Childhood Obesity and the Magic Pill
Have you ever wished there was just one thing you could do, one thing you could take to lose weight and improve your health? There’s sooo many weight loss programs, so many exercise machines, Where do you start? What is the right program for me? What is the right program for my children? The answer is in the title of this article ” Childhood obesity and the magic pill” and the answer is not what you think.
In your search for the “Magic Pill” you want to look at your life style, your child’s life style and see if there is something you could NOT do to improve your health and lose weight. There is a growing epidemic of obesity that is sweeping through the nation and across the world. The changes in the lifestyle of Western societies from a previously more active one to an increasingly more sedentary one. This is closely followed by the change in diet over the last thirty or so years from a predominance of home prepared and cooked meals to an unhealthy preference for convenience foods. And what comes with convenience foods….? Soda drinks. And who likes the soda children.
Soda drinks come in many flavors, but can be broken down into two major groups. Soda sweetened with sugar and sugar substitutes and soda sweetened with artificial sweeteners. The sugars used to sweeten soda drinks are mainly derived from refined sugar, which is labeled on cans or bottles as sucrose, fructose or dextrose. The second group of soda are those sweetened with artificial sweeteners. The most common artificial sweeteners used in today’s “sugar free” or “low calorie” soda drinks are aspartame and sorbitol. Everyone knows that drinking soda sweetened with refined sugar is not healthy and it makes you gain weight. So you switch to soda sweetened with artificial sweeteners. The problem with that is aspartame and other artificial sweeteners interfere with the way the brain registers hunger or fullness and fools it into believing that we’re still hungry.
So the “Magic Pill” is not something you take, it’s something you do not take. Just eliminating soda drinks from your diet improves your health ( no more aspartame, no more sorbitol ) and you’ll lose weight. Well that just left a big hole in my life. How do I fill it? The President’s wife and the President want to make us more like the Europeans so here’s a substitute for the sweet sodas we Americans love. Chill some plain water in the fridge, then add a squeeze of fresh lemon, or lime and drink it with some crushed ice. This is totally thirst quenching, tastes great and as one of nature’s great weight loss tips, is healthier for you than you can know!