly related to our diet. If low-fat, high-carbohydrate was the way to go... we'd all be doing just fine. Now, I'm not implying that poor results are the only evidence we should care about; the biochemistry discussed earlier in the book about hepatic toxins and the biochemistry I'll be discussing later on fad diets and smoke screens is my evidence refuting the low-fat, high-carbohydrate hoax. So what went wrong? Keys was a world-class scientist who was famous for his (dubious) contributions to nutritional science. Surely he didn't screw up.

Here's how Keys screwed up

George V. Mann, M.D., a professor of Biochemistry and Medicine, is often quoted as saying that the idea that a low-fat diet prevents heart disease is "the greatest scientific scam of this century... perhaps any century." And for those of us who agree, the scam begins with Keys' study. There are three problems with this study: 1) not all the countries that were studied were listed in the final report, 2) the study was not conducted properly, and 3) the idea of a study of this nature is flawed in its design.
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Worldwide Acclaim
Because it's called the Seven Countries Study, it's often assumed that there were only seven countries in the study. The original database included dozens of countries. Keys carefully selected the ones that served his purpose. Combining all the countries into a single graph creates a worthless cloud of data.
Petro Dobromylskyj, Cholesterol presentation: Between countries (2009) http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2009/02/cholesterol-presentationbetween.html

Shifted in Reverse
Critics of the Keys' report often argue that it relies on clinical diagnoses (which are sometimes incorrect) and death certificates (which are often incorrect) rather than the available ECG data. I am absolutely unqualified to speak on this. However, I know a lot about multivariate linear regression studies -- the kind that Keys conducted. So let me walk you through the error of his ways. I think up a theory: bones are bad for dogs. I hire seven guys to go to cities in seven different countries and obtain the veterinarian records of thousands of dogs. Then I have them interview owners of recently deceased dogs to ask about the number of bones consumed compared with non-bone foods. They send me the data, and indeed I was right: dogs that eat fewer bones lived longer lives than dogs that eat more bones. I'm about to make a million dollars telling people to avoid bones. Except, my conclusion is wrong. Here's why: the dogs that ate more bones also probably ate more kibble. What if kibble kills dogs? In order to prove bones are the culprits, I would have to examine kibble intake to exclude it as the explanation for early death. Keys' big mistake is that instead of looking for the cause of heart disease, he was looking for a link between dietary fat and heart disease. And he found one.

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Polished to Perfection
Scientific facts are not based on population trends, like those that support the conclusions of the Seven Countries Study. In order to say that something causes a disease, you need to explain step-by-step how it happens. In Keys' defense, he didn't have the technology or the sixty years of extra science that we have now. Today, we can follow a fructose molecule through the body and know exactly when it will hit the liver, what the liver will change it into, and what the side effects are of those new chemicals. Now that we have the new information, it's time to adapt.

It All Goes Wrong

This study competed directly with the first anti-sugar debates of the 1950s, polarizing nutritionists and corporations on both sides of the debate. Keys and the soda/vegetable oil companies fought to indict fat and cholesterol as the culprit and in 1961 they won, when Ancel Keys was put on the front cover of Time Magazine (an honor also awarded to Adolf Hitler). Since that time, the lowfat, high-carbohydrate diet has ruled upon high.
"The Fat FiascoOne Fad Diet to Rule Them All", Darrin Carlson (Feb. 22, 2011) http://leanmeanvirilemachine.com/2011/02/22/the-fat-fiasco-one-fad-diet-to-rulethem-all/

During President Carter's administration, a report entitled "Dietary Goals for the United States" -- which rehashed Keys' misinformation -- was released to every primary and secondary school in the country. Every health class taught it. Every school cafeteria served it. Every home economics class cooked it.
Dietary Goals for the United States; the first two pages are great, it's page three where everything goes to shit. http://zerodisease.com/archive/Dietary_Goals_For_The_United_States.pdf

Today, the Internet is feeding a growing revolution that's re-educating the world. This book is part of that. But even so, people are still scared to death that eating cheeseburgers will kill them because "common knowledge" says that animal fat is lethal and vegetable oil is the "natural" alternative... and they're dead wrong.

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AU NATUREL
If that's what nature looks like, I want the fake stuff.
It comes from nature. That's what the fructose industry sells you whenever their product is hidden somewhere in the microprint of the food label. Even the organic people embrace fructose as earthy and wholesome. It's a lie -- a boldfaced lie -- and here's the convoluted path through the woods that gives them the legal cover to make such a claim.

Houses Made of Gingerbread

The process of manufacturing table sugar is this: take any vegetable plant (sugarcane/sugar beet works the best), get the root, throw the rest into a steam engine that runs the machines, juice the root in a juicer, boil the juice until it thickens (evaporated cane juice), keep going until it crystallizes (raw sucrose), ship it to a refinery where it's blanched (washed with gallons and gallons of wasted water), filtered and chemically bleached (sugar), dyed (brown sugar), and packaged. No vitamins, minerals, fiber, or protein left -- only sucrose.

Trail of Breadcrumbs
If sucrose is natural because it comes from plants, then nicotine and opium are both natural for the same reason. Let's say you wanted pure nicotine -- highly addictive (more so than cocaine), highly toxic, absorbable through the skin. Take some nightshade plant leaves (like tobacco or tomato), grind them up, soak in water in a glass, leave sit on a windowsill until water evaporates, then collect the yellow crystals (wear gloves or you'll die). Same basic procedure. All natural? Not so much.

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LACING UP
How companies lace their foods to make you a huge fan.
Sweet sells. That's the marketing maxim that explains why "sucrose" is listed under the list of ingredients in chicken fingers. Think about it: why the hell do you need to put sucrose in a chicken finger? Why to feed the addiction, of course.

Baby Food
Miseducation allows companies to hide fructose anywhere -- even in baby food. I once had a conversation with a new mother at a diner who returned from changing her infant frustrated. Seems in addition to being abnormally fussy, the little tike's bowel movements were... disturbing. I suggested that it was fructose related and offered a quick fix: eliminate three of her son's baby foods including vanilla pudding. She told me there was no sugar in baby food and suggested that I might be happier living in hell. Then she stormed out. So who cares if infants get a little fructose every now and then? You do. Because when your little ones are little, a little isn't just a little. Infants and toddlers, because they are physically smaller than the rest of us, are exponentially more susceptible to the affects of fructose (even in tiny dosages).

Breakfast Cereals
Soon, your babies graduate to toddlers and then to children. When this happens, they become conscious of the world around them. This is when we are most susceptible to advertising because kids are gullible. So your son Billy is sitting in the living room watching television. I'm totally "unplugged", so I have no idea what he's watching. But I assure you it's heavily monitored by the Christian Right, so he's not learning a thing. Then there's a commercial break. A man throwing a football with his son. Awww, how heartwarming. But this isn't your commercial. The father throws a pass. Perfect spiral. But just as his kid is

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about to catch it, THUMP! Sniffy the Squirrel comes out of nowhere and spikes the ball into the ground. He celebrates, bouncing around the lawn on his feet, butt, and head. Kookuba! Kookuba! Kookuba! Cocoa Critters are part of a kookubalicious breakfast. He bounces away. The kid waves and calls after him, "Bye, bye Sniffy. Bye, bye." Final scene: kid and dad eating bowls of shit. You look at your kid. He's waving goodbye to a fake fucking squirrel. That's how it starts. Your kid has just been programmed to want a box of Cocoa Critters because he thinks if he eats them he'll 1) get more face time with his old man, and 2) he'll get to meet a squirrel. So when you take him to the market, he sees the box on the shelf and he begs you for it. When you decline, he throws a tantrum. Instead of popping him in the head, you give in. Now he's sucking down 26g of fructose for breakfast. His teacher calls later that day. Billy's dry-humping the air conditioner in the back of the classroom. You stand in your kitchen shaking your head saying, "Kids do the darndest things... who can explain it?" I can. You fractured your kid with fructose then shipped him off to become someone else's problem. Next time, cook him some eggs.

Canned Vegetables
Vegetables. How bland. No one likes eating vegetables. In fact, the phrase, "eat your vegetables" is universally understood to imply that doing so is an unpleasant chore done only to ward off death himself. But now, we've turned our vegetables into candy. Ever eat a yam without butter, cinnamon, and sugar? Ever eat a pea that wasn't a "sweet pea"? Go to the store and start snatching up cans of vegetables off the shelf. Ingredients: seven times out of ten you'll find "sugar" and whatever the vegetable happens to be. Asparagus. Okra. Corn. All laced with sugar... put there to "help" you choke down your vegetables.

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Fruit by the Soot

A plain fruit is bad enough, though because it has dietary fiber in it, your exposure to fructose is limited. So raw plain fruit gets a pass. On the other hand, plastic fruit cups, cans of fruit, jars of applesauce, and bags of raisins are a travesty. The manufacturing is bad enough: destroying the dietary fiber leaving you to a pure shot of fructose. But then it gets worse! They coat the fruit with sucrose and then drown it in "light syrup". You know where you find this shit the most? You find it in the lunchroom when your kid turns ten and starts buying lunch at school. They plop spoonfuls of this goopy mess down next to his pork roll. It's part of the "well balanced" diet prescribed by the United States government in an effort to make sure every kid gets an adequate meal. Under the guise of providing good health, your school has opened a tunnel for the fructose industry to slam their products right into your kid's hearts. Literally.

Sweet Water
This is not about plastic bottles of water, which do leach horrific toxins that poison you every time you drink one (for some people three times a day). I cover that in another chapter. This is about flavored bottled water. There are people on this earth so hooked on sucrose that they can't drink a glass of water -- the most basic element we all need to survive -- because it's not sweet. This is tragic. These concoctions provide both the toxic petroleum byproducts from the plastic as well as sucrose or another toxic sweetener. If you can't bring yourself to drink a glass of water, you need to reexamine your life and realize that you are a puppet of the fructose industry and they have their hand firmly planted up your ass.

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Holy Frijoles!
Beans. They're supposed to be a staple. Try to find a can of beans without sucrose. And I'm not talking about "maple" flavored frankenbeans; I'm talking about stuff like canned chickpeas and habaneras. Never gonna happen my friend. Buy the bagged kind instead.

Alternative Edison
Lacing isn't just about getting you hooked on something sweet; it's also about keeping you fat. Food companies that sell "weight loss" fare almost always have sucrose on the label. This prevents you from losing weight too fast (if at all) so that you have to keep using their products and services. You know which companies excel at this: salad dressing companies. Here, you've been told (incorrectly) that scarfing down mountains of rabbit food for lunch every day is good for your health. Not including the fructose in the tomatoes, onions, or the sucrose sprinkled on your croutons; check out the sugar count on the label of your favorite salad dressing. Why are you eating rabbit food drowned in a sauce that makes it taste like a bowl of Super Fruity Astroblasts? Think about it.

Age of Unreason
Even when you're an old geezer, they're looking to keep you on the hook until the paddles go quiet. Your doctor will tell you to drink milkshakes that give you an "entire day's worth" of vitamins, calcium, and -- oh yeah -- sugar. Even if you're diabetic, they've got milkshakes for you too.

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ALCOHOL AND FRUCTOSE

The one-two punch from behind the bar.
I'm not going to tell you not to drink. If I'm celebrating something, I'll have a shot of vodka with dinner. It's fun. I don't do it to excess because I have come to grow very fond of my liver and now that I'm thin I'd like to stay that way, but a glass here and there won't kill you. Alcohol does poison the body in some of the same ways as fructose: it causes heart disease, liver fattening, steatohepatitis, and it makes you fat. Sadly for you, drinking in America is all about the mixing. Very few people drink their vodka (the most popular liquor) straight or on the rocks. Most people mix it with fruit juice or another flavored liquor to deaden the burn. However, doing so mixes fructose with alcohol, jacking up your hangover to new, god-awful levels of suffering and duration.

Two Wrongs Make a Hell-of-a-hangover

When the liver metabolizes alcohol, it turns it into acetaldehyde. If you drank straight vodka, the liver would process the vodka quickly and remove the acetaldehyde efficiently. Each pound of stored pollution in your fat cells complicates this process, causing it to last longer. That's why you can't drink as much as you did when you were a kid. Mixing in liquors that are created from or themselves mixed with table sugar (sucrose) complicates everything. The fructose you now also have to process competes with the alcohol, causing the liver to leave the acetaldehyde in your body longer than it normally would have. The net result is a harder hangover.

Mixers
Most flavored liquors (crme de cacao, schnapps, amaretto) are made with and contain lots of sucrose, but fruit juices are 100% fructose. That means that mixing vodka with orange juice is actually worse than mixing it with coffeeflavored liquor because you're getting more fructose.

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BABIES, DIABETES, AND FRUCTOSE

Good things for your small packages.
Babies. Aw. Tiny little mini-people that rely on us for all their necessities: shelter, clothing, food. The last of these isn't as easy as it may seem.

