The Washington Post
November 11, 1998
Losing Weight The Sugar Busters Way
By Judith Weinraub
Washington Post Staff Writer
It’s Not the Fat, It’s the Sugar
You know those cute little baby carrots we reach for as a snack or healthy hors d’oeuvre? The ones we choose over cheese or nuts, or, heaven forbid, pâté.
If you’re one of the million people who in the last six months have bought “Sugar Busters! Cut Sugar to Trim Fat,” the latest diet book to sweep the nation, you’ve already read that they’re virtual poison. And you also know the authors say that—along with potatoes, corn and beets—carrots are almost as bas as candy.
Carrots?
It turns out they’re full of sugar. And sugar is “toxic”—the real reason, say the authors, that Americans are more over weight than ever.
And whether the sugar comes from a chocolate bar or baby carrots, expunging it from your diet—or at least reducing it significantly—is the [poi? ? ?], and the Sugar Busters diet.
“What is it about a carrot that’s healthy?” New Orleans cardiac surgeon Morrison C. Bethea, one of the book’s authors, asks about the hapless vegetable. “It’s the beta carotene necessary for visual acuity and needed for the retina. And where is that? It’s no in the fleshy part, but the pigment. So why eat all that fleshy carrot to get the pigment? You can get it in squash, broccoli and sweet potatoes.”
As for regular potatoes, according to the Sugar Busters program, they’re even worse. “If I took a baked potato and filled it up with table sugar, would you eat it?” asks Bethea. “No.”
“But a baked potato is straight chain starch,” he explains. “The minute it hits your stomach, you get molecules of pure sugar.” So there.
“Sugar Busters” is one of those fad-diet-publishing success stories. But it wouldn’t have been written if one of the authors, business executive H. Leighton Steward, hadn’t read the somewhat similar French bestseller “Dine Out and Lose Weight,” by Michel Montignac.
A Week on the “Sugar Busters” Diet
Diets are like exercise programs: The easier they are to fit into your life, the easier they are to stick with. And any diet you actually stay on imposes some controls on your eating.
However, to me, the Sugar Busters plan seemed more healthful than other high protein/low carbohydrate programs; so I decided to try it for a week to see how hard it was to endure—and to see if I felt hungry, tired, edgy, whatever.
From the start I realized this is by far the most manageable diet that I’ve ever been on. A little more expensive, but definitely less intrusive.
Why? The plan makes it possible to diet and yet enjoy a glass of red wine, put oil and vinegar on salads, nibble cheese and nuts (cautiously), eat the recommended five fruits and vegetables every day, and even to have bread, pasta and cereal as long as they’re whole-wheat and sugarless.
But whether the plan results in weight loss over the long haul depends on that old bugaboo: the ability to eat those things in moderation.
I also had a few other misgivings. For one thing, Sugar Busters’ rules against eating fruit during a meal seemed ritualistic rather than scientific (not that a little ritual doesn’t help you remember you’re on a diet.
Then one of the authors, Morrison C. Bethea, revealed that the fruit rule really had to do with successful digestion—and therefore heartburn, distension and gas. “It has nothing to do with losing weight,” he said. So, as the week went on, I confess, I got a little lax about making sure fruit intake was limited to a half-hour before or an hour after meals.
My more important concern was the protein, more than I eat ordinarily. For me, that meant animal protein (including high-cholesterol cheese and eggs). It also recommends fewer servings of bread, pasta, cereal and rice than I usually eat (and fewer than the U.S. Department of Agriculture Dietary guidelines recommend).
Nevertheless, my doctor had told me recently that he’d seen patients lose weight on a high protein/low carbohydrate diet and lower their cholesterol. All the more reason to give it a try.
First, I went food shopping for brown rice, whole-wheat bread, whole-grain cereal; some chicken stock to flavor the brown rice; some sliced turkey breast for sandwiches; a skinned chicken (if I’d had to stop and skin each piece, I might not have bothered); a small flank steak and two small lamb chops. I also bought a few things to stave off hunger: celery, fruits and vegetables, hummus, baba ghanouj and sugar-and-additive-free peanut butter (an indulgence).
Then I simply followed the diet’s guidelines, theoretically not paying much attention to amounts. (I had to, of course—first, because I wanted to estimate the number of calories I took in; and second, because it seemed insane not to.)
The first day went fine, even though I went to a dinner party. I called ahead to make sure there would be foods I could eat, and managed to push aside the starches and dessert. I even had a glass of red wine.
