Salt & Sugar: Video Chat

Video streaming by Ustream

Here's yesterday's chat, the more robust version of this article. The odd opening came to Keith in a dream, and who are we to deny such a vision? I'm sure there will be more chat dreams/themes in the future. If you have further questios, ask away here.

Salt & Sugar: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Silent killer or manna from Heaven? What’s the straight dope on the role of salt and sugar in your diet? These nutrients, so vital for sustaining life that historical lore could fill the History Channel for a month, are also the root of the world’s obesity epidemic. Next week, these two misunderstood nutrients will be the topic of my live video chat q & a with a longtime sidekick, or colleague if you will, Denis Faye.

Here’s a little teaser:

Most of us are aware of the evils of sugar. Modern food companies have been adding more and more of it into packaged foods to the point that they’ve created an imbalanced sweet tooth for many consumers. This has led to an overindulgence problem that is the spearhead of the obesity epidemic.

Sugar is a high-density food, meaning that it doesn’t give you a lot of bang for the buck in a nutritional sense because it has a lot of calories with few nutrients. In nature, where it exists only one part of a whole foods picture, it aids in transporting the other elements of those foods into your system efficiently, as well as providing energy on its own. The problem is that we’ve isolated and now put it into things where it serves no purpose than to fill you up and make you crave more of it.

Salt you’ve heard of too. Your doctor probably tells you to lighten up on it because overconsumption can lead to a myriad of diseases. It makes the news regularly, under the name of one of its ingredients, sodium (salt is sodium chloride), when we learn things like a single dinner entre at a food chain contains more sodium than the RDA states you need in a week.

Salt is nutrient dense as it’s a vital electrolyte with no calories. We can’t live without it. Because of this we tend to crave it, which food companies know so they chock food full of it in order to fuel our desire to buy more and more of their products.

If these stories sound similar it’s because they are, the net of which is to sell you more foods that cost little to make. These foods, both high in calories and low on nutrients, have the unique ability to make us both fat and malnourished at the same time. We’ve been swindled into terrible eating habits and, worse, created an epidemic addiction for two things that are clearly killing us. Yet...

These are two of the most important foods on the planet.

Try to perform at your highest level and you’ll quickly understand the marvels of sugar. Sugar turns to glucose in your blood and glycogen in you muscles and this fuels your body and brain far better than anything else. If you run out of sugar in a long athletic event your body will slow down and, at some point if you don’t stop, die. Used at the right time, sugar is the most powerful performance-enhancing substance known to man.

run out of sugar during a race and you'll quickly learn its merits

Salt is even more important and less understood. Most of us consume far too much of it but, oddly enough, the inverse is a big problem in healthy populations who can be too strict about limiting it. Salt is absolutely vital for life on any level but the more active you are the more you need. 500mg a day is enough for an average sedentary person but a cyclist racing on a 100-degree day can burn through 2,000mg in an hour! Those who eschew all salt find themselves at risk for hyponatremia, an electrolyte imbalance that will kill you swifter that a bite from a black mamba. There’s a good reason salt has been the catalyst of many wars throughout history.

gandhi used salt to thwart the british

Join us Thursday, October 25, and 2PST (5EST) and have your questions ready. Links will be posted on all of Beachbody’s social feeds and the chat page here.

How Bad Is Sugar?

"Just think," said my friend Ben last night. "This is how normal people feel all of the time."

We were in a comatose state of a sugar crash that came of the heels of one of my more unhealthy weeks, which has led me to make a little anecdotal statement about eating excessive sugar.

I’ve been traveling every weekend to climb and, with a birthday challenge in the forecast, decided that this week I should rest and recover before my final cycle of training leading up to the big event. Instead of doing an actual recovery phase of training, I opted to do nothing while catching up on my social life. Given this week is Halloween; there’s been no shortage of weird sugary treats to indulge in. So I partook regularly, will the knowledge that my hard training during the ensuing weeks would easily counteract it.

So yesterday I go climbing. After my second warm-up climb, where I’d accumulated a fair amount of lactic acid build-up, I felt awful. At first I thought I was hung over because I’d been out the night before. But I’d only had two drinks. Next I thought that, perhaps, I was getting sick. I took a short nap and then finished off my climbing workout tentatively, wondering why I was feeling so bad.

I had dinner with my climbing partner, Ben, and his family. It was healthy and I began to feel better. Then we hit the leftover bowl of Halloween candy. Almost immediately, I returned to my prior state. As we sat there feeling worse and worse Ben made the above comment.

As I struggled to drive home I recounted my diet for the week. It had included more pure sugar candy than I’d had all year. From gummy worms to Wonka taffy to Haribo burgers, I’d been munching on the type of stuff some people eat on a regular basis. After all, as one of the packages informed me, these were “no fat” treats. How bad for you could they be?

Well let me tell you:

I’m pretty healthy but I don’t always eat ultra healthy. In fact, when I’m participating in endurance sports I often eat a lot of sugar in order to quickly re-charge my glycogen stores. So I should be used to eating sugar, right? Not exactly.

Dense calories, like sugar, are vital when you’re burning more calories than you can possibly eat. However, when you’re not doing excessive exercise—and most people never do any—eating dense sugary foods is friggin’ horrible for you. Last night I dreamt of lettuce as a junkie probably does crack. Give me some fiber and low density stuff to soak up all this crap, my body seemed to be saying. I’ve never been a big fan of salad for breakfast but that’s what I’m going to have. I have no idea how some people live in the state of being all the time. Especially when you know that you don’t have to.

Happy… cough…Halloween.