My guest today is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci, author of five books on the Paleo Diet, and creator of The 30-Day Reset Diet, an easy-to-follow, delicious plan that will detox and transform your body. We’ll be talking about how the food you eat can make your body healthy or sick, and how you can change your body condition dramatically in just 30 days. She’s a board-certified naturopathic physician, board-certified chiropractic physician, certified nutrition consultant, certified in biological medicine, certified in Chinese medicine, and certified in First Line Therapy, a program designed to help practitioners teach patients to reach genetic potential through nutrition. She’s written five books on various aspects of the Paleo diet. She publishes several websites and even delivers paleo food to your door. www.drkellyann.com, www.livingpaleofoods.com, www.superkidswellness.com

                                         

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Putting Real Food First: How the Paleo Diet Can Help Your Body Detox, Lose Weight, Balance Blood Sugar and a Whole Lot More

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Kellyann Petrucci

Date of Broadcast: January 23, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.

It is a toxic world out there. There are lots of toxic chemicals in the food we eat, the water we drink, consumer products in our homes, in our bodies, in our schools, in our workplaces. It seems like every place we go, everything that we touch might be toxic and it’s in the news every day.

But there are many, many things that you can do to make your life toxic-free, remove toxic chemicals from your home, from your body and that’s what we talk about on this show. And today, we’re going to talk about toxic foods, and how you can get the residuals of those toxic foods out of your body in 30 days.

My guest is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. She’s the author of five books on the Paleo diet and creator of the 30-Day Reset, an easy to follow, delicious plan that will detox and transform your body.

Now, get this. Listen to all these. She’s a board certified naturopathic physician, board certified chiropractic physician, certified nutrition consultant, certified in biological medicine, and certified in first line therapy which is a program designed to help practitioners teach patients to reach their genetic potential through nutrition.

So, she’s a very interesting person. And she’s written some very, very interesting things about food and what we can do about our bodies.

Thanks for being with me, Dr. Kellyann.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Oh, it’s a thrill to be here. As I told you, I’ve been a fan of yours for many, many years. You provide the absolute top-notch best out there when it comes to toxic-free living. And your website has been a great referral source for my patients for many years.

DEBRA: Well, thank you so much. So, tell us what inspired you to be interested in how food harms or helps your health.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Well, a couple of things. You talked recently about my degrees. And all of that doesn’t really matter as much as spending time listening to patients. That has made the greatest difference and has been the [heartiest] education that I’ve had above and beyond all.

It’s been a matter of listening to patients. When you see patients, you pick up common trends. You start hearing the same things. You start seeing the same things. So you kind of put these pieces together.

So that, in addition to what was going on with me and in my life that really made an impact really caused me to pull out what I call my ultimate Nancy Drew, to really dig in and find out what is our nutritional blueprint.

Debra, I totally crashed. I hit rock bottom. I got in my forties. And you have to understand, this is someone who have focused their entire life on consumer health in every way, shape or form in terms of education, in terms of having a clinic and seeing patients, extracurricular every year. My fun for me was reading the Diabetes Journal. It was not Seventeen Magazine. And I kid you not, fun for me has always been going to seminars and so forth where I learn more about this. I mean, it’s in my blood. It’s who I am.

So, when I got into my forties, I crashed and I burned in every way possible. And I’m somebody who didn’t smoke, drink and do all of these things, and eat a lot of toxic foods. I thought, “Oh, my gosh! If this is happening to me, what does this mean for the rest of us? What’s causing me to crash and burn?”

My hair got thinner. My skin started losing all of its [pallor]. My skin went from being beautiful to not being good anymore. I started gaining weight like crazy. And the most important thing, vitality is really how you really determine health, right? it doesn’t matter, you can be fooled by how someone looks. It’s really their cellular health which we’ll talk more about which gives you the buoyancy in life, which gives you the vibrations and says, “I’m healthy.” That’s what does it. And that’s what I lost.

And that was my edge I life. I had buoyancy. I had vibrancy. I had great energy and effervescence. And that was gone.

DEBRA: I totally understand. I went through a similar thing myself. I’m very interested.

In my life, early in my 20’s, I became ill from toxic chemical exposure. And so when I started recovering from that, when you’ve had something that that’s dramatic, then you say, “Oh, well, the whole entire problem is this. And all I need to do is just recover from the toxic chemicals, and I’ll be healthy.”

And I did recover from the toxic chemicals. I’ve been living in a completely non-toxic home for so many years. But that didn’t mean that it solved all my health problems.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Hmmm… great point!

DEBRA: And what I’ve come to learn over the years is that it’s just not about removing the things that are bad for you, but also giving your body the things that are good for it.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Exactly!

DEBRA: And so I’m going to say something because I think a lot of people do this. And that is that if all your attention is on toxic chemicals, then you’ll say, “Well, I’m not going to eat any food additives. I’m not going to eat any pesticides. So if I eat everything that’s organic, I’ll be fine.” And so then you’ll go and you eat organic chocolate and organic potato chips…

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Everyone, listen carefully to this. After 20 years of seeing people, what Debra is saying is one of the most important things that everyone needs to hear—exactly what you’re saying.

DEBRA: Me too! Thank you. Because that’s what I did. I said, “It’s organic, so it’s okay.” And I ate a lot of processed, packaged organic foods. I spent a number of years writing about 300 recipes for using those great organic sweeteners in the natural food store. Whole Food sweetener is great! And yet…

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: I’m laughing because it’s exactly why I crashed and burned in my 40’s.

DEBRA: Yeah! And I ate soy earlier in my life—not so much later because I found that soy really messed up my hormones.

But earlier in my life, I was like, “Oh, we’ll eat all these soy burgers” and stuff like that. And just one by one, I kept following whatever was the new thing in the natural food industry—and I’m saying “industry” in big emphasis.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: You nailed it!

DEBRA: What we’re about to talk about today has nothing to do with industry but has everything to do with the way that we should be eating.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Yes. And you brought up a lot of great points. That is what happened to me. I think the most common problem that we have is when people go gluten-free, and they say, “Well, as long as it’s gluten-free…”

DEBRA: Oh, my God, yeah.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: …and they buy packages of this and packages of that. I will tell you, this all started with me, and I have to give you a little back story, but I did a lot of fitness contests and so forth while I was in school. It was very much a part of who I was at that time.

And when I worked with a trainer, the first thing he did—a gym said, “We want to sponsor you in this contest that we’re having.” I said, “Great!” “So we’re going to have you work with somebody that we work with all the time that will help you get really lean and strong.” The first thing this trainer said was, “No gluten.”

Well, I couldn’t believe what happened. I couldn’t believe how strong, how lean. But most importantly, I had a health problem, a really terrible health problem called endometriosis which means, every month, I was doubled over in pain. My mother was at her wit’s end with me growing up because I would have to take three or four days off of school to manage this problem because it really was debilitating in every way. That went away, completely dissipated.