Your First Compartment

Unless you were miraculously spawned in a chicken egg, at one time you had a nine-month lease on a cramped studio: nice place with free utilities and a view overlooking your mother's duodenum. At first, you brought all the food you needed with you, but sometime around week five those supplies ran out and you were forced to use the umbilical cord -- a handy little plumbing system for mooching from mom. From that point onward, what she ate you ate.

Prenatal Care
If she ate mostly asparagus and rice, you grew to become a scrawny little wisp of a person (let's say, 6 lbs, 6oz). If she ate eggs and bacon, only you got big (let's say, 8 lbs, 8oz). In my case, Philadelphia cheesesteaks and lasagna graduated me at a scale-jarring 10 lbs, 10oz. Rumor has it my delivery was so painful even the OBGYN was screaming. There's a rumor that the primary nurse who carried me around the hospital (we had great insurance) went on to become an all-world arm wrestling champion. Currently, to erase the memory of that day, my mother takes the same medication they give war veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder. But for a pregnant mother, it's not just quantity she has to be concerned about... it's also selection. Why? Because when your baby is the size of a quarter, what you feed it could spell the difference between a healthy child and one with mental or physical disabilities.

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Top three on the list of bad things pregnant mothers shouldn't eat are fish (mercury: birth defects), deli meat and soft cheese (listeria: miscarriages), and caffeine (miscarriages).
For a mostly full list of all the things pregnant women shouldn't eat: http://www.americanpregnancy.org

Chemical Kids
Unless you've lived in a crack house all your life, you should know that cigarettes, alcohol, and heavy drugs are all out of the question for numerous health-related reasons. But here's something few people are talking about. Large dosages of fructose consumed during infancy may be the source of type-1 (read: juvenile) diabetes mellitus.

Is it fat?
The diabetes people love to talk about how obesity -- which they attribute to fat consumption (think cheeseburgers not doughnuts) -- is the primary contributing factor to whether someone will or won't develop the disease. That may have to do with the fact that none of them receive donations from fast food restaurants. However, type-1 is the primary type of diabetes. It affects people who are fat, thin, eat lots of fructose, eat little fructose, professional athletes, or hosts of fantasy football leagues. Jay Cutler -- NFL quarterback -- has type-1 diabetes. You can call him fat if you want, but make sure it's not within earshot because he can bonk you in the head with a football at like seventy yards. And he's one of many, many pro level athletes -- people who spend their every waking moment maximizing their performance by monitoring what goes in and out of their bodies -- who have this same condition. It's not fat.

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Is it genetics?
Doctors love to point to genetic anomalies and mutations. It has been proposed that the genetic code sometimes goes loopy or that there's a recessive gene somehow involved. If this was a genetic thing, the incidence rates for type-1 diabetes and obesity would be similar worldwide. That's just how the law of large numbers works.

So what's the answer?

It's fructose. Specifically, it's vitamin depletion due to over-consumption of fructose... most notably Vitamin-D. While babies are busy growing their arms and legs, they also grow their internal organs. During this time, these organs are extremely fragile and require all the vitamins that they can get. Each of the side effects of fructose poisoning discussed earlier in this book (particularly vitamin depletion) is magnified due to the diminutive size (mass) of the fetus and the general state of unrest of the mother's body chemistry. So in other words, first mom depletes her own vitamin supply with sheet cake and then what precious little is left is passed to the child via the umbilical cord along with trace amounts of fructose. This deficiency damages vital organs like the pancreas and leaves behind a ticking time bomb that explodes in full-fledged type-1 diabetes four, fourteen, or even forty years down the road.

Define massive quantities.

When a "pregnant" woman on a sit com sends her husband out amidst a torrent of screams to fetch her some ice cream because she's having "cravings", replace the words "ice cream" with "cigarettes" and see how funny it is. There was a time -- prior to the 1950s -- when smoking during pregnancy was perfectly acceptable and any suggestion otherwise was considered fear mongering. Today it's common knowledge.
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It's acceptable to tell a pregnant mother who regularly drinks herself into a stupor that she's causing severe damage to her child's body because that science was well established years ago. But it would be cruel to deny a craving woman a chocolate sheet cake... in America.

Advice from the Aussies

Since 2007 -- when a study linking maternal diabetes to fetal complications was made public -- obstetricians (baby doctors) in Australia have been telling women point blank to eliminate sugar as type-2 diabetes in the mother can cause hypoglycemia, respiratory distress, and perinatal death. This is the part where the lives of your children come into play... in this case before they're even born.
2008 Diabetes: Australian Facts 2008 http://www.aihw.gov.au/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=6442454991

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EXERCISE AND FRUCTOSE

How spin class is killing you.
I successfully lost fifty pounds six years ago by busting my ass at the gym. Fifty thousand sit-ups and a hundred spin classes made me look great. I felt like crap, but at least I looked great. Exercise alone can make you thin. That's the truth. But it's not the whole truth and the part that you don't know can kill you.

Spin, Spin, Sugar

We're off to spin class. We've got our outfits and our towels ('cause we're gonna sweat, man) and our headbands and our headphones and our squeeze bottles full of electrolyte replenishing "sports drink". We arrive. Hello. Hello. Hey, Sally. Husband still a prick? You bet he is. How 'bout them Bears? Now we're spinnin'. And spinnin'. And spinnin'. Then we're all done. Bye. Bye. See ya, Sally. Call me about lunch. We're sweaty and gross, but we feel great. Later, we'll look great and hopefully we'll have showered so we'll smell great. Most important -- we're thin. So what went wrong? While we were peddling to nowhere, enraptured in the thumping of club music, we took a swig of sports drink. And before class we had a danish in the lobby. And for breakfast, we had oatmeal with raisins. All fructose. So here we go. Your liver starts breaking down fructose. Now, your body uses up the Acyl-CoA (because you're exercising). But what about the other two hepatic toxins? (see "A Tale of Two Sugars", above) The c-Jun N-terminal kinase continues to cause insulin resistance at the same rate, so it is unaffected. Over time, it will destroy the ability of your muscles to function properly (insulin resistance). This is why people in their 40s stare in awe at people in their 20s and say funny things like, "Where would I find the energy to spin?"

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And the last toxin? Uric acid. Here's where things get dicey. The uric acid produced by the breakdown of your oatmeal/danish combo burns the inside of your arteries like over-bleached pool water -- causing microscopic cracks. Jamming into these cracks are the fructose-toting LDLs (see "Heart Disease", above) created when you took your swig of sports drink. Now that's to be expected, even when you're just sitting around. But because your blood pressure is elevated because of all the exercise, the uric acid and fructose packets (LDLs) are flying through your arteries twice as fast as normal. The extra speed and pressure inflames the arteries -- multiplying the damage. The net result is that even though some people look from the outside like they're in perfect health, a close look at their arteries tells another story.

Prevention
It's simple. If you're going to work out, avoid fructose at all costs. Now, you might be saying, "Well, what about my electrolyte level? I was drinking the sports drink to replenish my electrolytes." You don't even know what that means, do you? You heard it on television and you think that without electrolytes you'll dry up and die. Well you're an idiot. You heard about electrolytes on a sports drink commercial. Your electrolyte is the fluid that allows your nerves to communicate with each other. For humans, the elements and compounds needed for good electrolyte balance are sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, chloride, and hydrogen phosphate, and hydrogen carbonate. You get all of these from a regular diet and the idea that they flee from your body in such great numbers that they must be replenished is a ridiculous myth. You will replenish all of your electrolytes the next time you eat. Period. If you feel woozy while you're working out, it's because you weren't eating right before you worked out. So get a sandwich and stop listening to commercials.

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FAMILY VALUES
Good old Americana cut with vicious lies.
Morality is everything in America. Respect your elders means not only must you listen (and believe) everything they tell you, but you most certainly can't argue back. And if you do, the devil will burn you with his pitchfork. The sad truth is, being healthy in America is about telling your elders (who are hopelessly addicted to fructose, insurance, credit cards, and never ever changing no matter what) to go fuck themselves.

Nana's Cookies
Poor Nana. She gets a bad wrap in this book because in most families she's the one driving for bigger better deserts. She's been hooked on the white smack (sucrose) for ninety years. She couldn't stop now even if her doctor told her she had cancer and only months to live. She's too far gone. That's why she's always pushing to go out to eat at a diner; she wants something gorgeous out of that revolving case before her liver finally explodes. I would love to tell you that there's no reason in the world to have dessert, but that wouldn't be true. The reason you should have dessert is so that you can get a massive blast of fructose to end your day. Thankfully, it's the only reason. In fact, eating sugary desserts after a meal is the reason why any resulting flatulence smells bad and can nourish any bacteria that lives in your intestines or that just moved in via the meal you just ate. If you eat an egg salad sandwich laced with salmonella and then chase it down with a piece of chocolate lava cake, you will suffer worse and for longer than if you had just eaten the egg salad sandwich by itself. You can refer to a handful of nuts or a banana as a "snack" if you like, but it counts as a meal because both of these things nourish your body with gobs of nutrients. Snacks and desserts are little heart-shaped things your Nana pulls out of the oven because she stopped learning in 1958.

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Summer Wheeze
The theory is that when you come in from a cold winter's day (shoveling or sledding, your choice) the best way to warm up is to drink a hot beverage. Now, you could heat up some water and drink that (Asians do it), but seriously, ew. Warm milk? Maybe for some. But, how awesome would it be to take cocoa powder and sugar, mix it with hot water, and then top it with as many marshmallows (pure sucrose) as you can without scalding yourself or defying the laws of physics. Now that's the way to erase the image of a blizzard. The inverse of this heart-warming scene is the guy who comes in from mowing the lawn in the middle of summer and cools down with a nice, tall, frosty glass of iced tea... or rather fructose and tea-like chemical flavoring. These are just two examples of the many pre-programmed habits that we inherit from our society and simply follow without even thinking about what they mean to our lives or bodies. In our minds, these two scenes seem on their face to be perfectly normal. But they are the hidden reason behind most weight loss plan failures: we live in a sugar-beverage society and losing weight means flying right into the teeth of peer pressure.

Pregnancy Cravings
It's a staple of the situation comedy: character one is a pregnant women with raging hormones who sends character two (her husband/boyfriend) out to the store to get two tubs of ice cream, a dozen bagels, and a jar of pickles. Ha, ha, ha... it's raining and there're no pickles. He buys and extra ice cream hoping it will be enough, but it isn't and when he gets home she tries to murder him with an ice cream scoop. Good times. Lots of laughs. The problem with this scenario is that, in actuality, bingeing on huge buckets of rocky road can have devastating and permanent side effects on a developing fetus -- something I'd like to encourage you to consider not funny.

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The obvious and most common side effect is that your child, having eaten it for nine months, will be born addicted to sucrose. This can manifest itself as fussiness or colic, since breast milk has no fructose (some formulas do, though). Foremost among the more serious side effects is type-1 diabetes (formerly juvenile diabetes). Let's examine the science behind this. We know from earlier that poisoning is a matter of dosage based on body mass; so what is healthy for an adult can be potentially deadly for a child. Well a fetus is smaller than even a child, so an adult dosage of fructose can damage the pancreas of the fetus. But what adds an additional wrinkle is the fact that the brain chemistry of a pregnant mother goes haywire -- causing addictions and desires to multiply or disappear entirely. So in the best case, her desire to eat fructose can be eliminated; in the worst case, a pregnant mother can be hit with cravings for chocolate cake so pervasive that she may binge. Couples planning in advance on getting pregnant should go out of their way to reduce their fructose intake as much as possible before they conceive in order to reduce these effects. The father, too, should get off fructose -- if not for his own health than to prevent his cravings from triggering process addiction responses in the mother thereby endangering his child. As with all aspects of pre-natal nutrition, this is especially important during the first and second trimesters when the fetus is most vulnerable.

Birthday Cake
Right now you're thinking, "Don't tell me he's suggesting that we deprive our children of even birthday cake. Has he no shame?" No. No shame whatsoever. Birthday cake is a massive slice of fructose. Would you celebrate your child's birthday by giving him or her a line of coke? A bag of heroin? Shot of tequila? The birthday cake is morally depraved marketing tradition invented by bakers to sell more cake. As a celebration for having completely circled the sun several times over, we invite over dozens of children and feed them all a massive cake

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(batter containing sucrose), topped with pure-fructose icing and special decorative edible pure-fructose flowers, balloons, or computer generated photographs made with candy ink (contains aluminum, food coloring, other toxins) of the child-in-question smiling or hitting a baseball. Then we push them out into the yard so they can run around in a circle until the side effects wear off. Well here's a suggestion: hand them all lasagna. No fructose means they won't destroy your house. Of course, they'll probably hate you because at Billy's birthday party (everyone knows a Billy) last month, his mom had a cake. But that's the crux of the birthday cake scam: fructose companies depend on emotional guilt to keep even those people who know better from living properly. So while you know now that birthday cake is literally sickening, you're forced to cave in to peer pressure. Fuck those addicted little bastards. Hand out your lasagna and tell their parents to stop paying bakers to kill their kids.

