Dr. Mercola, June 11, 2012
beer belly
If you’ve paid any attention to the US news over the past week, you’ve surely heard that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed a ban on the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces, in an effort to combat obesity.
The announcement was made just days before Mayor Bloomberg celebrated National Donut Day in Madison Square Park, where, on June 1, the largest box of Entenmann’s Donuts ever created was proudly unveiled.
Bloomberg’s plan would prohibit the sale of cups or bottles of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces from restaurants, delis, movie theaters, sports arenas, street vendors, and any other establishment that is regulated by the New York City Department of Health. According to CNN, the NYC Department of Health will submit the proposed measure to the Board of Health on June 12. The board will then accept comments for next three months, after which it will make its decision. If approved, the proposal would take effect six months later—as early as March of next year—and restaurant owners would have nine months from the adoption of the proposal to comply before any fines would be levied.
According to Bloomberg, New York City spends $4 billion a year on medical care for overweight people, and he wants to “do” something about that. CNN recently quoted the Mayor as saying.
“This is something we think we have the legal authority to do. We¹re not taking away anybody’s right to do something; we’re simply making it different for them in how they do it.” He said he hoped the move will help lead to different behaviors.”
Dr. Wilson comments:
I certainly agree that Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban is a diversion from where we should be focusing—on the type of food that we are consuming. There is now no doubt that sucrose (sugar) and HFCS are chronic toxins akin to cigarette smoking.
When you mix these elements with rapidly absorbed carbohydrates, especially from grains, you also end up frying your brain. Excessive fructose from sugar and HFCS drives insulin resistance and central obesity. When you consume rapidly absorbed carbohydrates and have insulin resistance, your brain is subjected to toxic glucose spikes. These glucose spikes eventually cause mitochondrial dysfunction and lead to depletion of important neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin.
Initially this leads to a situation where you start to crave sweet and starchy foods—the very foods that are frying your brain. At this point you have a condition we call “sugar-brain”. Because it takes a healthy brain to auto-regulate fat stores, when you have sugar-brain you start to store extra total body fat even when you are dieting to lose weight. That’s how you end up with normal sized “obese” people—they have too much fat in their body even if their weight and BMI are normal. In a sense people with sugar-brain are stuck in a bear-in-fall metabolic mode where they store extra fat regardless of how much food they eat.
Over time sugar-brain can transition to a serious chronic medical condition called Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome. People with CARB syndrome develop up to 22 brain dysfunction symptoms that interfere with their ability to function and they continue to store a lot of extra fat. At this stage they are often incorrectly diagnosed with depression, ADHD, PTSD, eating disorders, bipolar II, anxiety disorders, fibromyalgia and similar conditions.
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