The next day involved a restaurant lunch. Easy: salade nicoise with grilled tuna. I asked for oil and vinegar instead of a boutique vinaigrette that could be loaded with sugar.
The third day, I abandoned the fruit-a-half-hour before-breakfast drill—it was getting to be a drag.
The fourth day was a little more complicated. At a restaurant for dinner, I opted for two appetizers: one a salad with walnuts and a little crumbled blue cheese, the other a raw-bar sampler. According to the Sugar Busters plan, the cheese was fine. But the cocktail sauce—I just wasn’t thinking—must have had sugar in it.
The days after was more of a challenge: I knew I’d be eating a late lunch, so I had half a turkey sandwich for breakfast. Lunch was light, and by dinnertime I was ravenous. I had my planned dinner—a lamb chop with brown rice, green beans and fat-free coleslaw. But a lamb chop and rice didn’t seem like a diet dinner. The week before, I would have finished the rice and cut back on the size of the chop; this time I did the opposite.
Came the sixth day—and the second breakfast of cereal so light, it was almost nonexistent. I could have had oatmeal instead, but I don’t like oatmeal. I ended up having celery with a little peanut butter for a snack. That, combined with the ounce of cheese I’d had as a snack twice during the days before, made me wonder about my increased fat and cholesterol intake.
My seventh day went without incident: very lean choices like chicken breast and flank steak and lots of celery. But by the next morning I really began to crave something sweet. Even sliced beets.
Looking at my food diary for the week, the plan had been flexible and very manageable. However, I’d eaten more cheese than usual. As for the peanut butter, I still feel guilty.
But any diet that eliminates cookies, cake, candy, fatty meats and poultry skin, is going to be lower in fat, sugar and calories. And being on a diet that’s reasonable pleasant otherwise (lie this one) makes it easier to resist those temptations.
My calories were clearly more controlled than usual; my intake of fat was lower, even with the cheese (Sue me—I eat a lot of chicken, and I like the skin); and my intake of refined flour (most bread, crackers, etc.) and hidden sugar was way, way down. Not to mention the Halloween candy I didn’t eat.
So it’s no surprise that I lost three pounds. Will I stay that way? If, and only if, I continue to pay attention to what I’m eating.
Will I give up carrots, potatoes, beets and corn? Of course not. Will I eat them less often? Probably.
Diet With No Sugar Coating
When Montignac wasn’t interested in exploring his concepts further for a new book, Steward and Bethea enlisted endocrinologist Samuel S. Andrews and gastroenterologist Luis A. Balart, friends and colleagues in New Orleans, as co-authors. The result, “Sugar Busters,” was self-published in October 1995 and took off so phenomenally that it sold 210,000 copies—an incredible number for a book with limited distribution and word-of-mouth marketing.
Then last April 27, an expanded hardcover version was published by the Ballantine Publishing Group. Since then, sales of the new, improved “Sugar Busters” have shot up to more than a million, bolstered by an NBC “Dateline” segment on June 16. The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 25 weeks.
That, according to any measure, is a huge success—outdone only by the likes of the new “Joy of Cooking” or “In the Kitchen With Rosie” (Oprah Winfrey’s chef) or the Stephen King/John Grisham/Tom Clancy firmament. “We were totally surprised,” says Maureen O’Neal the Ballantine executive who edited the book. “We thought we’d have to build it nationally, but it’s had a life of its own,” she says. “Somehow people knew about it, and were waiting for it.”
The beauty of Sugar Busters the diet, which in part explains the super sales of “Sugar Busters” the book, is that it’s simple—even though the science behind it is not immediately obvious. Foods are classified either as “acceptable” or “to avoid.” And theoretically, you can eat any food on the acceptable list without measuring amounts or counting calories.
What’s on the list? The usual diet reliables: lean, trimmed meats and skinless poultry, most fruits and vegetables, olive or canola oil, nuts, low-fat mayonnaise , mustard, herbs and spices—plus peanut butter and pure fruit jelly without added sugar. Fruit is allowed a half-hour before meals or two hours after.
But it’s the “to avoid” list, according to the authors, that makes Sugar Buster work. The list includes those carrots, potatoes, beets and corn; white rice, white bread and anything containing refined sugar (and that means most processed foods); and high-sugar fruit such as raisins, watermelon, pineapple and bananas.