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SUCROSE VS. HFCS

The "nip slip" of the fructose industry.
"A dog is smarter than it's tail; if the tail were smarter, then the tail would wag the dog." - American expression

There is a raging debate between those who produce hard-core sucrose and those who produce glucose-fructose -- known in America as High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) -- over which of the two is the healthier option. It is a spin off from the soft drink wars. Now, a lot of you are reading this hoping to catch me when I pick a side. "Ah ha!" you plan to say, "He has chosen sucrose/HFCS and he's wrong!" I've done the research/watched the Food network/tried drinking both and I know the right answer. I'm returning this book to the bookstore." Well, prepare to be disappointed. The answer is that neither is the healthier option because both are equally toxic. The entire debate is a smokescreen designed to keep your attention focused on who wins the war instead of how many innocent civilians have died because of these two armies? I would liken this debate to one in which a suicidal person had two friends argue over whether they should end it all with a lead-based bullet with a uranium tip or one with a less toxic metal and a copper jacket.

The Name Game

HFCS is not-called glucose-fructose for the same reason that sucrose is called "table sugar": good marketing. After all, if you realized that your HFCS soda pop contained two sugars (glucose and fructose), you might start asking stupid questions like, "What's the difference?" Similarly, sucrose is called sugar in America because the companies that use and manufacture it want you to think it's the same thing as glucose.

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Sweet Thoughts
Based on thousands of question and answer sessions and presumably many distributed candy bars, there is a scale to determine sweetness. The one difference between HFCS and sucrose is that HFCS is significantly sweeter than sucrose. Now, before you get excited and think, "I guess that means they can use less of it", the downside is the extra sweetness makes it harder to give up.

Abstinence Only
Both sucrose and HFCS contain no healthy components and neither is natural. No vitamins. No minerals. Nothing of value to your body. In fact, humans manufacture both (HFCS is made with acid; sucrose is a blanched plant root) for the sole purpose of stringing you out with their high-potency smack. So the question you have to ask yourself is: why are you eating either of these when they provide nothing for your body?

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SMOKESCREENS
Diverting attention from the elephant in the room.
You know them well. The major villains in the weight-loss community: calories, carbohydrates, cholesterol, and fats. Each one is vital to your body yet millions of dollars are spent every year on books, CDs, DVDs, programs, and Web sites that tell you how to declare war on one or more of them. In reality, cutting any one of them out of your diet will cause illness.

Calories: Feel the Burn

A calorie is a unit of energy. In life, we burn energy in order to do things -climbing stairs, typing on the computer, eating, breathing, having sex, walking down Broad Street on the way to the theatre -- and the fuel to keep us going is the glucose we get from the foods we eat and our liver. Let's say you buy a candy bar. The label says it has 200 calories. Is that good? Is that bad? What does it mean? It means that when the scientists put it into a jar and set it on fire, it burned for x number of minutes giving off y amount of heat to boil z amount of water. What your gym trainer has decided -- incorrectly -- is that if someone ate that candy bar, they would have to burn off 200 calories doing some sort of exercise in order to remove the candy bar from their system. This is a lie. I refer to this as the Catholic diet, because it basically assigns a penance number to each thing we eat and says, "if you eat this you'll have to say 200 Hail Marys (sit ups) in order to absolve yourself of the sin of eating it". Let's say for argument sake that you require 2,000 calories a day in order to successfully complete your day without passing out while on the subway. Well, that's ten of this particular candy bar. So, can you eat ten candy bars per day in order to survive? Of course not.

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Firstly, by the end of the week you would have explosive diarrhea the likes of which you could not possibly fathom. You would sit on the toilet with tears in your eyes while your sphincter burned with the heat of a hundred candles. But secondly -- and more importantly -- you'd be sitting on the pot with explosive diarrhea. So clearly, you didn't burn 200 calories per candy bar, did you? Some of those calories are currently torching your colon (so-called "empty calories"). Your body doesn't use the whole candy bar. You'd be exhausted and feeling like crap because you wouldn't have the 2,000 calories per day you were expecting. You'd have 2,000 minus however many calories are part of the poo. To figure out just how many calories weren't used up, you'd have to scoop your poo back out of the toilet and set it on fire. Most important to the point of this book, the truth is that calories are a unit of thermodynamics that, in no way, applies to you or the food that you eat. The fat around your midsection is not the result of an overbalanced ledger and chasing a mystical calorie count will spell disaster. "Low cal" should mean nothing to you.

Carbohydrates: Ride the Roller Coaster

Carbs. Most of us hate them because we've been told that they're bad. But what is a carb? A carbohydrate is any molecule that contains carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. While this has many, many complex combinations, for dieticians and weight-loss gurus, carbs refer simply to dietary sugars and starches. There are two problems with lumping all the carbohydrates together: they're not all bad and some of them are required to live. Eliminating the good sugar (glucose) makes you feel rundown and -- eventually -- leads to serious health problems. Eliminating dietary fiber turns your poo into a walking stick. Starches are important for maintaining energy levels over time -- especially if you are doing strenuous work like playing sports or working on a '67 Chevy. Polysaccharides -- complex sugars -- are used to create many of the biomolecules that our bodies require in order to survive.

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But that's the secret design of these diets. The lack of fructose (the bad sugar) in these diets will cause weight loss -- guaranteed. But because the user also cuts out the good sugar, they get exhausted and they end the diet -- reverting to their old ways. These are the diets that have people gaining and losing weight like a yo-yo (very unhealthy) and buying lots of diet books over and over again.

Cholesterol: Plaque-Builders Local

Cholesterol has gotten a really bad wrap. Here's why: 80% of people who have a heart attack have high cholesterol. Or so goes the rumor. Actually, 80% of people who have a heart attach have high LDL levels. Which actually isn't true, either. In fact, the statistics back up the fact that cholesterol is essential for the body and that it has no bearing on coronary heart disease. Which studies? In 1987 -- the same year he was awarded the National Medal of Science -- Michael DeBakey, world-renown surgical pioneer (also on the cover of Time Magazine) who created the DeBakey procedure for repair of aortic dissection and inventor of the M*A*S*H unit (maker of Alan Alda), conducted a study in which he surveyed more than 15,000 heart patients. 80% of those surveyed did not have high cholesterol (or LDL). The man was a genius who lived to be 100 and he said the cholesterol myth is a boldfaced lie.
Surgeon Questions Cholesterol Role, By Sandra Blakeslee, April 9, 1987 http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/09/us/surgeon-questions-cholesterol-role.html

That's one. How many others are there? Hundreds! But here's where the science truly trumps the hype: it is a known scientific fact that your liver produces most of the cholesterol in your body. In fact, anyone who eats a low-cholesterol diet is simply placing undue strain on his or her liver. In fact, the only way to reduce cholesterol is with pharmaceuticals. Cholesterol is essential for all body functions -- every cell in the human body is built from (requires) cholesterol. Limiting your cholesterol with drugs forces your body to choose which cells it wants to repair or replace and which it wants to sacrifice. Which cells in your body do you think you should be sacrificing? The

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ones that make your skin look young? The ones that make your fingers bend? The ones that make a penis stiff? Right. Serious shit. Most important to the point of this book, any diet that keeps foods high in fructose and eliminates foods high in cholesterol is a one-two rapid punch: not only do you fill your bloodstream with flaming death (uric acid), but you eliminate the natural cell-building materials that repair the damage.

Fats: If Fat is Fat, Then Fat Makes You Fat

The most basic concept in dieting today is that eating fat makes you fat. It's also completely incorrect. When you eat fat, your body doesn't take that fat and file it between two other fat cells like folders in a filing cabinet. If that were true, we'd all be 97% human, 2% cow, and 1% pig/chicken -- except for vegetarians who would be 97% human and 3% bean curd. Fats digest slowly, but they do digest into building blocks used by the body. Juices in the pancreas break down fat into fatty acids and glycerol. These byproducts are transported first to the muscles where they are stored or used to build muscle cells and then to the fat cells near the muscles that provide energy and cushioning for everyday life. In addition to the dangers of eliminating fat, low-fat foods are crammed with fructose because when you eliminate fat from any food it tastes like the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday Times. So not only are you starving yourself of the fats you need, you're upping the bad sugar you should never have. Fat is essential for a healthy diet. If you cut out all fat completely from your diet, your muscles would tear and atrophy. Your body would bruise at even the slightest touch and your bones would grind together like a gristmill as dietary fats also become lubricants. Fats are required for some vitamins like Vitamin E. Dietary fat plays a vital role in several major body systems. For instance, the reproductive system in women will screech to a halt without fatty acids.

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Most important to the point of this book, fats help break down sugars. Part of removing the toxic backlog of fructose from your system is making sure you get enough animal fat to help get the job done. Now, with that being said, there is one type of fat that is toxic. Trans fat (Elaidic acid) is an unsaturated fat that provides no fatty acids or other elements and circulate in the bloodstream until they are eliminated: making them contributory to plaque buildup in artery walls. In addition, they interfere with the liver's ability to produce two essential fatty acids (arachidonic acid and prostaglandins). While found in tiny quantities in the fat of cows and chickens fed with corn, the major source of trans fats in America comes from vegetable oil (partially hydrogenated unsaturated plant fats).

A Wave of the Wand

People who have no clue about science or nutrition provide most of this misinformation. It's very rare to find someone purporting one of these diets knowing full well the role of fructose in weight gain and keeping it hidden to string people along for as long as possible. However, that doesn't mean they don't benefit financially from the lies. Restaurants are a good example of organizations that benefit from public misinformation. Many fast food and franchise restaurants go out of their way to put their nutrition information on-line. They're thrilled to hand them to you on the back of a paper menu or mount them in laminated plastic right inside the front door to prove to you that they are on your side and bending over backward to make sure you have the information you need. Calories: check. Four kinds of fat: check. Carbohydrates: check. Serving size, almost always. Sodium for the high-blood pressure crowd: check. Fiber for the nervous poo-ers: rarely. Protein: does anyone really care? Fine, check. Sugar: think not... go fuck yourself.

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This is especially true if they own a spinning desert case full of cakes and pies, cheesecakes, milkshakes, or have a particular vested interest in the soda wars.

This Just In...

At the end of the day, the buck stops with the media -- who themselves aren't too big on science, nutrition, or facts for that matter. Fad diets are very exciting for media outlets, which see them as ratings boosters. That's why you see promo ads like, "Tonight at six: is the fat in your bacon strangling your duodenum?" These news stories pray on those who have tried and failed fad diets and are now desperately looking for real answers only to stumble across the next fad. Well rest assured, this book is not a fad diet; it's an education in the proper way to eat and how to educate the other people in your life so you can all grow old.

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KITSCHY FAD DIETS

The names you know and what they actually do to your body.
There is a semantic problem with the word "diet": it refers to both 1) the things you eat to live, and 2) a planned change to one's diet for a set amount of time to gain a temporary weight loss benefit (fad diet). This book is not about establishing a new fad diet. You cannot lose twenty pounds in twenty days by eliminating fructose, but I know for a fact you can lose 75 pounds in a year. This chapter talks about some of the dozens of fad diets that you can hear about at four in the morning when all the channels on your TV stop playing reruns and start selling time slots to the snake oil salesmen. None of these diets identify sucrose as dangerous. Most of them follow a breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, dessert formula. In fact, almost all of them have dessert options like fruit dipped in chocolate and pudding made from chemicals -- which as you can imagine I strongly disagree with.

Isolation Diets
Many times, someone will develop a diet based around his or her favorite food (or one that seems like a healthy option). The Cabbage Soup Diet and the Grapefruit Diet are two examples of this. Basically, the majority of your meals should be the namesake and then one or two additional meals of other foods. These fads are potentially dangerous, as removing diversity from one's diet can screw up the balance of vitamins and minerals. Franois Magendie proved that eating the same thing every day over and over again is a form of starvation.
An Elementary Treatise on Human Physiology, by Franois Magendie, 1855

Any diet that starves you is a bad one. While you may drop weight quickly, you'll gain it all back once you go back to real food and the starvation stresses all of your organs -- especially the heart and kidneys.

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3-Day Diet
A meal plan that offers instant gratification for those who want to lose weight right before a major event. It's a very specific nine-meal plan that features foods that dehydrate the body. Thus the results are based on the rapid loss of water and a little bit of muscle. This fad is dangerous and, if done longer than three days, could cause serious dehydration.

The Zone Diet

The zones break down your food into X% carbs, Y% protein, and Z% fats (the breakdown varies from diet to diet). These diets offer very little in the way of education and only work for those who eliminate fructose when choosing "zone acceptable" carbohydrates at meal times.