That anchored me into thinking, “Wow! This is the way to go. This is the way to eat. I’m not eating gluten anymore.”

So, I went about my life. I bought all of my gluten-free foods and so forth. And hence, the story goes forward, I crash and burn.

So, I said, “Well, I’m in the solutions business. This can happen. I have to give people the right information, solid information, and research-based information.” Everything I talk about, I can talk about in front of massive groups of people because I have science standing behind me, solid science—not soft science, but solid science that says in fact that we do a have a nutritional blueprint. There are ways that we can eat that work best with our bodies.

And I think, today, what I’d really like to talk to people about is when you work with Debra and you’re listening to her, she talks a lot about pesticides, heavy metals, other industrial pollutants in addition to all of the other pollutants that she talks about in the home and everywhere, they exist and there are ways to handle them. And Debra has great programs to do so. But what I would really like to talk about today are dietary toxins which are different.

DEBRA: And we’re going to do that right after this message. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

My guest today is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. We’re talking about real foods first, a diet that will make your body healthy. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK=
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. She’s the author of five books on the Paleo diet, and we’re talking today about her 30-Day Reset Program where you can eat the proper foods and have your body do wonderful things.

Dr. Kellyann, before we go on, I just want to put in my two cents about the gluten-free diet and what I think is wrong with it. I went through a similar experience with I stopped eating gluten. And I had this ongoing thyroid. And even though I take a thyroid supplement, and I’ve done lots of things to detox my thyroid and everything, it still was just out of control. And the doctors couldn’t figure out why my TSH was so high.

And then, I read a book about thyroid that talked about that you should go on a gluten-free diet, and I did. And within 30 days, instead of being abnormal, my TSH was normal. It was normal.

Now, this was with the supplement. But remember, before, taking a supplement wasn’t fixing it. But what fixed it was the gluten-free diet.

What fixed it was that I stopped eating gluten. But what people generally do is that they go out and buy all these gluten-free products that are basically made from starch.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: They’re made from potato starch, and they’re made from corn. And everything else just crushes what I call our internal terrain in every way.

DEBRA: Right! It’s all processed foods.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Mm-hmmm…

DEBRA: And even, the other day, I bought some bean pasta, pasta made out of beans. I thought, “Oh, this is great!” I ate them, and I made my blood sugar go way up. And I thought, “What’s wrong with this?” And what’s wrong with it is it isn’t the bean. It’s the starch from the bean without the rest of the bean.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Exactly, exactly!

DEBRA: And so you have to be real careful when you buy all these packaged foods. In fact, I rarely buy packaged foods. I just eat whole raw foods.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: You just can’t!

DEBRA: You can’t because it’s not a whole food. It’s not real. And it says on the package beans. It doesn’t say bean starch. It says beans. This pasta is made out of beans.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Trickery at its finest. Trickery at its finest. That’s why you really have to be able to navigate through the store.

You are going to love this program. Your listeners are going to love this program because it really speaks to that. The 30-day

Reset really teaches us, in every food group, what is the healthiest food that you can possibly give your body. And I determine that by what is going to reduce that inflammation, what is going to melt that inflammation out of your body, because one in five now have autoimmune problems. You just talked about your thyroid. I mean, it’s one in five now. That’s crazy! I mean, diabetes and all of these intestinal problems, Crohn’s, colitis. It’s a real problem.

So, you really have to melt that inflammation out of the body. You’ve really got to stabilize the blood sugar. It’s so important. And probably, the most important thing that you can do starting today is heal your gut.

DEBRA: I totally agree.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: The foods that I recommend, I simply took all of the foods that you’re programmed to eat, that you’re genetically programmed to eat, make no mistake about it. The healthiest foods within those categories, feed your body with those. Feed your cells with these foods. Get the toxins out of your cells, get the nutrition into your cells.

And a lot of the success behind the program is in the simplicity, and also, you get rid of what I call the dietary toxins.

DEBRA: Now, tell us about what a dietary toxin is.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Sure! Different than pesticides, heavy metals, other industrial pollutants. This is not about that.

This is about how food is metabolized and digested in your body. And if it’s not done correctly, it becomes a toxin.

A toxin is anything that’s capable of causing any kind of disease or damaging cells when it enters the body. And there are foods that damage cells when they enter the body. And I have my top four big hitters.

DEBRA: And what are those?

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: And that is wheat and grains, sugar, oil—bad oils, let me clarify that. And we’ll all go through these—bad oils, and soy. Getting rid of these four components, these four dietary toxins and replacing them—that’s the key.

It’s not about getting rid of. This is not about being extreme. This is not about having a difficult diet. This is about swapping. This is about this for that.

So, the dietary toxin, wheat, we talked a little bit about that. Really, you have to remember, in life, as humans, we are designed to always look for balance and survival. So, the balance is homeostasis. Our brain is always scanning our body looking for ways to find that balance. And it’s always struggling for that survival.

And the funny thing is plants are no different. Plants compete for survivals against predators—just like we do.

DEBRA: Hmmm… I haven’t ever thought of that.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Yes! But see, animals can run away. Plants can’t. So they developed a mechanism for protecting themselves. This is the interesting part. They’re called anti-nutrients. And basically, a lot of these plants like wheat, millet, rye, barley, they produce toxins that damage the lining of the gut.

They also produce toxins that bind minerals. And you don’t want that because that creates what you call nutrient deficiency.

And when your body is deficient of nutrients, it is a Pandora’s box. It’s an open door for every modern day disease out there.

And also, they produce toxins that inhibit the digestion and absorption of proteins. And we need proteins for about every cell and every structure of the body.

So, there really is problems with grains in terms of producing toxins that wreck your gut. And I talk about those three things—inflammation, gut and blood sugar stabilization. So right off the bat, they really create terrible damage to the gut. That’s why you want to avoid that dietary toxin.

And the other dietary toxin, and probably the most important to me, is when we talk about oils. You’ve got to swap out what we call the industrial seed oils for the healthier oil.

So, these industrial seed oils may surprise people, but they’re not healthy. And these are things like corn oil, cottonseed oil, soy bean oils, safflower, sunflower. And it’s the reason why it has a lot to do with the balance of Omega-6 to Omega-3.

So, the right balance is 1:1. I mean, that’s what our ancestors ate, a 1:1 balance. That’s how we’re really programmed. But that’s not what we get anymore. Since the industrial revolution and these oils have come to be, these processed oils, we’re now getting 25 times more of the bad fats, the bad oils than we should be. And this is big trouble because this is inflammation.

DEBRA: We’ll talk more about that after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. We’re talking about her 30-Day Reset Program. Stay tuned!

