Diabetes News

As regular readers of this SUGAR SHOCK! Blog know, I attended and graduated from the amazing Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) in New York City, which brings in a Who's Who of nutrition experts to teach students there.

Now, as an alumni of IIN, I periodically receive e-mails about subjects of interest. I am including verbatim the contents of one such e-mail because it is vitally important. It's about the Farm Bill currently up for consideration in Congress.

I believe that it's important to galvanize as many people as possible to tell our legislators that they need to change the Farm Bill so that we make significant changes in the availability of healthy foods and nutrition education for Americans.

Please join the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and me to send an important message to your representatives in Congress so that they will realize that their constituents believe nutrition and health should be a major priority in the Farm Bill and that the bill should help:

• Improve the nutritional quality of school foods
• Increase the availability of fruits and vegetables in schools
• Expand research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture
• Ensure that low-income pregnant women and small children have access to nutritious foods
• Strengthen nutrition education initiatives through the Food Stamp Nutrition Education Program

This is what the Institute for Integrative Nutrition sent me:

Make your voice heard in Congress!

This month the American Congress will vote on the “Farm Bill,” a major piece of legislation on food, agriculture and nutrition in the U.S. for the next five years.

This legislation is a chance to make significant improvements to the availability of healthy foods and nutrition education in America. In partnership with Michael Jacobson and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Integrative Nutrition and our students and alumni are getting active.

Please take a moment now to send a message to your representative in Congress. Let them know that you think nutrition and health are a major priority.

When you're done, please forward this message to everyone you know. Your life depends on it!

Together we can rock this world! Thank you for your support.

Please click here to take action now.

Again, I urge you to please join the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and me so that we make our legislators realize that we need the Farm Bill to increase the availability of healthy foods and improve nutrition education for Americans.

Parents, you've been besieging me for years with questions like, "How do I help my sugar-loving kids cut back on their habit?"

Or you've been repeatedly asking me, "How do I get my children to enjoy vegetables?"

Parents, I have some help for you -- so you, in turn, can help your youngsters.

I'm presenting a special teleseminar on July 17 with famous obesity expert David Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Ludwig, author of Ending the Food Fight, will give you all kinds of helpful pointers to get your kids to eat more healthily, feel better, and ultimately live longer.

To prepare you for our exciting July 17 teleseminar, I highly recommend that you get Dr. Ludwig's must-read-for-parents book, Ending the Food Fight.

In this book -- which is written in a warm, compassionate bedside manner -- Dr. Ludwig some simple, but effective ideas to turn your kids' passion for junk food into enjoyment for healthy vegetables, fruits, etc.

If anyone is equipped to give advice to parents to help their overweigt youngstgers, it's Dr. Ludwig. He's an endocrinologist at Harvard, who has pioneered the use of a low-glycemic diet in combating obesity.

Not only that, but his groundbreaking research is the basis for some of the most successful diets of the last decade, including the South Beach Diet and Sugar Busters.

In addition, Dr. Ludwig has personally helped more than 5,000 youngsters himself. Ten years ago, he founded the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) program at Children's Hospital Boston. There, he and his team tailored his low-glycemic diet for children and combined it with a nine-week progressive plan that benefits the patient and the entire family.

Ending the Food Fight addresses, for the first time, all three key factors affecting body weight -- biology, behavior, and environment -- and integrates them into a powerful prescription for weight loss.

And you have the rare opportunity to gain access to this cutting-edge physician. Get more info now about this exciting July 17 teleseminar with Dr. David Ludwig.Hope to see you on July 17.

Check out the CBS website to find a description about Sunday's cover story about sugar, on the CBS News Sunday Morning. The piece is now entitled, "Short and Sweet." Here's the item on the CBS website.

Set your TiVos now if you plan to be busy for Father's Day. Learn first where the CBS News Sunday Morning airs in your area.

FYI, you can learn more about this segment here and also here, when I first posted about my exciting day with the CBS News Sunday Morning crew.

(CBS)

Exciting news comes from the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

After a year and a half of negotiations, the CSPI came to an agreement with the Kellogg Company to adopt nutrition standards for the foods it advertises to young children. In announcing the agreement, CSPI hails this as "an historic commitment."

Kudos really go to CSPI for its hard work to reach this new agreement, which now means that CSPI, as well as the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and two Massachusetts parents, will not proceed with a previously announced lawsuit against the company. (FYI, I mentioned this pending lawsuit in my book SUGAR SHOCK! So this is the latest info that you can't currently find in my book.)

According to the new agreement with Kellogg, CSPI states, "foods advertised on media—including TV, radio, print, and third-party Web sites—that have an audience of 50 percent or more children under age 12 will have to meet new nutrition standards."

In addition, thanks to CSPI's efforts, Kellogg also agreed not to:

• "Advertise to children any foods in schools and preschools that include kids under age 12;
• "Sponsor product placements for any products in any medium primarily directed at kids under 12;
• "Use licensed characters (Shrek, SpongeBob, etc.) in mass-media advertising directed primarily to kids under 12 (for example, on the labels of food packages unless those foods meet the nutrition standards);
• "Use branded toys in connection with foods that do not meet the nutrition standards."

Watch CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson, Ph.D. discuss the settlement.

A big hurrah for CBS News Sunday Morning! They are planning an exciting story -- the lead one -- about sugar for Sunday, June 17.

Talk about thorough. Yesterday, I spent much of the day with the CBS crew, including talented, Emmy Award-winning reporter Susan Spencer and producer Jason Sacca, covering a number of different angles on this compelling topic.