Calorie Counters
Calories are meaningless. The idea that food can be equated into a number of sit-ups or push-ups that will negate its effects is poorly crafted. I look at it this way: if one "medium" apple is 95 calories and one "medium" apple dipped in caramel is 160 calories, then why not just lick the caramel off the apple and throw the rest away? Food is more than fuel and sometimes less than safe.

Cholesterol Watchers
People who limit their cholesterol -- usually because of "bad cholesterol" fear mongering by people looking to sell pharmaceuticals -- are actually removing the building blocks that your body uses to rebuild and replenish their cells. This will lead to sickness and premature aging.

Protein Only
Protein-only diets eliminate carbohydrates in favor of pure protein and fats. While you can live on pure protein (gluconeogenesis), removing carbohydrates completely from your diet will prevent any prolonged physical activity, as protein fuel is spent too rapidly. Athletes cannot play sports while on such a diet;

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attempts to do so can result in muscle failure and exhaustion. While technically adhering to my no-fructose mantra, good carbohydrates are important.

Lean Beef
Cutting out fat is based on the idea that you're gaining weight because you're somehow adding the fat you're eating in your diet to the fat cells that are already on your body. This is a lie. Your body has all the fat cells it will ever have. In fact, only liposuction can remove them. So what are you actually doing when you strip the fat off your food? It deprives you of amino acids and it makes all your food taste like shit. These diets almost always fail for both of these reasons: the loss of amino acids causes malnutrition and the lack of taste defeats your resolve.

The No-Cows
No beef. Period. These diets insist that cow meat is somehow more dangerous/fattening/unhealthy than "leaner" chicken and fish. Some of these diets also include a no-pork clause. Occasionally, these diets will talk about hormone injections as one of the reasons why cows are worse than other meats. If you do the research, you'll find injections, hormones, chemical-byproducts, and preservatives in all your meat sources (save the dubious claims of "organic" meats). I would argue that beef tends to be more unhealthy than chicken because it's usually slathered with barbecue sauce. However, this diet won't kill you so if you have a personal interest in saving the lives of cows, go for it.

Milkshakes and Protein Drinks

People want to believe that they can live on fructose and still survive because they're sugarholics. These diets are for people who simply refuse to admit that they have a serious addiction. Drinking milkshakes several times a day will send your blood glucose level skyrocketing -- especially since you don't have any solid

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foods to dietary fiber temper the process. What's worse, you're probably going to have horrific bowel movements as your body fights desperately to eject the fructose. Bottom line, stay on this diet long enough and you'll lose weight (wasting) but not in the healthy, "man I feel great" way. It will be more like the "wow, look at the size of that tube in my urethra" sort of way. Some milkshakes come with chemicals (sugar substitutes) instead of fructose to make them even "healthier". Your body is a chemistry lab and pouring sweet tasting chemicals into it can only fuck you up.

The Glycemic Index

The GI (glycemic index) is a list of carbohydrates that ranks each food or ingredient by how it affects your blood glucose level. High GI is anything above 69; low GI is anything below 56. According to the diet, low is good as low GI foods break down slowly allowing you to eat sugar but maintain a healthy blood glucose level. Let's start with a baseline:

70, Sucrose
Now, compare this to some other foods:

95, French fries 90, Potato chips 85, Cooked carrots 85, Rice cakes 40, Fresh unsweetened fruit juice (doesn't say what kind) 30, Raw carrot 22, Dark chocolate 20, Pure Fructose 15, Apricot
http://www.glycemicindex.com/

The glycemic index is more about selling "Low GI" stickers to companies that sell fad diet foods than it is about realistically providing a guide to nutrition. According to the list above, eating pure sucrose off a spoon is better than eating

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a handful of French fries (I eat French fries covered in cheese at least once a week) from a blood glucose point of view. So, assuming you had two twins, if you fed one spoonfuls of sucrose and the other French fries, theoretically the fryguy would collapse first. And fructose gets a total pass. That's a crock of shit. The glycemic index is mostly a mathematical exercise. Cookies, cakes, candy bars, and anything else made of pure sucrose are all listed as having 70GI and thus (according to the Web site) are considered high GI and thus forbidden (though just barely). So kudos, I guess, for that. But it in no way addresses body chemistry, obesity, toxins, or any of the other topics addressed in this book.

Fecal Disimpactors
The theory is simple: you're fat because you're full of shit -- literally excess fecal matter that is caked to the walls of your colon, intestines, and who knows what else. So by dislodging it with their chemical cocktail, you'll shit yourself to thinness. This is one of those things you buy at four in the morning when anyone who could warn you against such a thing is asleep. If you removed your intestines and packed them full of meat (sausage style) you would get roughly fifteen pounds across 7.5 meters (25 feet). You would also notice that while literally cramming raw meat into the intestine, it never sticks. That's because intestines are slick and -- with the exception of disease -- have no pockets in which fecal matter can become trapped. So what you put in today pushes out what you ate a few days ago. And if you have a disease that left pockets or perforations in your intestines, a fecal disimpactor can really make you sick. If you had fifteen pounds of shit inside of you (intestinal obstruction), you would be doubled over in excruciating pain, you wouldn't be able to keep down any food, and your breath would smell like a toilet. And you'd be in a hospital. You would not be ordering bottles of pills at four in the morning.

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This scam works because the chemicals inside the pills paint your feces various colors (most commonly green). The people selling them claim this is undigested food when really it's just a bit of chemistry at your expense.

Liposuction
Liposuction yanks out fat with a big fucking needle. The problem is, the surgeon makes you look good today. But if your fat cells get bigger or smaller (gain/lose weight), you'll be able to see where all the fat cells were removed. You'll be bumpy and lumpy because you didn't have the patience to do it the right way.

The Pritikin Diet

Nathan Pritikin wrote a book in the 1980s called "The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise". The idea behind the diet is to eat only those things that come from the earth and nothing that's processed from a factory. A noble effort, as many of the toxins we consume come from the food manufacturing process. As a result of limiting these toxins (and by proxy, processed sugar), the Pritikin Diet works to eliminate diabetes and offers significant weight loss. However, the diet isn't perfect. It relies heavily on dietary fruit and fresh juices (which contain fructose), so while people may be thin, they still have the underlying dangers of heart disease and insulin resistance.

Heart Healthy
Most heart-healthy diets blame cholesterol levels for heart damage and say nothing about fructose. As discussed earlier, this simply isn't so.

Fasting/Juice Diets
Fasting comes in two flavors: straight up starvation and liquid only diets. Any starvation of the body is dangerous. The natural reaction of your body to starvation is to cannibalize itself to try to bridge the gaps between meals. Liquid diets are actually a little bit worse. Usually, liquid diets encourage you to blast your liver with fruit juices -- which contain fructose and citric acid. Drinking
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high concentrations of fructose will turn your internal organs into a war zone and the citric acid can disrupt the balance of your digestive system... eliminating any benefits you may have received from the fast in the first place. Fasting is worthless for weight loss. Any weight lost will be regained once you start eating again (especially if you don't change your diet) and depending on the length of the fast may actually climb higher as your body attempts to hoard extra food just in case you start being ridiculous again. Fasting for 24 hours -- which I have done in the past -- is refreshing and may aid in the removal of toxins, but any longer than that will cause muscle atrophy, joint damage, and eventual organ failure. Wait two full weeks between fasts to recover all the essential nutrients and protein you've lost.

Veganism/Vegetarianism
Veganism and vegetarianism are more lifestyle choices than they are diet concepts or even fads. They are based around the idea that no animals should be harmed in the process of feeding humans. The problem with this philosophy is that 50,000 years of human evolution has made us omnivores -- our bodies are designed to consume and process both vegetables and meat. In fact, humans can survive on freshly killed raw meat alone without experiencing any nutritional side effects (meat, like all foods, loses most of its vitamins and minerals when heated). If you think cows are cute, you can eliminate fructose and still be vegan or vegetarian, but the variety of food combinations you'll have are depressingly low. The key for you will be the use of spices to hype up the bland repertoire.

Fructose Replacement
Head on over to the South Beach diet Web site and check out their on-line recipe section. Pull up the "Buttermilk Waffles with Jam" recipe. You will see two red flags: 3 tablespoons granular fructose substitute and 3/4-cup fructose-free jam, any flavor.

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South Beach Diet, Buttermilk Waffle with Jam Recipe, May 2011 http://www.southbeachdiet.com/sbd/publicsite/recipes/buttermilk-waffles-withjam.aspx

Sugar substitutes are designed to keep you jonesing for the sweet stuff. You cannot live a healthy lifestyle when you're constantly looking for something sweet; someday when you're not in the mood for fake-apple jam you're going to hunt down a hot-fudge sundae. Eating that much of a worthless (read: toxic) chemical for breakfast every morning isn't good for anyone. Companies that push fructose replacement diets use a passive philosophy to make their money: by making deserts and meals laced with aspartame and other sugar substitutes a part of your diet, they can reduce the rate at which you lose weight and make money over the long term.

Sleeping Diets
There is a fad diet known as the sleep diet. The basic philosophy is that since you're sleeping, you're not eating. Hence you lose weight. It's actually a starvation diet and those poor bastards are not only less healthy, but they're sleeping their lives away trying to get thin. In addition, in order to sleep, they deplete their glucose levels, which can cause brain disorientation.

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THE PROFITEERS
Most of the people who perpetuate the "white" lies have no idea they're part of the problem. Of course, there are plenty of assholes that will gladly trade your good health for a beach house in Boca.

10 things you're going to learn...

If the book thing doesn't work out, I can work for Big Pharma. I'm a selfish prick... and so are you. Almost every doctor wasn't the best in his class. I invented the grande mochaspresso: coming to a coffee shop near you. If you want perfect teeth, become a nomad. Ice cream is the worst thing you can eat -- ever. Soda is the second worst thing you can eat -- ever. Size does matter. Chewing your vitamins will rot your teeth. If vitamin companies would start putting out, we would all be a lot healthier.

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A NEW DRUG
Flaxi: the fake family-friendly food filler.
It's very easy to start thinking that we're all being used as part of a grand conspiracy in which one group of individuals pulls all the strings making thousands and thousands of bakers and ice cream parlors dance to their sick and twisted tune. We picture a massive stadium filled with sixty thousand waitresses, restaurateurs, chocolatiers, and members of the lollypop guild all transfixed on a Patton-esk figure standing in front of a huge billboard in the shape of a box of candy. Into the microphone he speaks...

Thank you for coming.

Friends, I'd like to thank you all for coming, today, to talk about how we can all -each and every one of us -- make a boat-load of cash. I mean money on such a level that you personally may be in danger of drowning in it. My associates and I have been hard at work, tweaking and perfecting our newest formula. We have just found a new drug (pause for applause). It takes years to kill you, causes numerous diseases and illnesses, makes you hyper, mentally unstable, chemically imbalanced, and fat, but none of that matters because it's cheap and addictive. We call it... FLAXY! (pause for applause) Now I know what you're thinking: addictive products sell really well so let's get out there and sell, sell, sell! Well great enthusiasm, but before we hit the streets looking for users -- I mean customers (pause of laughter) -- let's discuss appropriate salesmanship guidelines. Step one: never call it a drug or a chemical. People hate drugs. They're afraid of drugs. They abhor drugs. And chemicals are used to clean toilets. While this stuff will probably end up in the toilet (pause for laughter), we want to craft a porcelain-free image. Instead, we've chosen the more family-friendly term

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"food additive" because it sounds neat and fun to say. I'm adding a "food additive" to my food; now it's better than before. Awesome. Step two: sell it cheap. Traditionally, businesses like to buy something cheap and sell it for as much as they can get. But in this case, that's bad. Flaxy is incredibly cheap, but we have so much of it that we can sting out every man, woman, and child from here to the Serengeti. Cheap means a lot more people hooked on our product. Even cocaine and heroin can be kicked if the price shoots high enough. Step three: put it in everything. When people see something in everything, they won't question why it's there. And since it's addictive, not only will they be unable to avoid getting hooked on it, but they'll appreciate the fact that you were the one who gave them their daily fix and they'll become loyal customers. Step four: sell it to kids. When adults see a child, they think innocence. When children see another child, they think, "hey, that human is small like me... maybe I like what they like". Both of these work in our favor, so you want to make sure that every time you have a television commercial or print ad for a Flaxy product, it's got a kid in it. Make sure it's a skinny kid too, or their parents will start wondering about the side effects. Step five: lie. Every chance you get, tell a lie. Talk about how when you eat Flaxy, it wakes you up in the morning (it doesn't), makes you feel full (it doesn't), makes you smarter (it doesn't). These lies, when told by multiple companies, will grow on the public and become part of the zeitgeist (pause for clearly condescending applause) that helps Flaxy sell itself. Step six: holidays are Flaxy times. Flaxy products are great any day of the year, but by collectively building holiday-based branding campaigns, we can triple our sales ten maybe even fifteen days out of every year. For instance, love means giving your sweetie a box of cherries wrapped in Flaxy. If she's not eating Flaxy, she'll leave you. If you don't have Flaxy for kids when they ring your doorbell on Halloween, they'll commit suicide. Do you want their blood on your

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hands? I'm pretty sure it's in the bible that Jesus once held a party for the small children of Nineveh where he hid eggs shaped like Flaxy under trees for them to find. Continuing that tradition is what Jesus would do. Step seven: play on emotions. Nationalism. Maternalism. Depression... ism. How do we stop the terrorists? Pregnant woman got a craving? Tough day at the office? The answer is always Flaxy! Step eight: propaganda. We need people on television talking about how wonderful and safe Flaxy is. We need sales people on the home shopping channels. We need cooks on cooking shows. We need spin masters on news programs saying, "Side effects? What side effects?" and then we need to pay scientists to produce studies that dispute the negative health claims. Step nine: never eat Flaxy. The most important step of all is to make sure that you and all the people who work for you or represent you in a television ad are free of Flaxy so that those "customers" who assume that you and your associates are also consuming Flaxy then believe that Flaxy clearly has no visible side effects. If pressed, you can take a bite of one of your Flaxy products, but we suggest spitting it out at the first available moment and then rinsing your mouth thoroughly as Flaxy is known to encourage the loss of teeth. If we all work together and follow these few simple rules, we can all become multimillionaires and retire to Bermuda! (standing ovation)

The Reality
In reality, there's no grand conspiracy. No puppet masters. No stadium full of people. What there are, are hundreds of thousands of people and a handful of mega-corporations all making money on three hundred years of lies. Lies that began as little white lies and then grew and grew and grew like an avalanche as people began to accept them as truths and other people began to realize just how much money can be made by selling the white smack.