= COMMERCIAL BREAK=
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. And we’re talking about her 30-Day Reset Program.

You can go to her website. It’s DrKellyann.com. And right at the top, you can get a free download called 7 Steps to Paleo that will give a lot more details about this than we can give in just an hour on the radio. And right below that is the 30-Day Reset Program. So you can see both of those right there. And that’s DrKellyAnn.com.

And right below that, it says, “Tune in to Toxic Free Talk Radio.”

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: You can’t forget that.

DEBRA: And it shows all the TV shows that Dr. Kellyann has been on. And one of them is Daytime. I’ve been on that show.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: I noticed that we’re both on that same show. And we had the same interviewer as well.

DEBRA: Oh, really?

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Yeah!

DEBRA: Okay! So now, tell us about what we can actually eat on this diet. I want everyone to know, I read this thoroughly, this whole 30-Day Reset thing. And it sounds delicious.

The thing that really appealed to me about it is that probably a lot of you listening are already eating a lot of these foods. But I’m also cheating. And I think if I eat this little bite of this one day a week or something, then it doesn’t matter. But when it does matter, and what you learn in the Reset program, is how you really need to do it for 30 days with no cheats so that your body really goes through a whole transformation that it doesn’t do when you eat even little, tiny bits of those foods that aren’t good for you.

And after I read this, I decided that I’m going to do the program for the next 30 days.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: And coming from somebody like Debra who reads so much and has so much thrown at her desk…

DEBRA: I do!

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: That’s a huge compliment, I have to say.

DEBRA: Thank you.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: I’m as excited as you are. I’m as excited as you are because I know it’s going to happen. I know the magic is going to happen.

And you talked about, well, if a little bit of this, a little bit of that, one of the most important things that you can create—and I tell this to patients all of the time—is something called food values. And when you really key in and lock into this, and start really understanding that—

My whole thing here is about getting rid of all the confusion, all the clutter in your diet. Get rid of it all. Nothing is faddy. This is not trendy. This is good ole’ back to nature foods, the foods that we ate that got us healthy before we started cluttering up our diet. That’s all this is.

And we talk about having a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Well, for these 30 days, you’ve got to white knuckle it. For these 30 days, if you go to day four, and you say, “Well, there’s a wedding this day, I’m having a piece of wedding cake,” sorry, buster, it’s back to day one.

DEBRA: Yeah, it really is. I mean, that’s what I do. I’ve been studying food for a long time. I started cooking when I was six.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Wow!

DEBRA: And I love to eat. I used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. We had plenty to eat, plenty of restaurants to go to—not so much here in Florida. But I mean, food is a pleasure for me. I love to cook, I love to eat, it’s a social thing. We all have our favorite foods from the past. We have our comfort foods. We have the foods that our grandmothers made. And yet, what we need to do in order to be healthy is we need to just eat what nature provided for our bodies to eat—and it’s not industrialized foods. It’s not factory farm foods.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: It’s absolutely not.

DEBRA: It’s as close as you can get to nature; it’s really it.

So, I’ve known this for a long time. I’ve read a lot of books. I totally agree with the idea. But what ends up happening for me is that it’s really hard for me to go to that party and not just eat all these free food. I think, “Oh, it’s just tonight. And tomorrow, I’ll go back on my diet.” And that has helped, but it has not given me breakthroughs.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Well, you need the tips, the tricks and the traps.

DEBRA: Yeah! And I need to know that I’m on a program that I’m going to do it for 30 days, and I’m not just saying, “This is how I’m going to eat Monday through Friday, and then on the weekend…”

You know, there are actually diet books that say, “Stay on this diet for six days, and on the seventh day, you can eat anything you want.”

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Step into the commonsense corner of our brain. Is that nonsensical to you or is it just me?

DEBRA: Well, they tell you that you should do this so that your body will keep burning the fat and that you won’t go into that plateau mode. But it’s not giving you the transformation.

I’m really glad, when I read your material, that there is a transformation. And it comes from your body releasing all these toxic stuff and getting into—

We’re going to have to go to break pretty soon. But I just want to say you said something earlier about our intestines, our guts.

Every single person on the planet, unless you’ve done something to heal your intestinal flora and fauna, everybody has a messed up gut. Everybody!

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Let me just piggyback off of that. I want everyone to get a visual. Your intestines is about 25 feet long. And that’s about 10,000 sq. ft. of surface area. And within it, there are literally trillions—listen, trillions–of cells. So this is a really big deal.

And if they are not locked in and strong and working like an army for you, you’re in trouble. Inside your gut, there’s something called Peyer’s Patches. And these are your immune guards. This has everything to do with immunity. You can look at someone’s skin when you’re trained in my business, you can look at someone, and you know the health of their gut by the way they look on the outside. It has a huge impact.

And I love what you said. Yes, everyone, if you have modern day foods, your gut is wrecked.

DEBRA: Everybody. And it’s not just the foods, it’s also the toxic chemicals because what happens is, as your body processes the toxic chemicals, they go through your liver, and then they go through your intestines. That’s how they get out of your body.

If your intestines are not working to move this stuff along, the wastes from your foods and the toxic chemicals, it all goes through your gut.

And if you have Leaky Gut Syndrome or something, those toxic chemicals just go right back into your body if the stuff is sitting in your gut.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Hence, the autoimmune problem. Hence, the amount.

DEBRA: Yeah! And so, it’s like there are very simple things like having gut problems—which everybody does unless you fixed it—from all these exposures that everybody just has in normal life that if you don’t fix it, then it results in all these illnesses.

And the interesting thing to me is that there are these simple things that you can do like the diet that we’re about to talk about and removing toxic chemicals in your life. And doing those simple things fixes everything.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Everything!

DEBRA: Yes, yes.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: It’s what I call the magic. I always say, “Just hang tight, and wait for the magic to happen.” I can’t wait! I want to tell you a little bit about my patient, Drew, when we get back because it really is an astonishing story.

DEBRA: We need to go to break, but we want to hear about Drew. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here with Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. Her website is DrKellyann.com. You can go there and find out all about what we’re talking about. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. And we’re talking about her 30-Day Reset Diet Program, which I announced I’m going to go on. I’m actually starting today. I already started. And when we get off the air here, I’m going to go have my salad for lunch with protein.

So, basically, the foods that you get to eat—because you get to eat a lot of different foods. You get to eat vegetables, of course, non-starchy vegetables. But there’s a lot of vegetables. And salad can be really fun.

You can eat fruits, fresh fruits. You can eat proteins. You can eat seeds and nuts. But no beans, no cheese, no sugar, no sweetener of any kind (only fruit). Did I get all that right?

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: So, sweeteners and so forth, we talk about in our Paleo for Life program which is coming out what to do after the 30 days […] You really get to have fun with all of these foods and expand upon these foods. There really is a lot to eat!

