The No Added Sugar and No Alcohol Diet

Part of the problem is that sugar / alcohol are commonplace.

A few days ago I came across a video from Denmark about a Danish guy in his 20s who went on a No Added Sugar and No Alcohol Diet for 30 days. You can see the video at the bottom.

Please note that the diet doesn't mean cutting out sugar entirely. It just means "no added sugar".

eg. Ketchup has a lot of added sugar. Corn syrup is basically pure sugar, so anything with added sugar, glucose or fructose should be avoided. The sugars naturally found inside whole grains, fruits and veggies, perfectly normal to have.

Initially I thought it would be an interesting experiment to do - to see how much difference it would make, and compare it to my previous 30 Days as a Vegetarian. However the realities of the diet and my busy lifestyle later convinced me that now was not the time to be doing such an experiment. From Spring to Autumn I have a fairly busy schedule and am heading to work, working, coming home from work, going to social events, attending social events, coming home from social events, plus all the other menial tasks. You know, like sleeping, cooking, cleaning and doing laundry.

Cutting out alcohol completely is a doable task. And perhaps I will do that eventually - just as soon as we run out of leftover wine from my wedding in 2016. We have started giving bottles away...

But the No Added Sugar part is really tricky.

• It means no buying anything from Tim Hortons/etc on the way to work.
• It means no buying a burger or pizza on the way to social events.
• It means no bread - because it is basically impossible to find sugarless bread unless you bake it yourself.
• It means I will need to make and pack lunches all the time, because any food purchased in restaurants likely has at least some added sugar. (Even a salad will have sugar in the salad dressing.)
• It means very careful grocery shopping.
• It means extra time requirements for food preparation both for food at home and food packed for lunches.

And right now with a pregnant wife in the house, if I value my life and my marriage, now is not the time to be experimenting with the menu.

So instead I have adopted a different approach. I am working on my cooking skills instead, as fatherhood is in my future and I should brush up on my skills. A diet that isn't practical for me right now doesn't really make sense.

But what about other people who have more spare time to try out this diet?

The Danish guy in the video looks like he is already pretty athletic and probably already eats reasonably healthy food. He even has abs. So it seems like an unfair test in some ways.

I am very curious about how the diet would help someone who isn't in their 20s and already fit.  I want to see how this diet would work on someone who is in their 40s or 50s, and is overweight due to eating comparatively unhealthy foods.

That to me would be the true "acid test" to see how well this diet really works.

The No Added Sugar / No Alcohol Diet has been compared to various detox diets - the kind that follow the logic that if you aren't eating certain foods over a longer time period that your body will detoxify itself from various toxins in your system.

However your body already does this, primarily through your liver. What an useful organ the liver is. The problem really is when people get too many toxins in their system and their liver cannot handle it all. Hence liver cancer and similar ailments.

Still, less sugar in the body is still healthier regardless. The trick here is that our bodies can make its own sugar. We don't actually need to eat sugar to live. Our body can make sugar itself.

Can you guess which of our body parts makes sugar?

Scroll below the video to see which one it is!




The Liver!

What an amazing organ.

In addition to filtering out toxins like alcohol, the liver both stores and produces sugar. The liver acts as the body's glucose (or fuel) reservoir, and helps to keep your circulating blood sugar levels and other body fuels steady and constant. The liver both stores and manufactures glucose depending upon the body's need.

So really the above diet should be called The Healthy Liver Diet, as that is clearly what it is designed to do.

I would be curious to see what the diet would do to help people who are the early stages of liver disease. Help it, certainly. But by how much? Is it a viable treatment or just part of a range of things a person should be doing when they are in the early stages?

A low sugar diet is still a good thing obviously. As is cutting out alcohol, but sometimes people have to make personal health choices that are practical and make sense for YOU, not just because the latest fad diet says so.