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A baker isn't selling you a sticky bun because he's scientifically figured out exactly how much sugar will keep you on the hook. His great grandfather, Alphanso, made a sticky bun one day, but only a handful of people came back. So the following week, he added more fructose. More people came back. The next week: more fructose. By the end of the third month, the entire town was camped out at his door every morning and they had erected a massive statue in Alphanso Square to commemorate his magnanimous contribution to society. Now, do you think Alphanso stopped one day and said to himself, "Hey, these damn fools are gaining tons of weight and worshiping me like heroin addicts. Perhaps I should use less sticky in my sticky buns." Or do you think he said, "Wow, if this keeps up we're getting one of those big beds and a summer house in Napoli with indoor plumbing! No more outhouses for me. Woohoo!" Alphanso isn't to blame. And neither is his great-grandson. He's just doing what his father did and what his father's father did: sell something that people want. And corporations aren't to blame either. As long as we keep demanding these products, they'll continue making them. That's business. It's easy to pass the blame onto mega-corporations. This company produces the most chocolate. This corporation is winning the soda wars. But at the end of the day, it's not their responsibility to save us from ourselves. We have to find the lifeboats.

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WHISPER DOWN THE PAIN

Perpetuating the lie.
While ice cream makers and marshmallow cereal manufacturers aren't to blame, there are some people who have blatantly exploit your good health.

Who?
The people who profit from your ignorance can be classified into one of four categories: snake oil salesmen, morons, shadows, and cohorts. Snake oil salesmen are the people who want to sell you some object, drug, diet, supplement, notion, or service that can fix the symptoms of fructose poisoning without ever addressing the root causation of your ailments. These people know full well the misery that comes from the sweet life -- often because they were there themselves -- but choose instead to avoid the topic because selling their placebos and medications is more profitable. They prey on your sensibilities and use your addiction to sugar against you. Morons are simply that: schmucks who inadvertently cure themselves by altering their diets and then attribute it to some alternative cause (like cholesterol or divine intervention). They're often well intentioned but never provide science or back up any claim with proof and quote meaningless (often manipulated) statistics and studies sponsored by the fructose industry. Shadows are people who make their living hiding fructose. They come up with the new names for fructose (see Appendix A), they lobby Congress for screwed up nutrition labels, they run the political action committees, and they disbar lawyers and revoke medical licenses. They move money and sway opinion. Cohorts are in bed with the fructose companies. They're the worst of the worst. They contend that fructose is part of a healthy diet and openly rail against people who suggest otherwise. They do not like me at all. No matter what group they're classified in, the important thing to remember is that they're everywhere: your dentist wants to clean your teeth, your doctor wants

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to clean your arteries, and your pharmacist wants to clean your colon, but at the end of the day the only thing that's clean is your wallet.

What?
So what are the lies these people want us to believe?

As every nutrition label attests, there is no maximum amount of fructose you should eat in a day; the sky's the limit. The sucrose laced into the "fruit smoothies" your gym sells you "feed your muscles". Your weight loss company doesn't need to educate you at all -- just weigh you to see how much you owe, then pass you off onto a support group where you can talk about how much you like the food they make. Your weight loss company cares about you so much that they've made a special "light" version of a chocolate brownie: low fat, heavy fructose. It's perfectly normal to eat lots of fructose then take a pill to save your life after your pancreas starts to fail. Fructose isn't habituating. Salads aren't just for rabbits: people can eat them too. If you do enough sit-ups and run enough miles, you'll regain your youthful look and have the body of a nineteen year old. Frosted fruity cocoa smacks (sucrose) are part of a balanced breakfast that includes milk (lactose) and a glass of orange juice (fructose). Eating sugar for breakfast makes your brain work better. Standing in line for a doughnut is part of the American dream. Not having a birthday cake for your child's eighth birthday is a form of cruelty and you should be investigated or ostracized. Dessert is an actual meal -- or at the very least, a great end to a long day. Table sugar is "natural". Playing racquetball when you're fifty pounds overweight is a great way to become healthy and build strong joints. Being fat is normal/acceptable/unpreventable/genetic. Diabetes is incurable and can only be managed with pills. Children who eat toaster pastries, marshmallow treats, and candy bars are always skinny -- just look at the commercials.

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 Halloween is about costumes and trick or treating. Easter is about real eggs, rabbits, and Jesus. Valentines day is about roses and love. Thanksgiving is about celebrating the positive, productive relationship between tolerant, religious conservatives and the understanding and unoppressed native peoples of the Americas. Nutritionists are hippy tree huggers with no education. Doctors are always right. Only dentists can fix your teeth.

Where?
You can see them on the home shopping channel. They're in your local mall. They're at your gym. They're at the place where you buy all your food. They're everywhere. I'm not telling you that to make you afraid; I'm telling you that so you understand just how deeply America has whored itself out. Imagine you're walking through a mall. Forget about the obvious degradation -the cinnamon bun stand and the restaurants where you can get five hundred different kinds of milkshake -- and focus on the little things. There's a health supplement store selling foreign homeopathic herbs that help increase your metabolism (snake oil salesmen) to burn off fructose. There's a bookstore selling the newest weight-loss bestseller "Twenty Pounds in Twenty Days on Twenty Calories" about a girl who starved herself into a pair of size 0 pants to attend her twenty-year reunion she forgot about until the last minute. Sure she's gaunt, but that's hip now, right? (moron) There's an annoying woman with a clipboard who wants to pay you twenty dollars to watch seventeen commercials about different candy bars in order to see which one is the most effective. She's giving you someone else's twenty dollars, but by the end of the session chances are you'll be jonesing for a s'more shaped like a rabbit and they'll make that twenty back and then some. (shadow) Finally -- just before you leave in a waiting ambulance -- you jitter past a coffee shop (or an arcade or, ready for it, a pharmacy) that's selling an all-natural, seventy-two hour energy drink/shot/tall grande mochaspresso filled with guarana
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(Brazilian maple leaves), ginseng (a worthless weed from China by way of Wisconsin), and just enough fructose to keep you from crashing until your next tall grande mochaspresso (cohort).

When?
It starts about a half an hour after you wake up just as you're pouring your morning cup of coffee. A.M. Your Town is on. Huh: a scientific study -- funded by Americans for a Brighter Tomorrow for our Kids and Their Kids -- suggests that eating two eggs could kill you instantly. Who would have thought? Thank God you're eating a complete balanced breakfast including Mega Frosted Rice Hexagons and a glass of grapefruit juice. Next it's off to work. You walk past the vending machines (one for each soda company) and the candy machines to your office. Look! Someone brought doughnuts. Brain food. Yum. Damn. There's Jenn. Her kid is selling candy again. Shit. Don't see me. Don't see me. Oh, hey Jenn. Yes, put me down for seven Mondobars. No, you rock. Double damn. That doughnut is letting you down. Almost lunch time, though. Put in your order: General Tso's chicken (12g). The Chinese have never actually heard of it, but it's tasty. And salty. Damn... again. Now, you're thirsty. Down to the vending machine. Caffeine blast, yet still thirsty. You're productive for about 28 minutes. Batteries winding down. Really thirsty, now. Oh, no! It's Jenn's birthday. Why are you the one that always has to cut the cake? What are you, Jack the Ripper? At least you get dominion over the corner pieces and you'll be damned if Jenn's getting one. Finally, day's over. Turn on the car. Sports radio kicks in: D.J. Badger's mispronunciation of the word "pianist" is the "Uncle Jamaica's Maple Syrup's Sticky Situation of the Day". Classic.

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Forty minutes of traffic just to get back in the car: Junior's going to baseball practice. Sitting on the bench, you read the outfield signs: Ostoyevski's Bakery -World's Greatest Cupcakes. Damn. Now you want a cupcake. You cart home five kids: all begging to stop for ice cream. You refuse. They make up a song. It's horrible, but you stand fast. Back home. Finally. TV time again. The sitcom you watch has a guy trying to hide frozen custard from his roommates. The drama you watch features two sexy detectives refusing alcohol and accepting sodas because they're on duty. The cooking show you watch is making crme brle. En fuego! Before bed you're not really sleepy. A health magazine passes the time: eight moves to guarantee eight abs. The advertisements: Supaswell creatine powder, a diet book that's "endorsed" by a "real" doctor, and several bottles of scotch. And then... sleep.

How?
We live under the misconception that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a vicious Doberman that oversees all the claims, advertising, and recipes of every soda factory, two-bit conman, and author and brings about charges or penalties against anyone who tells a lie. The FDA is more like your neighbors pug dog -- an annoying little shit that yelps a lot, nibbles occasionally, and shuts down thousands of farms (upending hundreds of independent farmers, but no mega growers) whenever someone eats a head of lettuce without washing it first. The people who sell you junk pills at midnight and "power" bars after palates have nothing to fear from these people, save the occasional fine, which they can shrug off or declare bankruptcy to avoid. They make all the outrageous claims they want with no proof until someone comes along with a scientific study proving them liars. Then they simply change their claims or invent a new product and start the process all over again.
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Why?
Because there's tons and tons of money to be had. You can easily spot these clowns because most of them live in gated, multimillion-dollar mansions and float around the ocean on multimillion-dollar yachts. The weight loss industry alone (forget about supplements, drugs, and some of the others) raked in a whopping $60.9 billion in 2011. That gets divided between everyone from the den mother (CEO) of your local weight-loss support group to the guy selling you abdominal electrolysis at three in the morning.
U.S. Weight Loss Market Worth $60.9 Billion, Press Release from Marketdata Enterprises, Inc. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/5/prweb8393658.htm

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NAMING NAMES
A look at the industry that's looking the other way.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair

This may seem ultra-cynical, but trust me when I say that every single human on the face of the earth is interested in their own well being -- not yours. The sexy trainer at the gym who tells you you're doing great even though you've only lost six pounds, the guy in the green question mark suit who wants you to get money from the government, the guy behind the counter at the smoothie stand who swears they use real bananas then scoops you out some chemically-flavored ice cream while you're standing right in front of him: all lookin' out for number them. Me too, by the way. I'm selling some books. I already lost my seventy-five pounds and I look fucking great. I don't care if you eat yourself into an ice creaminduced coma out of spite because I said birthday cake was bad (see Birthday Cake is Bad on page 100). If some surgeon saws off your diabetes-ravaged toes or loggers come to your house to try to tap your tree-trunk thighs for maple syrup, know that I will sleep just like a baby. You care about living forever and I care about getting paid for the secrets I know. That's the whole basis of our relationship. So who else is out to get theirs?

Weight Loss Food Companies

$1.46 billion in revenue (2010) Crain's New York Business, " Weight Watchers picks a new target: men", (revenue attributed to Marketdata Enterprises). http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110422/FREE/110429947

What if you didn't need to live out of your freezer in order to lose weight? What if you could lose weight by simply killing off one or two things in your diet (soda, ice cream, etc.)? What would that mean for the weight loss companies? Devastation.