DEBRA: Well, let’s just stick to the 30 days because that’s where we are now.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Yeah! Yeah, of course.

DEBRA: Let’s not get confused. So first, it’s pretty limited for the 30 days, but you do get to eat fruits and vegetables. And fresh fruits and vegetables, you can cook them. You can have spices and herbs and protein and nuts and seeds. And that’s a lot of foods. There’s a lot you can do with that.

I’ve been cooking since I was six. So I know a lot about cooking. And I feel comfortable just taking any list of foods and doing anything that I feel like with them. But if you’re not that experienced with cooking, Dr. Kellyann gives you the shopping list, she gives you recipes. They all look delicious. Anybody can really do this. So, she’s just giving you every detail, so that even if you don’t know how to cook or anything, you can do this.

And so, I’m going to be doing it, and I’m going to be blogging about it on my website every day. I’ll tell you what I’m eating, what I’m doing with the foods, how I’m doing, how much weight I’ve lost, et cetera. So join me! You can do it too.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Oh, it’s going to be so fun. We’re going to have a really good time. I can’t wait until the results come.

So, like you said, we’re eating a lot of fresh, lean proteins. We’re eating vegetables—both starchy and non-starchy vegetables.

There are some approved starchy vegetables. A great one is sweet potatoes. We talked earlier about trying to find pasta, trying to get that pasta-like dish. Being Italian and growing up on the stuff, it’s something that I had to find, “if not this, then that.” And for me, having spaghetti squash, really terrific! Making some of that spaghetti squash, you shred it super easy with a fork. Put some wonderful sauce on top of it. I have to tell you, what a great meal!

And for those out there that are involved in any kind of activity, working out or sports, nothing fuels your body and gets that glycogen back into your muscles, refuels your body, like having some sweet potato or spaghetti squash.

Pumpkin is another one. Even jicama, if you haven’t tried jicama, what a great vegetable.

DEBRA: I love jicama.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Isn’t it wonderful!

DEBRA: I do!

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: It adds a lot of crunch in a salad.

DEBRA: Yeah.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: And it gives you that sweet flavor.

Kohlrabi is another one. If you haven’t tried kohlrabi, it’s really cool to go out and try some new vegetables. Kohlrabi is another one. It’s another starchier vegetable that gives you kind of a sweet, crunchy tang. And I can’t tell you how many people I’ve turned on to it that just absolutely loves it.

But there are all kinds of ways that you can get these approved starchy vegetables. And that’s what keeps you going. That’s what gives you the energy that you need to keep refueling and to keep going.

And then, you have your healthy fats. Your healthy fats are a really important part of this. And when you start feeling like you have cravings and so forth, there’s nothing like these healthy fats that really gets you grounded. It takes those cravings away. It makes a huge difference.

And again, we talked about the gut. The healthy fats really get in there.

DEBRA: Tell us what the healthy fats are. Tell us what they are. Tell us what the healthy fats are.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Sure! One of my favorites is the coconut fat. I absolutely love coconut fat for a couple of reasons.

And I’m talking about coconut chips which are absolutely delicious. And I can tell you a quick and easy snack to make with them. It’s absolutely fantastic!

I also love to cook with coconut oil. That’s a really good one. You can add coconut milk. I like the full fat version. It’s important because the full fat versions actually are the ones that don’t have any of the stabilizers or anything else in them. They’re just plain coconut milk.

These are so good for healing the gut. They’re so good for making the skin beautiful. Almost every station I go on, I have to mention this because women want to hear this particularly. It’s like the natural wrinkle-eraser.

DEBRA: Oh, good!

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Yes! We need that, right?

DEBRA: We do!

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: And it makes your eyes pop and white. And Debra, you know better than anyone on the planet.

This is happening because the toxins are leaving your body.

DEBRA: Right, that’s exactly right.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: The toxins are leaving your body. And you’re getting that glow. You’re getting that sheen. And coconut helps get you there.

But the most important thing about coconut oil is that you can crank that sucker up. You can crank the heat up when you are cooking, and you will not destroy the oil. It can take a very high heat. We’re talking now about smoke points. But basically, you can just turn the heat up really high, you don’t have to worry about damaging the oil.

Why don’t you want to damage the oil? Because the oil oxidizes, it gets rancid. And rancid oils means rancid bodies. And when we think of rancid bodies, we think of inflammation, one of those top three tier things I always talk about. We talked about blood sugar, healing the gut, and inflammation. We have to combat those three things. It’s necessary to be healthy beings. So that, we have to be careful.

I love olive oil It’s a great oil. But here’s the thing. It’s a drizzle oil. You can’t heat the oil up very high with olive oil. Very low temperature with olive oil or it oxidizes. That’s a fact that most people—when I speak to people in public, they’re always surprised to know that. Yes, you have to watch and understand a little bit about smoke points. Some oils are better to cook with than others. And I love cooking with coconut oil for that reason. It’s just not a concern.

Also, in terms of dairy, the one form of dairy that I find people can have on this 30-day Reset—and the only kind that people can generally tolerate fairly well—is butter from grass-fed cows.

DEBRA: Ah, that’s exactly what I eat, butter from grass-fed cows.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: And it’s perfect! And the reason why it works is because it’s got CLA’s.

DEBRA: Phew! I can have my butter.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Yes, yes! Isn’t that wonderful? It’s got CLA, conjugated linoleic acid. And these are not only an amazing cancer-fighting agent, but they also help you tolerate the butter.

And ghee, ghee is actually the butter with all of the milk solids out. And again, you can put that sucker on the highest temperature, you’re not going to destroy the ghee. You’re not going to destroy the butter from grass-fed cows. You’re not going to destroy the coconut oil.

They make you look and feel great. So I’m a huge proponent.

DEBRA: Well, I don’t want to interrupt you, but we only have about three minutes left on the show, and I know you want to talk about Drew.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: I do! I wanted to just say quickly, if you’re thinking about the 30-Day Reset, I wish I had Drew with me right now because he would tell you how amazing it is. He has a blood sugar of 353. As he called it—I didn’t, he said it—“I was heading for disaster.”

His wife is a nurse. She called me from the parking lot of the hotel freaking out, afraid that she was going to lose her husband of I think 33 years of marriage with three beautiful children. She was completely distraught. When I told her, “Just food, Pam.

We are going to cure this with just food. Trust. Believe.” And she did.

And I’m so thankful she did because he’s lost over a hundred pounds and has completely normal blood sugar. He lost quite a bit over the 30 days. He continued on the path for 30 days because he said, “There’s no way I’m going back. I can’t believe the way I feel.” He said, “I’ve never had a normal blood test in my entire life. They’re all coming back normal to the dismay—total, total dismay—of all of my physicians. There’s no way I’m going back.” He’s a hundred pounds thinner. He looked amazing, feels good. It was a huge success.

