Note From Jim

Did you see the big headlines last week on caramel coloring in soft drinks?  Yep - they are pretty potent carcinogens in animals.  How do you respond to that headline?  "Well what doesn't cause cancer? " Or "Well, I won't be drinking any more cola!"   Or somewhere in between?  

I find these headlines make people want to give up on trying to figure out how to eat.  That's why looking back over my years of practice at LaValle Metabolic Institute   - I realize one of the best changes we made was adding dietitians to our staff.   They help our patients take all the confusing and exasperating mix of diet information and know what is most important, and then show them how to eat to achieve their goals, because you can't get it all from supplements either.

I remember one of our patients who came to LMI wanting help with energy and weight.  She started taking supplements and felt better, but didn't make a commitment to our diet.  Try as she might, she couldn't achieve her weight goals.  I told her she needed to change her diet.   Having tried it her way, she realized it was true.  Long story short, she made an appointment with one of our dietitians, and that made the difference.  They found ways to implement a healthier diet based on whole, unprocessed, low glycemic, low allergenic foods that worked for her and went on to help her lose a lot of weight.

Eating healthy in today's world, especially in the United States, is not that easy.  As opposed to European countries like France and Greece for example, our culture has valued convenience more than it has valued healthy food and meals.  So, time and again I find myself referring people to a dietitian for help with the job of healthy eating.

With that in mind, I hope you enjoy this month's article in which our LMI dietitians discuss the recent headline and more. Look, it's important to avoid potential carcinogens, of course, but there is actually a bigger reason to avoid soft drinks in general and it has nothing to do with the food dyes.  Read on to find out what that reason is and to find out how to eat to have the most impact on cancer risk, without making yourself crazy!

Yours in health,

Jim 

Diet and Cancer - Help Us Help You!

by Laura B. LaValle, R.D., L.D. and Katherine Wight, R.D, L.D.

Do any of you remember a few years ago when Pepsi Cola introduced a product called Pepsi Free?  This product was cola flavored but not cola colored.  Perhaps the Pepsi Cola company had an inkling back then that there might be potential risks involved with caramel coloring, or perhaps it was just in response to what was happening at the time where some of the red and yellow food dyes were ordered off the market by the FDA .  In general, since food dyes had been a problem, it seems they saw reason with the logic that since food dyes don't do anything other than turn a food into an artificial color, why consume them?  

But it didn't matter because people had been so conditioned to their cola being brown; Pepsi Free flopped and was dropped by the company.  Maybe this time, if consumers are properly educated on the risks of caramel coloring, they will do the right thing and learn to accept products that taste the same but just look different.   In other words, support food manufacturers when they are trying to help you!   

We have always maintained that eating healthy comes down to two things - trying to reduce your intake of the things that are bad for you and trying to eat as many foods that contain health-promoting nutrients and phytonutrients as you can.  That's not always as easy as it sounds, we know, especially with all the attention grabbing diet headlines that pull us back and forth so much sometimes we don't know what to do.  In reality there are some pretty simple but powerful ways to lower cancer risk.   One recommendation in particular not only lowers cancer risk, it helps reduce risk of diabetes and heart disease as well.  That is good news for many of you. You only have to be willing to do it.

Diet and Cancer: Sorting It Out

Attention grabbing headlines linking diet with cancer tend to be divided into two camps: the substances that promote cancer (environmental chemicals, food additives, diseases and drugs) and those that protect against cancer (foods, phytochemicals, antioxidants).   We'll discuss three main areas of diet that are strongly correlated with increasing cancer risk - sugar, some meats and some food additives. Caramel coloring is an example of the latter.  So what is the story?

Animal tests found that two chemicals in caramel coloring are linked with several types of cancer in rats and mice[i].  Because of this the nonprofit group The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is calling for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban artificial caramel coloring used in soft drinks and other foods.  They are also arguing that the labeling phrase "caramel coloring" is misleading when describing caramel color because it is made with chemicals like ammonia or sulfite.  So at the very least they are calling for more accurate labeling names such as "ammonia process caramel" or "ammonia sulfite process caramel." At the end of the day their position is 'why gamble on colorings that only serve a cosmetic function in the food supply?'   

We couldn't agree more, but because the cancer findings are from animal studies, it is very difficult to assess how much risk it actually poses for humans.  Why take any risk is the CSPI's point and that point is well taken, but if you really loved soft drinks, would that be enough to make you stop drinking them?   Well what if we told you there were other more powerful reasons to think about giving up soda?

Refined Sugars and Flours

What if we told you in addition to containing carcinogens, soda consumption can increase cancer risk significantly by increasing glucose and insulin levels, and this assertion is based on human studies looking at large numbers of people.   High glycemic index foods such as soft drinks increase the body's production of insulin.

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