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These are companies who create slick systems and market-tested food products that you can buy to "help you lose weight". But how quickly does that happen? I lost 75 pounds in a year by simply eliminating sugar. Ever hear of anyone outside of a commercial that has done that on Salisbury steak? Probably not. It's hard to lose 75 pounds in a year when the weight loss company you go to has a "fat-free" brownie or special "diet" ice cream that you can munch on. It's also hard to lose weight when your food contains sucrose. Go to your local grocery store and pick up a half-dozen boxes of weight-loss food from the frozen section. Look at the label. Spaghetti and fish probably have no sugar, but check out how much sugar is in beef tips and turkey with apples. In fact, "sucrose", "high fructose corn syrup", and "sugar" may actually be in the list of ingredients. That's ballsy. It's in the company's best interest to keep you on the hook for as long as possible. If you lose 75 pounds over three years instead of one year, that's three times the profit. Their interests are at odds with your interests. That's why the education this book provides is less expensive than "low-cal" beef pot roast spiked with caramel to give it that pretty brown color.

Gyms and Trainers

$20.3 billion in revenue, U.S. only (2010) International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, Research Numbers http://www.ihrsa.org/research

There's an expectation that when you go to the gym, all the people there are trying to get healthy and the people who work there are trying to help. I can tell you from personal experience that neither of these assumptions is true. Firstly, the largest groups of people who attend gyms are senior citizens -- who are looking to hang out and talk to other people because they're bored. Second, the people who work there are trying to keep the gym in business so they can all have jobs. And the business of gyms is membership sales.

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Gym memberships are three years long. And there's a sign up fee. What do you think the percentages are of people who actually use their gym membership? The number is 35.1% of gym members are classified as "frequent attendees".
International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, Research Numbers http://www.ihrsa.org/research

So if 64.9% of the people you enroll are going to drop out, think how much of the membership fees are pure profit. Gym membership counselors are paid a small fortune in commissions and all they have to do is sell you on the idea that you can eat all the pie you want if you'd just be willing to put in a little bit of effort and a couple thousand sit-ups to "burn" it back off.

Doctors
Primary Care Physician: $186,044 per year, Specialists: $339,738 per year (2009) Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos074.htm

Doctors are worshiped in America. And that's a bad thing because just like in any other profession some of these people were at the bottom of their class. They aren't all perfect. In fact, most are idiots who focus on one specialty and spend their days handing out pills and ointments (snake oil salesmen). According to the documentary Food Matters, "less than 6% of graduating physicians in the USA receive any formal training in nutrition".
Food Matters, Directed by James Colquhoun and Carlo Ledesma, 2008 (DVD, Documentary)

An alcoholic (Guy #1) spends time on a binge -- six years, six months, six weeks absolutely devastating his liver with epic tons of acetaldehyde (the hangover chemical). Then he goes to the doctor and the doctor says, "You have got to stop drinking. Now. Today. Don't wait. Your next drink could kill you." Good advice. Now, an "overeater" (Guy #2) spends six years treating his body like a dumpster behind a bakery. He goes to the same doctor, who looks at the test results -which scream high liver fat and albumin levels through the floor -- and says, "Do
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you drink?" Not a drop. "This might be hereditary. I'll order some tests and call you back in a week. On your way out, be sure and grab a lollypop... it will make you feel better." Something is wrong here. Why wouldn't the doctor sit that person down and say, "Hey buddy. How about giving up the daily tire-sized bowl of ice cream you're sucking down so you can... you know... live another couple of decades"? It's because you can't cure liver cirrhosis with a pill; removing the toxins (alcohol) is the only treatment. But obesity pills alone are a multi-billion dollar a year cash cow. And bypass surgery is another $500 million. And fat people are perpetually sick with any number of other ailments. Doctors love fat people because they usually have good insurance that will pay for luxury cars and yachts and million-dollar homes. I guarantee you that Guy #2 is getting a crap diagnosis and a bunch of pills the next time he comes back. Non-sick people don't visit the doctor, so the doctor has no real incentive to tell people to stop eating fructose because their over-consumption pays for his life. In other countries like China, being healthy is more important than doctors being able to buy gold-plated umbrella stands and satellite TV for their yachts. In America, the priority is on the sick. The "well" don't need television commercials promoting Fakexifin, the impotence/depression/allergy relief medication. The "well" don't need operations to repair blown out knees from morbid obesity. The "well" don't hand out their hard-earned money to megasized pharmaceutical corporations. But the sick do. The sick keep the shareholders happy and as a thank you for selling their drugs, pharmaceutical companies pay doctors thousands and thousands of dollars in kickbacks and vacations and t-shirts and business conferences and cold hard cash. And doctors love kickbacks.

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Drug Companies
$244.8 billion in revenue worldwide (top 10 companies only) Fortune 500, Pharmaceutical Industry Snapshot http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/industries/21/index.html

Pharmaceutical companies are the most profitable companies in the world today. According to Time Magazine, "The prices Americans pay for prescription drugs, which are far higher than those paid by citizens of any other developed country, help explain why the pharmaceutical industry is--and has been for years--the most profitable of all businesses in the U.S."
Why Drugs Cost So Much / The Issues '04: Why We Pay So Much for Drugs by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele; Laura Karmatz and Barbara Kiviat and research by Joan Levinstein, Time Magazine (Feb. 02, 2004) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,9932232,00.html#ixzz1Km3Ww2tC

This is for two reasons. First, drug companies don't do prevention; they do promotion. There's no money to be made by telling people not to smoke, but you can make lots of money by telling people, "Sure. You love to smoke and we love you." and then selling them radiation when they get tumors, anti-bronchitis drugs when they start coughing up blood, and anti-smoking drugs when they decide that looking cool for their friends isn't worth their life. Second, they make sure that at all times they are the ones controlling the message. When a doctor leaves medical school and begins life with his new license, the first people he meets are pharmaceutical reps. They come to his or her office to provide all kinds of free stuff -- lab coats, stethoscopes, pill boxes and personalized stationary. Then they invite them to industry parties where they can meet other doctors. They also make sure that his periodicals all have advertisements for their products. And they make sure that if he or she sells those products, they get a big fat bonus: cash, vacation, and merchandise. When you control the doctors, you control health care.

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According to the CDC, in 2007, a total of 38,371 persons died of drug-induced causes in the United States. This includes use of both legal and illegal drugs, including poisoning from medically prescribed pharmaceuticals.
CDC National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 58. (2010) http://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_19.pdf

Dentists
$142,870 per year (May 2008) Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos072.htm

How much does it cost to get your teeth cleaned? $40? $85? More? Now, why do you need to have your teeth cleaned? Because of plaque. Tooth plaque is made up of millions of bacteria that create a thin film in your mouth (biofilm). When they die, their tiny cells dry up (like undersea coral). Then other bacteria live in between the calcified bodies of their dead cousins. So, how do you kill the bacteria? You can brush your teeth. You can floss. You can use mouthwash. And you can have a dentist scrap those dead bastards off with a metal pick. Assuming he graduated at the top of his class, you shouldn't experience any damage to your enamel. Honest. But that's only for people who live in developed countries. What do people who live in, say, Aboriginal parts of Australia do? Well, they don't grow plaque in the first place. Now, an obvious question would be, "Why not?" Do they have a secret plant that they chew? Do they rinse their mouths with seawater? Is it a parasitic worm that lives in their gums? They don't eat sucrose. You see, unlike in America, native peoples like the Aborigines don't have corner stores in which to buy chocolate covered pretzels and raspberry cheesecake. So their teeth never rot out of their face because they don't feed the few plaque bacteria they happen to pick up in their everyday lives. And since they don't have tooth decay, they don't have dentists. Prevention in action.

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Food Companies
Archer Daniels Midland (world's largest corn processor): $69 billion in revenue (2009) Fortune 500, Snapshot of Archer Daniels Midland http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/snapshots/36.html

In America, corn is king. Selling corn is what we do (it's our number two cash crop behind marijuana). We use bacteria to change it into ethanol (an unsustainable car fuel), cows to change it into porterhouse, machines to change it into trans fats (corn oil), and chemicals to change it into soda pop. The sale and manufacture of high fructose corn syrup is big business and it can be found in every type of conceivable food. And it's poisonous.

The USDA and their Bullshit Food Pyramid

They don't make much at the USDA... until they leave.

The USDA food pyramid is designed to encourage Americans to eat as many agricultural products as possible. It is not designed, as you might think, to encourage good health education. At least the original food pyramid (the old horizontal one) had some semblance of respectability even if the information was questionable. Then the vertical food pyramid came out and was redesigned in such a way that it makes no sense whatsoever. Now -- as of June 2, 2011 -- the new "new food pyramid" isn't a pyramid -- it's a "food plate" (which I'm sure will be easy to Google) with a glass of milk. At least now its understandable again and there's less servings of fruit. It's important to understand that when the people who work in the USDA leave the USDA, they get jobs with agricultural companies. Sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and fructose crystals are all agricultural products. One has to wonder about the motivation of people who update the food pyramid to include vegetable oils at the apex of the pyramid. I stand firmly against eating large quantities of fruit, drinking any fruit juices, and encourage people to get more meat, dairy, and dietary fiber into their diets -- all philosophies that fly directly in the face of the food pyramid.

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The Soda Guys

$51 billion in revenue worldwide (2009) Fortune 500, Industry Analysis http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/industries/5/index.html

The soda companies dabble in more than just soda: they control bottled water, sports drinks, and fruit juices. The soda guys operate billion-dollar advertising campaigns competing against each other for your money... one dollar at a time. They are regular advertisers during the Super Bowl. Soda has tons of salt in it to make you thirsty so you'll drink more soda. Sports drinks are "electrolytes" drowned in a sea of sucrose. Even bottled water -which usually comes at the expense of a rural lake community or a delicate ecosystem -- contains chemicals from the plastic. What they do have is decades of marketing experience that encourages people to choose sides in the "cola wars" and "replenish" their bodies with crap.

Artificial Sweeteners
$3.1 billion in revenue worldwide (2009), $371.4 million in USA (2007) ICIS.com http://www.icis.com/Articles/2009/05/25/9217338/artificial-sweeteners-market-tochange.html

Chemists noodling about in their labs have discovered various chemicals that taste sweeter than sugar. These chemicals would be worthless if millions of Americans weren't already hooked on sweets. The sugar substitute industry projects a benevolent mission to get people off of sugary drinks and foods by providing their products to be used in their stead. The problem is, their actual agenda is simply to sell as much of their product as they can in order to increase shareholder equity and the net result is that their products encourage (not eliminate) the habituating of sugar consumption. One of the most frightening parts of the sugar substitute puzzle is the chillingly ambivalent attitude the industry and its regulators have towards what they refer to as "breakdown products". Their reasoning is that by only drinking one bottle of

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diet soda per week (expected dosages), you can avoid any health risks because at those levels the risk of developing "complications" is minimal. They never discuss long-term effects of over-ingestion of their products. After all, if they did you wouldn't drink the chemicals.

Cancer Fundraisers
Susan G. Komen alone: $389 million in donations (2010) Komen By The Numbers: 2010 And Still No Answers http://cancerculturenow.blogspot.com/2011/03/komen-by-numbers-2010-and-stillno.html

People who raise money for cancer awareness are out of a job once the cure for cancer is discovered... and they have no interest in being unemployed. These people show you sad photos of moms and daughters and sisters who died of breast cancer or fathers who died of pancreatic cancer and that makes you sad. Then you start thinking about your own family and of ways you can help other people not die. Then you start getting loose with the pocket change. And that's where they get you. By the way, when they say, "we haven't found a cure for cancer yet", what they mean to say is, "no one has created a pharmaceutical yet that will allow us to continue eating the crap we eat." After all, where does all that money go? $250,000 goes to the asshole at the top, who drives a really nice luxury car. $100,000 goes to each of his lieutenants, who all drive SUVs the size of your bedroom. The rest is split between the three primary expenses: additional revenue generation (fundraisers, 20%), additional planning sessions in Bermuda (meetings, 20%), and additional funding for the pharmaceutical industry -- the most profitable industry on earth. The true victims of these groups are the people who do all the work for free because they lost a loved one to cancer and they've been suckered in with stories of loss and faith. They are exploited in unconscionable ways.

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IN CONCLUSION...
Now that you're all freaked out, here's the good news.
So you finished the book. And now you're all like: my God, I may never eat again. Or perhaps it's: what have I been doing to myself for all these years? Either way, you're in a better place because knowledge is how you save your life and your money when everyone else is trying to take them.

My Take on Pharmaceuticals
I would also like to take one last moment to clarify my position on pharmaceuticals. I know for a fact that some drugs are not only necessary but have changed the world because of the diseases they have cured. The drugs discussed in this book are not those drugs.