Susan did a one-on-one interview with me, tossing some fascinating questions my way. Then, the CBS crew filmed all kinds of foods -- from culprit, sugar-packed carbs to quality carbs, all laid out on a table -- with my discussing them. From there, we went to a nearby grocery store, where I showed Susan how to find all those hidden sugars packed in processed foods.

And then, thanks to renowned physician, Dr. Woodson Merrell, we ended at the Center for Health and Healing in New York City, where Susan interviewed six sugar addicts I'd gathered. (I had the amazing opportunity to watch them discuss their sugar addiction, which most of them had successfully conquered. More later on the spectacular sixsome -- Moe, Deborah, Christi, Donna, Sheila and Bhaswati.)

Anyhow, yesterday -- especially since I'm a journalist myself and have long admired CBS shows -- it was quite impressive and really fun to watch the CBS pros in action.

I'll update you more in a couple of days about this exciting segment planned for CBS News Sunday Morning on June 17. I need to go work out -- got behind in the last couple of days. Then, I need to take some relaxing time for me after this whirlwind week, which entailed lots of prep work.

But before I go, make sure to mark your calendars for Sunday, June 17 at 9 am EST and set your TiVo if you're not around. It's CBS News Sunday Morning. Click here to find out where and when it airs in your market.

I have tears in my eyes now and I'm sort of choked up, because I just finished reading a poignant "My Turn Online" piece, entitled, "Starvation of the Spirit," from anorexic Emma Farnsworth.

My emotions were triggered upon reading this beautiful, brutually honest essay, because years ago, I was very heavy into an eating disorder myself, dropping as low as 96 pounds. (I'm 5'6 1/2.") Naturally, I'm thinking back to a time when I was riddled by unhappiness, loneliness, and despair until I finally licked my disease.

But, as I mentioned in Chapter 1 of my book SUGAR SHOCK!, while I had overcome anorexia and bulimia years previously, back in 1998, I was still trapped by my sugar addiction.

Sadly, years ago, when medical doctors and therapists were treating me for my eating disorder, they were not at all hip to the dangers of sugar and refined carbs, and they made me drink this disgusting, sugar-loaded, calorie-packed concoction about three times -- or was it 6 times? -- a day so I'd gain weight and leave my state of emaciation behind me. (FYI, I'm normal weight now and have been for years.)

By the way, after plying me with this excessively sugary, calorie-packed substance, those same M.D.s and therapists who were helping me couldn't figure out why I was so moody. Well, duh, like millions of Americans, when I consume a lot of sugar, I get really edgy, irritable and cranky.

Please see Chapter 11 in SUGAR SHOCK!, "Sweets Can Sour Your Moods," in which I reveal recent research about this and delve into this fascinating, but little-known phenomenon in detail.

Anyhow, this is all history for me and my memory is kind of fuzzy because this was a different Connie who suffered from this horrible problem. But I do remember that crying when confronting my eating disorder is nothing new to me. As I recall, while I was recovering from the disease, I shed a flood of tears.

Then, years later, in around 2002 and 2003, when I was knee deep into researching and writing SUGAR SHOCK!, on several occasions, I simply blubbered (in privacy, of course), because I was finally -- although years had past -- excising remaining demons of my tragically sad days of either restricting food but allowing myself many low-cal sugary candies or over-consuming sweets and simple carbs and then purging.

Nowadays, I rarely think about my eating disorder. It's like I've forgotten that it happened. It's simply not a part of me or my life anymore. I've so moved beyond it and now have a normal life. But when I do very occasionally reflect on that time of my life, I get terribly sad and really remorseful.

You see, I'm absolutely convinced that my eating disorder would have quickly come and gone and would never have progressed to the extent it did if I'd known what I know now about nutrition and the importance of protein, healthy oils, vegetables, fruits and the addictive qualties of sugar and simple carbs. I'm not discounting the emotional component, but I think I could have moved through it rapidly if I hadn't been eating sweets and those processed grains or what I call "culprit carbs."

If you suffer from bulimia and anorexia as I once did, I just know that you'll find my book SUGAR SHOCK! to contain some ahah! information that sheds light on why it can be very hard to lick this eating disorder. Eating sweets and culprit carbs is very tied into bulimia, as some researchers revealed to me. (You'll definitely want to check out Chapter 9, "Proof Pours In: New Studies Show That You Can Become Dependent on Sweets.")

Although I felt sad after reading this article, I now feel very exhilarated and excited, because I know the power and joy that comes from leaving the miserable, sugar-addicted, eating-disorder-plagued Connie behind, and I'm now on a mission to bring hope to sugar sufferers everywhere, many of whom may be now in the depths of bulimia. (As it was, to clarify, first I conquered the eating disorder and then years later dealt with the sugar issues. You can lick them both at the same time, I believe.)

Even if you don't suffer from an eating disorder, I highly recommend that you read this compelling "My Turn Online" piece in which the anorexic Emma so very bravely confronts "the depression, fear and hopelessness that," as she put it, "ache far more than a bony body."

Just listen to her honest glimpse at this disease." Eating disorders are abusive, selfish, vacuous and deadly—but the media glamorizes them by giving them attention, even when showing a skeletal model on the verge of death."

Please know, sugar addicts, bulimics and anorexics out there -- as well as overweight and obese people -- you do not need to suffer. You can break free from your seemingly hopeless situation. And my intention -- however lofty it may sound -- is to help millions of you to do just that.

I invite you to begin to receive help by getting my book SUGAR SHOCK! now.

Again, all you sugar addicts, bulimics and anorexics out there, my thoughts and warmest wishes are with you.

Let me repeat, because I feel so very strongly about this: You can triumph over your sugar habit, eating disorder or binge-eating symdrome. I'm now living proof that you can squash those habits to smithereens and reclaim a joyous, fulfilling, healthy life instead.