DEBRA: It’s so amazing about how toxic industrialized food is and what will happen to your body when you stop eating it. It goes beyond the toxic chemicals that are in it. Denatured is probably a good word.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: I love that word.

DEBRA: How de-vitalized, it’s just like all the life goes out of the food. And if you eat whole, real, organic food, pasture-fed, all those kinds of things, your body will respond to those foods being alive and having the nutrients in them that nature intended to feed the body that nature designed that you have. I just can’t say enough to emphasize that.

Any time in my life when I have really focused on doing that and just forget about the industrial stuff, my body always gets better. And so now I’m going to do this for 30 days, and we’re going to see what happens.

Dr. Kellyann, thanks so much for being on the show with me.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: My pleasure!

DEBRA: Again, you can go to DrKellyann.com. And you can get the free download of 7 Steps to Paleo.

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: Can I say one thing, Debra?

DEBRA: Sure!

DR. KELLYANN PETRUCCI: I’m offering it special on my 30-Day Reset for Debra’s listeners. It is until the end of the month.

You put in the code TOXICFREE. So, you go on to the 30-Day Reset on my website, DrKellyann.com, you’ll see it right on the front page, 30-Day Reset. Hit that button. When you go to buy, hit in TOXICFREE. And this is only for Debra’s listeners.

DEBRA: Good! And you can also go to ToxicFreeNutrition.com on my website. And you can read an article by Dr. Kellyann.

And starting tomorrow, I’ll have posts on my food blog at DebrasHomeCooking.com about my experiences doing this every day for the next 30 days.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

My guest today is Nancy Appleton PhD, author of many books about sugar and other aspects of natural health. started writing and lecturing about health in the late 1970s as a reaction to her own poor health. Her discoveries about sugar and other common diet mistakes led to her first bookLick the Sugar Habit, which is still chugging along as a 25-year bestseller. Six more books have followed. Her latest is Suicide by Sugar. Dr. Appleton has also encapsulated her life’s work into the movie Sweet Suicide. She is semi-retired and living in San Diego. www.nancyappleton.com/141-reasons-sugar-ruins-your-health

                                 

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
141 Reasons Sugar Ruins Your Health

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Nancy Appleton PhD

Date of Broadcast: January 20, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. And today, we’re going to talk about sugar, sugar, sugar—one of my favorite subjects.

I, in the past, used to love sugar. I grew up on sugar. I used to eat sugar three times a day. I used to eat dessert instead of meals. I’m telling you all my horrible habits. But I stopped doing that—how many years ago now has it been? Maybe 10 years ago.

It took its toll on my body, and I learned to be very happy without sugar.

And so today, my guest is Dr. Nancy Appleton, Ph.D. She has written many books about sugar based on her own health situation as well. She has a very wonderful list on her website, which is NancyAppleton.com. She has a list called “141 Reasons Sugar Ruins Your Health.”

So we’re going to talk about the dangers of sugar. I actually consider sugar, refined white sugar, to be a toxic chemical that we should be removing from our lives. I have. And it seemed to me, at the beginning, how am I ever going to live without sugar.

But I can tell you that today, your body actually decides that it doesn’t want it after a while, that it gets used to not having it.

And today, if somebody could offer me the most delicious sugar dessert in the world, and I wouldn’t eat it because my body doesn’t want it, and I don’t want it. I don’t want those devastating effects.

So thank you for being with me, Dr. Appleton.

NANCY APPLETON: Hello, Debra. And I’m Nancy.

DEBRA: Nancy, okay. Nancy, thank you. So you’ve written a lot of books on sugar. Lick the Sugar Habit has been a 25-year bestseller. Tell us how you became interested in this.

NANCY APPLETON: Well, I was sick. Like you said, it took its toll on your health; it certainly has taken its toll on my health. I was a national junior tennis champion. And so if I’d win a tennis tournament, I’d treat myself to two hot fudge sundaes.

DEBRA: I’m only laughing because that’s what I used to do too.

NANCY APPLETON: And then if I’d lose a tournament, I’d treat myself to a whole bag of Oreo cookies. So winner or loser, I was a loser, you see.

And this went on and on and on. I knew it was wrong. I would put the Oreo cookies underneath my car seat on the way home from playing tennis, and take them out one at a time because I know watching 40 Oreo cookies disappear off of the seat was not a good idea. As long as I hid them and just ate one at a time, it was okay.

I mean, the rationalization that people put themselves through in order to appease their addiction is ridiculous!

DEBRA: I understand. And it is an addiction. It really is an addiction.

NANCY APPLETON: It certainly is an addiction. How did I get started? I’m not sure. My sister was not one. I was the one who had all the cavities as a dentist. I had pneumonia for the first time when I was 13 years old. I would hide the stuff as I’ve said.

We had what we’ve called the [inaudible 03:50]. I lived in LA. And it was a bakery truck. And so I would meet the helmsman down the street before it got to our house. And I would pick out all these different things and hide them in my room. And my mom would pay the bill at the end of the month, and she didn’t even look to see who had bought water, whatever.

And so for the first 40 years of my life, I was extremely addicted. I was 25 pounds overweight. I was sick continually.

And why did I change? I read a book called The Pulse Test. Do you know what that book is?

DEBRA: I don’t know that book.

NANCY APPLETON: What it says is take your pulse when you wake up in the morning, and see what it is. Take up some foods you think you might be allergic to, take your pulse again in 10 minutes, and if it goes up or down 10 beat, you know you’re allergic to that food and it’s creating illness in your body.

Now, I didn’t do sugar. I know I was a sugarholic. Why should I check sugar? I was addicted to it. So I said, “I think milk might do this to me.”

So, I tried it. And my gosh, it went up about 15 beats per minute. And did that get my attention?

DEBRA: So you eat the food, and then you take your pulse immediately after you eat the food?

NANCY APPLETON: Ten minutes about.

DEBRA: Ten minutes. I’m going to try that.

NANCY APPLETON: Do! Do three or four foods. Of course, you could try sugar, try dairy, try wheat, try soy. Those foods that I’ve just mentioned are the foods that many, many people are allergic to. So it really gets your attention when all of a sudden, you haven’t run, you haven’t talked to anybody, you haven’t done a darn thing except sit at the table waiting for the 10 minutes, and you watch your pulse go up.

Mine never went down. Mine went up. But the book said up or down.

DEBRA: Wow! So, you figured out that sugar was something that you were allergic to and addicted to, so what was the thing you did next? You started writing your books in the late 1970s. There weren’t a lot of books then about sugar.

NANCY APPLETON: I’ve written, I guess, three books on sugar. And then I’ve done a video called—what’s it called?

DEBRA: Suicide by Sugar? Sweet Suicide.