Why avoid these foods? According to “Sugar Busters,” the latest of several diet books (“Protein Power” and “The Zone” are two) to reject a focus on fat, it’s because excess sugar is the initiator of a whole chain reaction inside the body that makes it hard to lose weight.
In summary, this is what happens: The body deals with carbohydrates by breaking them down into glucose, which is then released into the bloodstream. When that happens it’s a signal to the pancreas to secrete insulin, the hormone that regulates blood sugar. But different carbohydrates are digested at different rates of speed—the ease with which a food is converted into blood sugar is referred to as its glycemic index. Quickly digested carbohydrates, which are prohibited or restricted on this diet, release a lot of glucose at once. When that happens, the body has more insulin than it needs to regulate blood sugar. And that extra insulin promotes the storage of fat and slows down the enzyme that helps burn fat.
The way to prevent that, according to the Sugar Busters program is to regulate the kind of carbohydrates consumed. In other words, make better carbohydrate choices and you can lose weight. “Our bodies are made to run off sugar. We can’t live without it,” says Bethea. “So you want a diet with satisfactory carbohydrates—but you want those that modulate insulin secretion downward.
“If you think of our nutritional world as a forest, you have a carbohydrate tree, a protein tree, a fat tree and a fiber tree,” says Bethea. “Many people have looked at one tree—the fat tree—to the exclusion of the forest. As long as we didn’t eat too much fat and exercised, then every thing else was done okay. [But] that’s not a sound principle.”
The “too much fat” concept is also an important one. Although the book doesn’t spell out exactly how much fat you can take in, it does provide a few guidelines. Restrict cooking oils to olive and canola, skin your poultry, trim fat from your meat, don’t put more on your dinner plate than it comfortably holds and definitely don’t go back for seconds. But the book doesn’t specify amounts. And that, obviously, can lead to over-eating.
When pressed, in fact, it urns out the “Sugar Busters” quartet doesn’t actually mean you can eat whatever amounts you like of the acceptable foods. For one thing, dieters must be careful about whole-grain breads, pasta and brown rice. “I’d eliminate them if you want to lose weight,” Bethea acknowledges. “Then, once you achieve your target weight, add them back one at a time. Make sure you’re not gaining weight.” For another, watch out with these foods that are deemed permissible: cheese, pate(!), butter and cream. “Not any significant quantity,” he says.
Okay, with portion size under control, so far so good. That is, assuming the Sugar Busters plan makes scientific sense in the first place. In other words, do we really know that eating the wrong carbohydrates generates insulin levels that make weight loss harder?
The response from other doctors is predictably dubious. “It potentially can, but it doesn’t tell you the whole picture,” says Stephen Clement, a Georgetown University Medical Center endocrinologist and director of its Diabetes Center. “In theory it sounds great, but there’s nothing about the unique composition of a high-sugar diet that will make a person gain more weight than if they ate a high-fat diet.”
Besides, he points out, on diets that avoid one kind of food, such as, in this case, sugar, people tend to compensate by overeating other things. They could eat a lot of beans broccoli, lentils and peas, “which are good for you,” says Clement. “But the other thing is to eat a diet high in fat, though I know [the authors of “Sugar Busters”] say not to. And high-fat diets cause insulin levels to go up, too. But they don’t say that.”
The authors don’t provide anything other than (admittedly compelling) anecdotal data as evidence, pointing instead to standard medical textbooks for support. And that disturbs scientists in the field.
“The theory is seductive, but it lacks published evidence,” says John Foreyt, director of the Nutrition Research Clinic and professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
“When people put forward an alternative program, I think they ought to do studies and publish their data and submit the studies for peer review. Until we get them, I don’t think it should be considered a healthful approach to long-term weight management.”
Instead, Foreyt’s clinic relies on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Pyramid, which encourages a daily diet higher in grains and far lower in meat and eggs and nuts than the Sugar Busters plan. The clinic also promotes the boring old idea of cutting back on calories.
“Nobody,” says Georgetown’s Clement, “has found a way to do better than a good, balanced diet with five fruits and vegetables and adequate exercise. If you try to trick the system any other way, the body finds a way to make up the difference.
Is that what the Sugar Busters plan is trying to do?
Not according to Bethea. “Look I want you to eat lean and trimmed meat, high-fiber vegetables, whole grains, fruits, and if you choose them all in moderation, and use judgment about portion size, what would be your complaint about eating in that fashion? What would be unhealthy about it? This is the way mankind has eaten for most of its existence.”