By Colleen Huber

By now you have probably read enough to understand that sugar and sweets should be crossed off your grocery list. But actually kicking sugar and eliminating cravings is a difficult feat, as its many fans know all too well.

Battle of the Sweets

As monumental a feat as quitting tobacco is, giving up sugar can be even harder. The biggest problem is that most people are sugar-addicted and there is no strong aroma that causes others to chase sugar eaters outdoors, as happens with smokers. This makes eating sweets easy, clean and socially feasible in the home and in public places. Further, the social isolation of smokers has forced them to acknowledge their addiction and the difficulties that tobacco creates in a smoker's life. This acknowledgement is a crucial threshold to cross in their healing journey.

But the showering of sugar on our children and almost universal addiction to sugar allows a comfortable blanket of denial to settle over our minds and lifestyles. This denial blinds us to the growing problems accumulating in our arteries, heart, nervous system, kidneys and other internal organs. Sugar is not seen as a public health problem, although it is the most entrenched, widespread and relentless one.

What makes giving up sugar even harder is the many different methods proposed by the various experts.

Diets That Attempt to Break the Sugar Addiction

Most famously, Dr. Robert Atkins advised to simply give up sugar and other high-carbohydrate foods altogether, while consoling oneself for the loss with unlimited high-fat and high-protein foods. This diet has worked miraculously for many people, in both weight loss and improved well-being. Yet for many others, large quantities of proteins and fats are not at all digestible or appropriate for their nutritional type.

Dr. Barry Sears' The Zone offers some simple sugars in the diet along with mostly healthier foods, but this just keeps the addiction going and does not heal the main problem of sugar cravings.

Dr. Arthur Agatston's The South Beach Diet urges minimizing sweets, but also includes such items as ice cream and bread, which contribute to the long-term torture of a frequently teased addiction.

A similar problem occurs with The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet by Drs. Rachael and Richard Heller, in which a "reward meal" is available in the evening to those who have denied their sugar cravings during the day. This also keeps a sugar addiction regularly fueled and stoked, ultimately resulting in frustration for the trusting dieter. These diets are as defeating in the long run for the sugar consumer as one cigarette a day -- for years -- is for the smoker.

Writers such as William Duffy (Sugar Blues) and Nancy Appleton (Lick the Sugar Habit) have dealt with the problem of sugar addiction by warning of the medical horrors of long-term sugar consumption and by advocating complete avoidance. The diets exclude sugars and Dr. Appleton advocates chromium and glutamine supplements to replenish the sugar-ravaged body and to stabilize sugar cravings.

Another workable diet, which is less well-known than most of the preceding works, is The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program, by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D., in which the dieter works in stages, going "slow carb" first before "low carb." Slow carbs are those that are accompanied by a lot of fiber or protein, which slow down the entry of sugar to the bloodstream.

Quitting Sugar in Three Steps

1. Substituting whole grain bread for white bread, steel-cut oats for other cereals, sweets with protein for sweets alone and similar substitutions makes the important first step of taking the sugar addict from the volatile glucose-insulin roller coaster of extreme highs and lows to a more moderate fluctuation of biochemicals and hence moods, cravings and sensations.

2. After these transitional foods, and once in the more moderate rhythm of blood analytes, the dieter is in a much stronger position to handle a reduction, then elimination of simple sugars. In Des Maisons' book, the last cold-turkey withdrawal is still a bit of a cliff jump, but she certainly strengthens the dieter toward that end more effectively than most other writers in this area.

3. The final step of giving up sugar with the help of chromium supplementation has been established as beneficial.¹ It is also useful for the dieter to understand which other nutrients are affected by high sugar states and low sugar states (both of which are visited by the sugar addict on a daily basis), and to know how to substitute healthier foods that contain those same needed nutrients.

For example, sugar cravings and sugar rebound involve deficiencies of the following nutrients:

• Chromium, which may be found in broccoli, cheese, dried beans, calf liver and chicken
• Carbon, which may be found in fresh fruits
• Phosphorus, which may be found in chicken, beef, liver, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, nuts and legumes
• Sulphur, which may be found in onions, cranberries, horseradish and cruciferous vegetables
• And tryptophan, which may be found in cheese, liver, lamb and spinach

In the case of chocolate cravings, magnesium is also deficient, and may be found in raw nuts, seeds, legumes and fruits.^2,3

The Final Answer

Ultimately, the way to win the eating game is to choose the healthiest foods possible in the widest variety available, with respect to your nutritional type. However, for the sugarholic, some extra care with the above substitutions will be a necessary component of breaking the chains of sugar addiction.

This article is continued in Part 2

Colleen Huber, 46, is a wife, mother and student at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., where she is training to be a naturopathic physician. Her original research on the mechanism of migraines has appeared in Lancet and Headache Quarterly, and was reported in The Washington Post.

Her double blind placebo controlled research in homeopathy has appeared in Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, European Journal of Classical Homeopathy, and Homeopathy Today. Her website Naturopathy Works introduces naturopathic medicine to the layperson and provides references to the abundant medical literature demonstrating that natural medicine does work.

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

Eliminating sugar from your diet is critical to optimizing your health, as future naturopathic doctor Colleen Huber's piece well describes. Along with sugar, grains pose as a challenge and often unidentified risk. Most grains break down to sugar very rapidly and can cause the same problems with insulin dysregulation. One key to ridding yourself of the addiction is complete abstinence from all sugar and grains. Complete abstinence resolves the biochemical addiction, however it will be very important to eat every two hours to avoid symptoms of hypoglycemia. This is usually necessary for several days to several weeks. As Huber points out in her article, the best way to win the eating game is eating the healthiest foods for your nutritional type. To learn what foods are good for you and to fight and prevent disease, take my free nutritional typing test. Without this knowledge this test provides, you are dangerously sabotaging your ability to improve your health, and are bound to experience ongoing frustration that can easily be avoided. If you want to dig deeper into nutritional typing as well as learn about the right combinations of proteins, carbs and fats you need to be healthy, consider my book, TOTAL HEALTH Program. While most people are able to find success in overcoming their physical addiction, they are still left with the emotional addiction. While this is very challenging to overcome, I have seen major improvements with the use of the energy psychology tool EFT. You can use my free EFT manual to learn this technique, or you can seek assistance from the many trained EFT therapists that are available. And if you are not addicted to chocolate but just want a healthy alternative that will curb your craving for sweets or chocolate, try our new energy bar - the Protein Bar. Specially formulated by myself and a team of nutritional experts, Protein Bar is a nutritional powerhouse loaded with a perfect balance of healthy fats, protein and fiber that will truly nourish your body rather than contribute to disease (like so many of the unhealthy bars on the market today do) ... Plus, it really tastes delicious! Related Articles: Eating Our Way In And Out of Our Symptoms Children's Food Demands: Do You Have to Give In? The Toxic Bucket: How Environmental Medicine Unloads the Burden of Synthetic Chemicals From the Body How to Cook Whole Food From Scratch--and Keep Your Day Job! Yes, You Can Become Addicted to Sugar Yes, You Can Be Dependent on Sugar References: Chromium picolinate supplementation at 1,000mcg per day for a 13-week period together with exercise lowered total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and insulin levels in a study of both males and females. J Nutr Biochem, 1998;9: pp.471-5. Lectures, Cheryl M. Deroin, N.M.D., Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, Tempe, AZ. Spring, 2003 (healthy food recommendations). Bernard Jensen, Ph.D., The Chemistry of Man, B. Jensen Publisher, 1983. (deficiencies linked to specific cravings and some food recommendations)