NANCY APPLETON: Sweet Suicide, thank you very much. It’s an hour video. It gets your attention if you’re not a reader. They all go into different things. I’ve learned over the 40 years that I’ve been writing, but I won’t change one word in Lick the Sugar Habit, which was my first book. Everything I said then is still the same. We just finally know a lot more.

I can’t tell you how many times doctors walked out of my lectures, nurses would walk out, I get put down on radio programs, unbelievable what I went through. And I wouldn’t give up.

DEBRA: Well, I’m glad that you didn’t. I’ve been around long enough. I’ve been doing what I do for more than 30 years. And so I’ve seen that over time, things that we used to think were perfectly fine, a lot of them we’re finding now that they aren’t.

People used to think that cigarettes were fine, that you could smoke, and then we found out that they cause cancer. And one by one, there’s so much more information about what’s harmful now from our industrial world than we knew 30, 40 or 50 years ago.

NANCY APPLETON: That’s true.

DEBRA: We’re finding there’s been a lot of evidence for a long period of time that sugar is very harmful to the body. And we keep finding that more and more. It’s becoming more and more accepted.

NANCY APPLETON: Finally, a lot of research is being done. Let me just tell you the latest research that I have read. It was a study—this is not a small study—of 56,000 people in one of the Scandinavian countries (It’s one of them), and the US was another.

It was written up in two journals—the British Journal of Medicine and a nutrition journal, a very good nutrition journal in the US.

And what it said was, for over 11 years, they watched these 56,000 people. And when they died of heart disease, they tested their cholesterol and started testing different blood things. And what they found out is that 75% of the people who died of heart disease had normal cholesterol—75%.

What’s going on here? What did they die of then?

So, they continued looking, and they found that it is an elevated blood glucose and an elevated insulin. Insulin is what the body needs to help bring the blood glucose back down to normal. And when both of those are elevated, you’re in trouble. And that’s what they found.

So, eat all the fat you want. Eat all the fat you want.

DEBRA: Eat all the fats you want. Don’t eat sugar.

We need to take a break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Nancy Appleton, Ph.D. She’s the author of the 25-year bestseller, Lick the Sugar Habit, and other books about sugar. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about the 141 Reasons Sugar Ruins Your Health.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Nancy Appleton, Ph.D. She’s the author of Lick the Sugar Habits, Suicide by Sugar, Killer Colas, Lick the Sugar Habits, Sugar Counter, and actually, other books about natural healing that have nothing to do with sugar.

But you can go to Toxic Free Talk Radio. Take a look at the description of the show and her bio, and there’s a link to all of her books on Amazon.com, so you can see all of them. You will see all of her book covers. You can click on those individually in order to purchase those if you’d like.

Her website is listed there—NancyAppleton.com. And there’s a lot more information on her website and her books than we’re going to be able to cover today. But hopefully, we’ll get across the idea to you that sugar is not the best thing for your body, and give you some tips on how you can remove sugar from your life.

So Nancy, let’s go to your list of 141—no, it’s 143.

NANCY APPLETON: Well, if you look at my website, this book was written five years ago. I think there are 149 now. Every time we find a new one, we keep adding more to it.

DEBRA: So the first one is sugar can suppress your immune system. Do you want to tell us more about that?

NANCY APPLETON: I’m sorry. Say that again, please?

DEBRA: The first one on your list is sugar can suppress your immune system.

NANCY APPLETON: Yes. That’s probably the most important one of all of them because once your immune system becomes suppressed, that means that you’ve opened the door to all infectious and degenerative diseases because those white blood cells, which are your immune system, can’t function correctly. They can’t do what they’re supposed to. They can’t remove toxic substances from your body.

So that should be number 1 through 10. Sugar suppresses the immune system.

DEBRA: Yes, I agree, and especially in the winter time, during cold and flu season, if you don’t want to be catching those bugs and being sick. A good thing to do is to just stop eating sugar because the more sugar you eat, the more difficult it’s going to be for your body to fight just an ordinary cold and flu, the more difficult it is, as you said, for the immune system to process toxic chemicals, and things like that.

Even if there weren’t another 148 reasons, that to me is reason enough.

So number two is sugar—

NANCY APPLETON: By the way, we should also say that all these have articles from medical journals, articles that are double blind placebo studies. So these are not just things that I learned in my practice as I went along in my life. All of them have an index, a bibliography of exactly where this information comes from.

DEBRA: I said at the beginning that I consider refined white sugar to be a toxic chemical. If you read a toxicology book, first of all, you were talking about allergies earlier. Allergy is considered in toxicology books to be a toxic reaction. It’s a toxic effect.

So you could read this whole entire list, and I hope everybody who’s listening will go to Nancy’s website and read this list because we’re not going to get through all 141. But the list reads like—and this is only one substance, the list reads like a poison control center book. All of these things, any toxic chemical, that is a manmade industrial chemical is going to have these kinds of symptoms and effects, and yet, this white sugar that we’re using just on a day-to-day basis, it’s just sitting on every table and restaurant. It’s just so common. It is as toxic as anything else that—

NANCY APPLETON: Debra, I have to say that it’s more than white sugar that is doing this.

DEBRA: Okay, go on.

NANCY APPLETON: Sugar has many forms. Agave syrup or nectar, malt, beet sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, cane syrup, confectioner’s sugar, crystalline fructose sugar, crystalline fructose state sugar. I can go on and on. I’ve just done about a fourth of them that I knew five years ago—and there are more today.

And it is any sugar that is processed. Go out and chew the cane. Go to Hawaii and go get a piece of cane and chew on that.

Actually, it takes something like nine inches of cane to get one teaspoon of sugar.

DEBRA: Yes, it is something like that.

NANCY APPLETON: That would take you a long time to chew nine inches of cane to get that sugar.

DEBRA: So what you’re talking about is all processed sugars.

NANCY APPLETON: Yes, I am.

DEBRA: What about—

NANCY APPLETON: Honey is not processed, but it still has glucose and fructose in it. And those are the substances that are killing us. I don’t care what you want to call it, or really, whether it’s processed or not, because again, I used that cane just because you’d have to chew and chew to get—you could take a whole teaspoon of honey, and get five times as much as you could chewing for a half-hour on a piece of cane. I do believe that any substance that has fructose and glucose in it—

Sometimes, agave syrup or nectar is about 90% fructose and 10% glucose. And agave nectar is probably the worst thing you can eat because it’s not the glucose, it’s the fructose in the sugar molecule that is killing us off today.

Everybody is saying, “Oh, this new thing, agave nectar,” forget it. Fructose and agave nectar are both real killers. Go back to your table, sir. It’s 50% glucose and 50% fructose.

DEBRA: So what about fruit actually? You just drink on fruit.