Getting Fired Up
With the new education you've just received, let me ask you this: when your daughter or her friends or a random little girl comes up to you on the street and asks to sell you Girl Scout cookies, how does that make you feel? Or when the school sends home a paper saying that as a way of teaching students the value of a dollar, they're hosting a candy sale and the winner gets a ten-speed mountain bike, how does that make you feel? Or when you think back to all the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches you were sent off to school with in your lunchbox, how does that make you feel? The answer should be, "Fired Up!" because each of these represents a blatant yet widely accepted form of coercion in which sugar companies and their cronies have brainwashed children and then used them against us.

Great Ideas: The Boss Edition

If you're the boss of a company, here are a few ways to make sure your employees don't kill you on medical bills. Remove any vending machines: they consume infinitely more money in health care costs and missed labor than they

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could ever generate. Stop asking your overweight employees to go to the gym: the additional stress on the body can cause even worse medical problems. Encourage the adoption of a fructose-free diet. Ban doughnuts.

Side Effects of Weight Loss

We tend to think that losing twenty pounds would be great; what few of us know is that we're actually fifty pounds too heavy. As you begin to lose weight, there are a few things that I've discovered that you may never have thought about. Your clothing situation is going to become dicey. After all, when your waist drops to a 32 but your pants are holding strong at a 38, you're going to look like you do your shopping at M.C. Hammer's House of Fashion. You can only pull a belt so tight. Eventually, you're going to need to go shopping so keep some extra cash on the side. People who are on drugs -- prescription or otherwise -- should know that as you lose weight, you should also reduce the dosage of the drugs you take. But don't do it yourself. Every twenty pounds or so, check in with your doctor. Several medications are designed specifically for obesity and he or she can take you off of them as you get thinner. But more important than all that, the reduction of overall body mass turns what used to be an adequate amount of hormones into an overproduction of hormones. Just so we're clear here, I'm telling you that there will be times that you're so horny your priest may excommunicate you from the church and your spouse may file for divorce because of your unholy carnal demands. Your mother is going to ask you if you're hungry every hour on the hour. Sometimes she'll call you in the middle of the night to ask if you've eaten anything. Your Nana -- she's such a sweetheart -- is going to think you have cancer and she's going to tell the girls at the Center that you could die at any minute. She's going to make you platefuls of cookies and armfuls of peach pie. After all... even if you explain it to her, she's not going to understand any of this.

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Best Documentaries to Watch

Fat Head (2009) Documentary that covers a lot of this material as background for disproving some of the "science" presented in the pseudo-documentary Super Size Me.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333994/

Food Inc. (2008) A behind-the-scenes look at the food industry as a whole.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

The Price of Sugar (2007) The horrific conditions in Haiti's sugar industry.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1045874/

Food Matters (2008) An examination of billion-dollar health care vs. thousand-dollar nutrition.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1528734/

Best Web Sites/Videos to Read/Watch

Sugar Stacks This site features photographs of popular products with the listed sucrose count expressed in stacks of sugar cubes so you can physically see how much sugar you would normally have been eating. Cute and educational.
http://www.sugarstacks.com/

Fooducate A nutritional blog focusing on sustainability in relation to healthy foods.

http://www.fooducate.com/blog/

"Sugar: The Bitter Truth" Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF talks about the science behind fructose.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

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Competing Opinions
In the interest of fair play, I'm including here a list of sites that I've found that say the opposite of what I'm saying -- just in case you get bored one day and want to hear what pure marketing schmooze sounds like. Livestrong.com - Fructose is Good Lance Armstrong Foundation downplays fructose.
http://www.livestrong.com/article/369988-is-fructose-good-for-you/

The USDA's Chose My Plate Campaign Still pushing their pro-produce agenda, the USDA just came out with a new version of the "food pyramid" that's now a plate. At least the fruit is shrinking.
http://www.choosemyplate.gov/

Calcium and fructose intake in relation to risk of prostate cancer. Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts Claims that eating fruit reduces risk of prostate cancer.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9458087

Genetics of Diabetes The American Diabetes Association has issued a statement that in order to develop diabetes, "first, you must inherit a predisposition to the disease. Second, something in your environment must trigger diabetes." I believe statements like this are to take the public spotlight off of the sugar companies -- the names of which you will find on their "corporate sponsorship" Web page.
http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/genetics-of-diabetes.html

National Library of Medicine - Heart Disease and Diet A great explanation of the reigning medical opinion regarding the other dietary causes of heart disease and hypertension.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002436.htm

National Cancer Institute - Understanding Risk The official policy of cancer prevention including risk factors like genetics.
http://understandingrisk.cancer.gov/

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APPENDIX A: SECRET NAMES OF SUGAR

Garbage by any other name...
If you bumped into a guy on the street and he dropped his wallet revealing seventeen drivers licenses, you'd think something was up. Here is a temporarily complete list of alternative names for sucrose you'll find on your food labels:

Table Fructose Table Sugar Table Syrup Cane-juice Crystals Caramel Demerara Diastatic Malt Evaporated Cane Juice Fructose Fructose Crystals Golden Syrup Malt Syrup Molasses Muscovado Sorbitol (or glucitol) Sorghum Treacle Turbinado (or demerara)

However, glucose (the good sugar) is now increasingly available in products and via health food Web sites. It only needs the one name because it doesn't blind you or turn your pancreas into jelly:

Dextrose Maltodextrin (glucose starch)

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APPENDIX B: THE CHEAT SHEET

Let me explain. No... is too long. Let me sum up.
Here is the whole book, minus all the "why fructose is killing you" and "who's responsible for this outrage" stuff, condensed down to the bare essentials. Tear these pages out and hang them on your fridge. Actually, I'm just kidding (please don't deface my pretty book).

Reading Labels:
Progress through these stages as you feel comfortable:

Stage 1: < 40g Fructose per day, < 20g per meal Stage 2: < 30g Fructose per day, < 15g per meal Stage 3: < 20g Fructose per day, < 10g per meal Stage 4: < 10g Fructose per day, < 5g per meal Final stage for long life: zero fructose while getting as much glucose as needed to stay healthy.
Your new rule of thumb: if it tastes sweet, it's bad for you.

Cravings
You're hooked on a drug (fructose) Occasional cravings should be expected. Honey is a good initial replacement. Try sucking on chocolate chips or other small candy and spitting them out. Still bad for teeth, but you protect your body. They will abate over time and sugar will become distasteful. One day you'll try a soda and it will make you want to vomit. Never feel bad; if you give in, simply start again the next day. Dental problems are caused by both sugars, but eliminating fructose will reverse bacterial destruction of your teeth and gums. Brush after sugary meals or any pasta.

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All You Can Eat:

Whenever possible: fresh, local, and raw Meat: beef, chicken, turkey, pork, ham, scrapple, bacon, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, sausage (not maple), sheep, goats, buffalo, misc. parts. Includes eggs. Pasta (easy on the tomato sauce) Rice Beans Nuts (by the handful if no allergies) Seeds Pizza (light on the sauce) Milk, butter, and cheese Plain cereals (Oats, Rice, Oatmeal) Soups Olives Spices Raw veggies Tea (not iced tea, with 1 tsp of sucrose if you need it) Coffee (with 1 tsp of sucrose if you need it) Whole grain breads

Water:
Filtered is best; tap is fine. Don't drink bottled water ever (petroleum byproducts) With your meals and if you feel thirsty 8 glasses a day is bullshit; too much leaches vitamins/enzymes

Eat Sparingly (check the labels):

Raw fruit Cooked veggies (including fries) Fish (contains mercury, but one fillet per week won't kill you) Shellfish (contains more mercury, eat monthly) Some condiments (plain yogurt, mustard) Beer Power bars/breakfast bars
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Avoid at All Costs (in order of deadliness):

Ice cream, water ice, sherbet, sorbet Soda Dessert toppings Cake, brownies, doughnuts, or pie Pudding/Gelatin Condiments (ketchup, barbecue sauce, honey mustard) Cookies Candy Any sugar substitute, including anything labeled "sugar free", "sugarless", or "sugar substitute". Brandy, rum, wine, and schnapps Chocolate and syrup Fruit cups Dried fruit Iced tea Bottled or flavored water Non-plain cereal Non-plain yogurt Jellies and jams Fruit juices and juice boxes So-called "recovery", "sports", or "athletic" drinks Baked beans Marshmallows Gum Molasses

Alcohol:
Alcohol is a poison. When mixed with sugary mixers, liquors, or fruit juices, the hangover/danger to your body is worse.

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Liquor:
Great - Vodka Good - Gin Okay - Tequila Bad - Whisky/Whiskey (inc. Scotch) Bad - Triple Sec Bad - Most Flavors and Mixers Worst - Rum Horrific - Brandy

Sneaky Foods:
Always check the labels for the following foods:

Coffee creamer Breads Peanut Butter Baby Food Pet Food Red Pasta Sauces International Foods and Sauces Condiments

Vitamins:
Vitamin A can buildup to toxic levels. Don't supplement. Vitamin B-complex once a week; twice a week if you suffer from depression. Vitamin C twice a week for general health. Vitamin E if you suffer an injury (scrape, bullet wound) or if you begin having problems seeing in the dark. Zinc if you're having sex problems. Calcium if you're over 55

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APPENDIX C: ENVIRONMENTAL TOXINS

Fructose isn't the only thing you don't want in your body.
I make reference to numerous other toxins that compete with fructose for expulsion via the liver. Since you can't escape environmental toxins, your job is to minimize your exposure to ensure a long life. Clearly, this isn't a complete list, but rather a quick glance at normal everyday exposure levels. If you participate in any of these bad habits, removing fructose is essential so you won't get sick. The threat level (on a scale of 1 [rare] to 10 [almost certain]) ballparks the likelihood of poisoning and identifies toxins that should be removed as quickly as possible. Carcinogens (cancer toxins) are automatically rated five (5) or higher. Source
Bacteria, Salmonella Bacteria, E. coli Bacteria, N. meningitidis Breathing Smog Breathing Gas Fumes Burning Fumigated Wood Cook, Non-stick Pans Cook, Heated Plastic Dental, Amalgam Fillings Dental, Brushing Teeth Drinking Fruit Juices Drinking Water, Bottled Drinking Water, Tap Drugs, Alcohol Drugs, Cigarettes Drugs, Cocaine Drugs, Heroin Drugs, Crystal Meth Dry Clean Your Clothes Eating Bad Fugu Eating Canned Goods Eating Cake Icing Eating Farm-Salmon Eating Fish Eating Food Coloring Eating Hot Pepperoni Eating Microwave Popcorn

Toxin(s)
AvrA Two enterotoxins Endotoxin NOx, SOx, CO2 Benzene* Ethylene dibromide (EDB) Perfluorinated chemicals Bisphenol-A Mercury Aluminum Methanol Bisphenol-A, Protozoa Pharmaceuticals, Trihalomethanes, Fluoride Acetaldehyde Nicotine, Embalming Fluid, Tar, Arsenic Benzo(a)pyrene, Nitrosamines Cocaine Diacetylmorphine Dextromethamphetamine Perchloroethylene Tetrodotoxin Bisphenol-A Aluminum PCBs Mercury, Ciguatera Petroleum Byproducts Potassium Nitrate Perfluorooctanoic acid

Threat
3/10 1/10 10/10 2/10 6/10 3/10 1/10 2/10 9/10 2/10 1/10 6/10 3/10 7/10 9/10 7/10 9/10 10/10 3/10 10/10 2/10 1/10 5/10 2/10 4/10 3/10 8/10

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Eating Pesticides Eating Fructose/Substitutes Eating Vegetable Oils Eating Vegetables, Fruits Fungus, Aspergillus flavus Immunizations Insect/Reptile Bite Install New Carpet Live, Near Mine Live, Near Chat Live, Near Oil Refinery Live, Mold Live, Anti-Stain Furniture Live, Dust Medical, Chemotherapy Medical, Full Body Scan Medical, Pharmaceuticals Medical, X-Rays Operating, Copier Painting Your House Spraying Scents Swimming in a Pool Taking Supplements Tanning, Outside >45 min. Tanning, Booth >7 min. Touching Motor Oil Wearing Antiperspirant Wearing Deodorant Wearing Makeup

Arsenic, Ethylene oxide Aspartic acid Trans Fats DDT Aflatoxin B1 Aluminum Venom, Histamine VOCs Sulfuric Acid, Methane, Radon Lead, All Heavy Metals Benzene* Mycotoxins Perfluorinated chemicals Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers Alkylating antineoplastics (mustard gas) Radiation Many, including interactions Radiation VOCs Benzene* Phthalates Chlorine, Chloroform beta-Carotene** UVA, UVB UVA, UVB Kerogen, Benzene* Heavy Metals Ethanolamine Formaldehyde, Toluene, Mercury

1/10 8/10 3/10 5/10 9/10 1/10 3/10 3/10 7/10 6/10 8/10 4/10 3/10 1/10 8/10 6/10 7/10 1/10 2/10 2/10 5/10 4/10 1/10 4/10 9/10 10/10 5/10 1/10 2/10

Benzene is, in my opinion, the most toxic chemical known to man; it's ability to cause cancer (carcinogen) is undisputed. Benzene's chemical formula allows it to bond with almost anything, especially the cells of the human body. Simply put, it shreds DNA like a carrot. It is used most often in industrial processing and is a natural byproduct of oil production, soft plastics, and their breakdown. beta-Carotene is a known co-carcinogen -- meaning it helps other carcinogens cause cancer. While not dangerously toxic on its own, overconsumption of beta-Carotene can amplify the threat from toxins in cigarettes (lung cancer) and UVA/UVB from tanning (skin cancer).

