With New Year’s resolutions abounding, a very common theme is “I’m going to lose weight this year“. A wonderful intention for many people who are struggling with their weight, and unfortunately a continuous problem in the U.S.
For those managing celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity, there’s an added focus on food just to live healthfully and symptom-free. Another challenge for many of us is the “busy-ness” factor and not having a lot of time to prepare healthy meals, relying on GF food manufacturers to supply ready-to-eat, often processed food.
In Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, author Michael Moss describes how major food manufacturers have seduced the American public by engineering food that is not just irresistible, but addictive. He describes how the food giants would hire researchers like Howard Moskowitz, trained in high math at Queens College and experimental psychology at Harvard, to work their magic on typical packaged foods. By conducting complicated math regression analysis these researchers came up with the perfect amount of sweetness to put into a food that would taste “euphoric”. Moskowitz was actually the one to coin the expression “bliss point”. Most frustrating is that food manufacturers not only add “bliss point” sweetness to expected sweet treats like soda, cookies and ice cream, they now add them to products you wouldn’t necessarily think have sugar in them like, bread, yogurt, and pasta sauces. By eating these foods, we train ourselves and our kids to expect that everything should be sweet.
Unfortunately, many manufacturers of gluten-free products add sugar to their foods to make them more palatable. I invite you to reconsider your resolution this year to being more observant of the amount of sugar you consume. Read your labels to be sure there’s no gluten lurking inside, and take the time to look at the grams of sugar, as well. You may find that the weight starts to slip off as you lessen your sugar consumption.
Let me know if this works for you.