NANCY APPLETON: Good question. Fruit, of course, is a wonderful substance. It has fiber, and it has lots of vitamins and minerals. It goes through the body slowly. And for a healthy person, fruit is a good substance because of all of its good things and because it goes slowly.

But fruit juice, let me tell you, has the same—an eight-ounce glass of grape juice, orange juice, or I think it’s the—what’s the third one? Grapefruit juice maybe it is—have the exact same amount of sugar as a Coca Cola of 10-ounces too.

DEBRA: I need to stop right there because we need to go to break. But we’ll talk about that more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Nancy Appleton. We’re talking about sugar.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Nancy Appleton—author of four books, maybe more, about sugar, and its health effects. And we’re talking today about how sugar can affect your body, and how we’re going to get off of sugar and become more aware of the sugar that you’re eating.

Nancy, I just want to say that when I was a child, my grandmother would always make some sugar dessert for me. She would either make—she lived about four hours away, and she would always make a cake, or she would make cookies. I still have her cookie jar that I would always run to. The second that I would walk into the house, I’d run to the cookie jar and see which kinds of my favorite cookies that she had baked for me.

I remember her saying—at the end of a meal, I would say, “Grandma, what can I have for dessert?” And she would always say, always, always, she would say, “Have a piece of fruit, honey.”

And I’d say, “No, grandma. I don’t want a piece of fruit. I want cookies. I want cake.”

NANCY APPLETON: Where did you grow up?

DEBRA: In California.

NANCY APPLETON: That’s interesting because grandmas—of course you’re a younger generation than I am. But at that time, unless you had quite a bit of money, you didn’t eat that much sugar.

DEBRA: Well, I was born in the 1950s. And so I was growing up in 50s, 60s, going to my grandmother’s, running in and wanting my sugar. And by then, sugar was very inexpensive when I was a child. Sugar was just all over the place—all over the place. It’s just very, very common.

So before we go on to talk about the solutions to this problem, I just want to read a few more items on the list of 141. It can cause juvenile delinquency in children. It can elevate, we all know that it can elevate glucose and insulin levels. It can cause hyperactivity. It can reduce the body’s ability to defend against bacterial infection.

It leads to chromium deficiency, to copper deficiency. It interferes with absorption of calcium and magnesium. It can cause hypoglycemia. It causes premature aging. It can lead to alcoholism, tooth decay, obesity, ulcers, gallstones, heart disease, appendicitis, hemorrhoids, varicose veins.

It’s practically anything that you would go to a drugstore and buy over-the-counter drug for. You could just stop eating sugar, and the symptoms might go away.

It can increase cholesterol, food allergies, diabetes, change the structure of the DNA.

It’s just a good all-purpose toxic thing.

NANCY APPLETON: That is so right.

DEBRA: You want to cause problems in your body, eat sugar. I shouldn’t laugh because you and I have both been through this ourselves, and there are so many people that are listening that I know are still sugar. But this is just one thing.

I want to say, it’s one simple thing that you can [inaudible 00:22:19]. It’s not so easy to stop eating sugar. How did you stop eating sugar?

NANCY APPLETON: It’s easy. I did it many times.

DEBRA: I’d like to say what I did to stop eating sugar. So when I’m saying I stopped eating sugar, I was eating a lot of refined white sugar and high fructose corn syrup, although at the time, it wasn’t so prevalent as it is now, the high fructose corn sugar.

I was eating a lot of basic white sugar.

And what I did was that I started looking at other alternative sweeteners, the stuff that’s being sold in the natural food store.

Until I decided, I figured out well for myself, and I understand that you don’t agree with this, but I’m going to tell you what worked for me.;

So I started eating the natural sweeteners instead of the refined sweeteners. Even though there’s still glucose and fructose, the refinedness makes your body absorb it faster than if it’s in its whole form. And I ended up developing about 300 recipes for how to make anything you could possibly eat with sugar with a natural sweetener.

And what I found to my surprise was that the more I ate the natural sweeteners, the less I wanted to eat them. Where the white sugar was very addictive, the effect of eating the natural sweeteners was that I just lost interest in them entirely. I didn’t want to eat them anymore.

And that’s still true for me today, that I’d much rather eat whole food than eat something sweet. And that really surprised me.

That was my remedy.

I know there are lots of other ways to do it, including just cold turkey. But it is an addiction. It’s really hard to stop and not go back to it.

NANCY APPLETON: Many people say on radio programs or those talk shows, they call in, and they’re like, “Help me! I’ve gotten off of tobacco. Alcohol is no problem. But sugar is the problem. I cannot get off of it.” Yes, it’s just as addictive as any of the other substances.

DEBRA: So what do you recommend for helping people get off sugar?

NANCY APPLETON: Well, I don’t recommend that they do it cold turkey because they could go through withdrawal symptoms. And by that, I mean, they could have a temperature, they could shake, they could perspire, they could just feel terrible, they could have a headache—all of those things. And then they’re going to go, “Well, just give me a couple of teaspoons of sugar, and all of this will go away.”

DEBRA: Yeah. And it does.

NANCY APPLETON: And it will go away too. But it comes back of course. So I don’t believe that people should do that. They should slowly get rid of their sugar. If they drink coffee with two teaspoons of sugar, make it one teaspoon, and then a half a teaspoon. And hopefully, they’ll get into teas and herbal teas, but we’re just talking about sugar right now. And so, going slowly.

What I did with my kids is I actually swiped home. I was in England. Laurie was about 10, and Greg was about 6. I said, “Okay, kids. When you’re over here, there’s no luncheons. You’re not at school. You’re with me 24 hours a day. And we’re going to get off sugar.”

So the first week, I said, “Okay, you can go anywhere you want and have anything you want.”

One kid would go to the milkshake store and get a milkshake. Another one would go to the cookie store and have a cookie.

The next week, it was half of that. The next week, it was a fourth of that. We were there one month. And after that, that was the end of the sugar in my household.

DEBRA: I think that method works. I think it does. And I think that everybody, it’s a new year, I think everyone should try cutting down on your sugar. It really did surprise me to find that I didn’t want to eat sugar anymore after. I used to eat bags of cookies.

We need to take another break, but we’ll be right back and talk more about sugar with my guest, Nancy Appleton.

NANCY APPLETON: Okay, let’s talk about Valentine’s Day.

DEBRA: Wait. After the break. After the break. Okay, Valentine’s Day, great idea.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Nancy Appleton. We’re talking about sugar, and Nancy wants to talk about Valentine’s Day.

NANCY APPLETON: Well, it’s coming up. And chocolate companies and sugar companies make a lot of money over that period of time. And I just thought it might be a good idea to give some suggestions that can still mean love and sweetness and all the good things that we relate to sugar unfortunately.

DEBRA: Well, tell us some of your suggestions.