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APPENDIX F: RAW FRUIT FRUCTOSE

Raw fruits have been cross-bred to maximize the amount of fructose they contain. As a result, they tend to have a low fiber-to-fructose ratio. The following statistics were provided by the USDA; the dietary fiber (DF) to fructose (F) ratio is calculated with the formula DF/F. Serving size for all listings is 100g of raw fruit and measurements are in grams.

A high DF/F ratio (>2.0) is good. A low DF/F ratio (< 1.0) is poor to horrible.

Fruit Olives, Jumbo Cranberries Lime Raspberries Lemon Blackberries Guava Strawberries Kiwifruit Pomegranates Apricot, Dried Apricot Orange, Navel Blueberries Pear Papaya

Fructose Fiber Ratio GREAT 0.1 2.5 25.00 0.7 4.6 6.57 0.8 2.8 3.50 2.45 6.5 2.65 1.25 2.8 2.24 2.4 5.3 2.21 FAIR 4.46 5.4 1.21 POOR 2.67 2 0.75 4.35 3 0.69 6.4 4 0.63 12.47 7.3 0.59 3.88 2 0.52 4.39 2.2 0.50 HORRIBLE 4.97 2.4 0.48 6.63 3.1 0.47 3.73 1.7 0.46

Fruit

Fructose Fiber Ratio HORRIBLE Grapefruit 3.52 1.6 0.45 Nectarine 3.8 1.7 0.45 Bananas 6 2.6 0.43 Fig 22.93 9.8 0.43 Cherries 5.37 2.1 0.39 Peach, Dried 21.19 8.2 0.39 Peach 3.89 1.5 0.39 Plum 3.82 1.4 0.37 Apple 6.9 2.4 0.35 Tangerines 5.4 1.8 0.33 Plantains 7.5 2.3 0.31 Pineapple 5.12 1.4 0.27 Cantaloupe 4.04 0.9 0.22 Date 31.95 6.7 0.21 Mango 8.18 1.6 0.20 Raisins, Seedless 29.68 3.7 0.12 Grapes 8.13 0.9 0.11 Watermelon 3.96 0.4 0.10

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APPENDIX V: RAW VEGETABLE FRUCTOSE

Vegetables, because they are mature plants, are high in fiber and low in fructose. The following statistics were provided by the USDA; the dietary fiber (DF) to fructose (F) ratio is calculated with the formula DF/F. Serving size for all listings is 100g of raw vegetables and measurements are in grams.

A high DF/F ratio (>2.0) is good. A low DF/F ratio (< 1.0) is poor to horrible.

Vegetable

Fructose Fiber Ratio GREAT Yam 0.25 4.1 16.40 Collards 0.23 3.6 15.65 Spinach 0.15 2.2 14.67 Artichokes 0.5 5.4 10.80 Okra 0.41 3.2 7.80 Watercress 0.1 0.5 5.00 Potato 0.48 2.4 5.00 Garlic 0.5 2.1 4.20 Broccoli 0.73 2.6 3.56 Pepper, Banana 0.98 3.4 3.47 Brussels Sprouts 1.18 3.8 3.22 Eggplant 1.17 3.4 2.91 Celery 0.56 1.6 2.86 Chives 0.93 2.5 2.69 Mushrooms, Portabella 0.49 1.3 2.65 Kelp 0.6 1.3 2.17 Radish 0.76 1.6 2.11 Cauliflower 0.97 2 2.06

Vegetable

Fructose Fiber Ratio FAIR Asparagus 1.11 2.1 1.89 Corn, White 1.5 2.7 1.80 Pea 2.89 5.1 1.76 Cabbage 1.45 2.5 1.72 Lettuce, Iceberg 1 1.2 1.20 Carrots 2.35 2.8 1.19 Squash 0.95 1.1 1.16 POOR Onion 1.79 1.7 0.95 Turnip 1.9 1.8 0.95 Cucumber 0.75 0.7 0.93 Rutabaga 2.8 2.5 0.89 Tomato 1.37 1.2 0.88 Corn, Yellow 2.39 2 0.84 Beets 3.38 2.8 0.83 Pumpkin 0.68 0.5 0.74 Pepper, Chili 2.65 1.5 0.57 HORRIBLE Jerusalem-artichokes 4.8 1.6 0.33

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APPENDIX M: MEAL PLANS

Here are a few examples of a solid, balanced daily meal plan taken from my personal life. Remember: reading labels and developing your own diet is the key. This is more to illustrate how to balance energy vs. micronutrient intake meals. Wait at least one hour in between meals.

Meal 1 Meal 2 Meal 3 Meal 4 Meal 5

Pasta with Chicken Oat Circle Cereal in Milk Handfuls of Nuts Philly Cheesesteak Blackberries

Fuel Fuel Nutrients Cholesterol/Protein Vitamins

Meal 1 Meal 2 Meal 3 Meal 4 Meal 5 Meal 6

Pork Fried Rice, Homemade Steak and Eggs Lemon Peel Plain Bagel with Butter Multi-Vitamin 8 Sausage Links

Fuel Cholesterol/Protein Dietary Fiber Fuel Vitamins Cholesterol/Protein

Meal 1 Meal 2 Meal 3 Meal 4 Meal 5

Chicken with Bacon/Mshrms 2 Slices Pizza, Light Sauce Bean Soup Loaded Baked Potato Chili

Cholesterol/Protein Fuel Fuel Nutrients Dietary Fiber

Meal 1 Meal 2 Meal 3 Meal 4 Meal 5 Meal 6 Meal 7

Eggs with Scrapple Cheese Fries w/ Bacon Pasta Fagioli Broccoli/Sunflower Seeds Creamed Spinach Clam Chowder Shredded Wheat Cereal/Milk

Cholesterol/Protein Fuel Fuel Nutrients Vitamins Cholesterol/Protein Dietary Fiber

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GLOSSARY
Acetaldehyde - the toxic byproduct of alcohol; responsible for hangovers. Acyl-CoA - a natural hepatic co-enzyme that aids in the creation and management of ATP, the molecular units that hold energy stored in fat cells. Amylase - an enzyme that breaks down starch. Antihyperlipidemic - any chemical or agent that kills lipoproteins. Antitoxin - any chemical or agent that neutralizes a toxic chemical. Aplasticity - the ability of the brain to reprogram itself by growing new pathways. Arteriosclerosis - the narrowing of the walls of the arteries leading to the heart, either through cellular inflammation or growth of plaque. Bowel - the small and large intestines. C-Jun N-terminal Kinase - an enzyme that phosphorylates the c-Jun receptors of the liver promoting liver-insulin resistance. Caffeine - a mildly addictive chemical found in coffee that aids in the breakdown of fatty acids. Calorie - a unit of metric measurement defined as the amount of energy required to heat a single kilogram of water by one-degree Celsius. Cancer - the sudden reprogramming of a cell's genetic code to multiply exponentially creating large invasive tumors. Carbohydrate - any chemical composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. This includes saccharides, starches, and almost anything you find in your body. In the food industry, it refers to sugar and starch. Carcinogen - any chemical that causes cancer in mammals. Chemical Addiction - the dependence by the body on a foreign chemical that replaces one of the normal chemicals in a neurological process.
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Cholesterol - a fat steroid produced by the liver and obtained by food that provides the raw materials for every cell in our bodies. Cigarette - a tobacco product containing tobacco, extra nicotine, and flavors. Co-carcinogen - any chemical that prevents expulsion of a carcinogen -- the result of which is an amplification or increase in likelihood of cancer. Cocaine - a manufactured chemical that interferes with dopamine receptors in the brain creating a euphoric "high" and a chemical dependency. Collagen - the most plentiful protein in the human body. Depression - a chemical imbalance in the brain that causes significant feelings of sadness, malaise, unease, or suicidal tendency. Dextrose - the marketing name of chemically isolated glucose. Diabetes - a pancreatic disorder in which either the pancreas is physically damaged and then attacked by the body's own immune system (type-1) or chemically thwarted by muscles and organs unable to communicate with its primary hormone, insulin (type-2). Dietary Fiber - long strings of non- or partially-digestible starches that clean and regulate the digestive system. Embolism - a small scab of coagulated blood that obstructs the flow of blood through a blood vessel. Epidemic - a crisis that suddenly and unexpectedly increases in frequency among members of a particular population. Fat - refers to either the fat cells in our own body or the fat cells of an animal consumed as food. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - the government agency tasked with monitoring the U.S. food industry looking for unsafe products and services.

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Fructose - a monosaccharide created by plants to encourage bacterial growth during reproduction; toxic to humans, a co-carcinogen. Gangrene - the death of body tissue due to lack of oxygenation. Gastric Bypass Surgery (GBS) - a surgical procedure in which a band is wrapped around the stomach to maintain food in the upper chamber triggering involuntary brain signals that stop a person from eating. Glucose - a monosaccharide that provides fuel for all animals and plants. Heart Disease - any number of heart-related medical conditions. Hepatic Toxin - a poisonous byproduct inadvertently created by the liver as it breaks down an ingested chemical or food. High-density Lipoprotein (HDL) - a lipid-protein structure in the bloodstream that carries used cholesterol away from cells. High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) - a chemical sweetener manufactured using corn sugar and acids. Honey - a supersaturated glucose-fructose suspension created by bees. Hyperglycemic - high blood glucose. Hypoglycemic - low blood glucose. Insulin - a hormone used in a wide array of bodily functions, including the management of glucose within the bloodstream. Insulin Resistance - the inability of a body part to read signals provided by the pancreatic hormone insulin. Jonesing - to want something really, really bad. Lacing - to mix in or intermingle in such a way as to avoid immediate detection. Lactose - a glucose-glucose disaccharide unique to milk.

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Leukocytosis - an attack on a person by his or her own immune system. Liposuction - a surgical procedure in which fat cells are removed from the body. Liver - a vital organ in humans responsible for detoxification and digestion. Low-density Lipoprotein (LDL) - a lipid-protein structure in the bloodstream that carries nutrients to cells. Maltose - a glucose-glucose disaccharide found in grains. Microbiota - a unique collection of multiple types of bacteria. Nutrition Facts Label - an information label provided on manufactured food packaging that provides micronutrient levels. Obesity - a ratio of fat disproportionate to what a skeleton can handle. Palliative - any object or substance used to transition off of another more addictive or dangerous object or substance. Pancreas - a gland organ in humans responsible for the production of hormones, enzymes, and digestive juices. Pandemic - a crisis that suddenly and unexpectedly increases in frequency among members of multiple populations, groups, or cultures. Pathogen - a harmful bacterium. Percent Daily Value - the amount of a given micronutrient compared to the recommended daily allowance as suggested by the FDA. Plaque - a cohesive formation of small cells, fibers, or organisms in which the units hold each other in place by friction or chemical bond. Poisoning - the ingestion of any chemical that disrupts one or more of the consumers chemical processes at a rate grater than it can be expelled. Political Incorrectness - the collective sense of inappropriateness surrounding an action or topic of conversation as dictated by a cult leader or politician.
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Process Addiction - the enjoyment of a habit to the point that ending it is contrary to the happiness or perceived self-interest of the addict. Starch - a long, complex string of many glucose molecules. Starvation - the emergency cannibalism of vital organs to replenish depleted blood glucose levels. Steatohepatitis - the toxic buildup of fat droplets in the liver. Stroke - a blockage of a blood vessel in the brain depriving it of oxygen. Sugar - a catchall marketing word that describes one of several monosaccharides (simple sugars), disaccharides (paired sugars), and polysaccharides (complex sugars). Sucrose - a fructose-glucose disaccharide manufactured from dehydrated plant essence extracted from sugar beets and sugarcane. Sweetener - any chemical or saccharide added to food to artificially increase the perceived level of sweetness. Toxic Horizon - the point at which any given person, based on body mass, exposure, overall health, and chemistry will experience poisoning. Toxin - any chemical that does not belong in the body. Trans Fat - an unsaturated fat that provides no fatty acids or benefits. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) - the government agency responsible for oversight of all things grown or raised on a farm. Uric Acid - a toxic chemical compound responsible for several ailments including gout, kidney stones, and arteriosclerosis. Wasting - the sudden evacuation of the fat cells in response to chronic toxicity. Withdraw Symptoms - a negative physical or emotional reaction to the removal of an addictive or habituating substance.

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