NANCY APPLETON: What I want you to do is get a piece of newspaper, and make a pattern of a heart. You can make it any size you want. Make it just six inches, approximately six inches. And fold it in half, and cut it, so that both sides are even. And if you don’t like that one, tear it up and make another one. And you’ll finally come to the one that looks correct for you.

And then you can go to the grocery store, and they have these—what do they call them? They’re white lacey—

DEBRA: Doilies.

NANCY APPLETON: Doilies, that’s the word I want. Thank you. Paper doilies that you can put underneath that, or you can fold it (an accordion folding), and make a hole outside of it, so that it has a pretty doily on the outside.

And then, in the center of this thing, you want to cut a hole. And it depends on how big your heart is to start with, or how big your heart with a doily on it is as to how big the hole will be. But then you can buy two or three roses, or whatever, and put them in the center. And then get a little vase and you can have just a wonderful Valentine’s gift that will probably last longer than any candy will.

DEBRA: That sounds adorable. I have a heart-shaped cookie cutter. But instead of using it to cut out cookies, I use it to cut out vegetables. And then you can have a salad that’s all full of little hearts with tomatoes, and bell peppers, and beets.

NANCY APPLETON: Good for you. That’s a great idea.

DEBRA: I think hugs and kisses are much better than chocolate anyway.

NANCY APPLETON: I think they’re a great idea. But we’ve got to get away from this idea that on holidays, Halloween, the list goes on, birthdays, [inaudible 30:03] and christenings, that sugar is the answer—it’s not. And there are many different things that you can do at different holidays to give the same idea that you love this person.

DEBRA: Yes, I totally agree with you. So before the break, you were talking about how a glass of fruit juice has as much sugar in it as a Coca Cola.

NANCY APPLETON: Yes, you can just pick up a Coca Cola and take out a glass or a can of orange juice or a plastic container, or whatever, and just start reading. And you’ll see that they have the exact same amount of sugar.

Now, you’d say, “Well, Nancy, one of them is made from either cane or beet or high fructose corn syrup, and the other is made from a natural substance.” It doesn’t matter. It still hits the bloodstream very fast because there’s no fiber in it.

That’s the difference between fruit juice and fruit. Fruit has the fiber in it. It goes slowly through the body. And fruit juice goes zap just like sugar goes zap through the body.

So, eat your fruit whole from now on.

DEBRA: I think that we probably have—I’m wondering if we have a natural desire to want to eat fruit. It exists in nature. It’s an edible thing. But I think that our taste buds and our perceptions have been altered by these industrially sweet things where the sweet is so concentrated that when we then eat a fruit, where it’s a lower amount of sugar and it’s combined with fiber and all the nutrients that come in a piece of fruit, but it doesn’t taste very sweet to us, but I find now that I’m not eating industrial sweeteners that foods taste very sweet. Even a carrot tastes sweet to me, or an onion tastes sweet to me.

And it’s really nice to be able to have my taste buds not be altered by sugar anymore, and to be able to actually taste the sweetness that is inherent in natural foods. It’s completely changed not only my health, but my experience with food, and my pleasure of food [inaudible 00:32:52] be eating sugar.

NANCY APPLETON: Potatoes taste sweet.

DEBRA: They do, they do. It’s pretty amazing.

NANCY APPLETON: I will have to say that there are still some people—if God said to me, “Nancy, you’ve got 24 hours to live, what would you do?” Well, it wouldn’t be my kids or my grandkids. It would be See’s Candy Store or Haagen-Dazs.

DEBRA: Did you see that movie, “Chocolat?”

NANCY APPLETON: I’m a chocoholic, not a sugarholic.

DEBRA: Okay, well, there was a movie, Chocolat. It was very interesting because—

NANCY APPLETON: I did see it.

DEBRA: It was all about how much these characters love their chocolate, and how important it was. Then there was one woman there, one of the characters that I remember, where even though she was diabetic, she was still going to the chocolate store even though it had sugar in it and things like that. So I love chocolate as well.

NANCY APPLETON: Wait until the day before you die.

DEBRA: Wait until [inaudible 34:02].

NANCY APPLETON: And then eat all you want.

DEBRA: Well, let’s see. So we only have a few minutes left.

NANCY APPLETON: Also, let me tell people that if they are concerned that they are sugarholics, they can go to my website, NancyAppleton.com, and take a test to find out if you are a sugarholic. I forgot how many, but if you say yes to so many, chances are you’re a sugarholic.

That can give you some idea, as well as, of course, I have 140-some odd reasons why sugar is ruining your health, page after page, and article after article. Be at home!

DEBRA: Let me give a few questions off of your quiz. I’m looking at it on your website. It’s basically a true/false.

So the first one is, “I don’t eat refined sugar every day.”

“I can go more than a day without eating some kind of sugar-containing foods”

It just goes on and on like this.

“I can stop after eating one bite of pastry, or one piece of candy.”

I was just reading.

“I can have sweets around the house without eating them.”

False.

Part of it is just saying, “I’m not going to have sugar in the house. I’m not going to have dessert in the house.”

I went through a phase where I said, “Okay, I can have cookies, but only if I bake them myself.”

This is part of the transition away from this stuff. And so I wouldn’t keep any ingredients in the house, and I couldn’t go buy a bag of cookies. But if I wanted to get in my car, go to the store, spend the money, buy the ingredients for the cookies, bring them home, and bake the cookies, then I would allow myself to have them. And that really reduced my cookie consumption.

NANCY APPLETON: That’s a great idea. Also, let me tell you about my grandkids. I have twins. They’re 16 now. One of them has one cavity. The other has been on antibiotics once. That’s it! They’ve had very little sugar, very little dairy, very little wheat, and they are the healthiest kids in the whole world.

I almost say, “Forget your kids, mom.” Think of all the worry you have to decide, “Should I go to the grocery, the drugstore, at 2 a.m. to get my kids something? Do I need to telephone? Do I need to not go to work the next day because my kid is sick?” I mean, all of the things that go on with this, child sickness due to sugar, I just can’t tell you. My daughter has raised two healthy, healthy kids, and has rarely had to miss a day herself.

Yes, they get snotty noses. They whine. But their immune system hooks in, so they don’t have to have the antibiotics. And the immune system takes the flu away.

DEBRA: Yes. It does. It all works when you don’t bombard your body with toxic things.

Well, Nancy, thank you so much for being on the show with me. Again, her website is NancyAppleton.com, and you can go there and read her research. You can read the 141 Reasons Sugar Ruins Your Health. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and you can look at the description of this show, and get all the links and see all her books.

Also, when you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you can just go to the top of the page. There’s a navigation bar, and click on “food,” and you’ll get to my food blog. And one of the things that I’m doing there—first of all, you’ll see some recipes from Christmas.

Well, just go click and you’ll see.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.