Movie Review: That Sugar Film
A must-watch for anyone interested in how sugar negatively affects our energy, mood, and mental stability.
Click here to watch it free with ads on YouTube.
Since I love the concept of people using themselves as human experiments to see how health changes affect them, I found this documentary well-made and informative.
Damon Gameau had been living a lifestyle free from any sugar for years because he felt better that way. Then he decided to do a 60-day experiment where he ate the same amount of sugar as the average Australian: 40 teaspoons per day. (The USDA estimates the average American eats or drinks 34 teaspoons of sugar a day.)
Damon decided not to get this sugar from candy, ice cream, desserts, or soda. He instead made sure to eat it from heart-approved “healthy” foods such as granola, whole-grain cereals, bread, yogurts, smoothies, juices, fruit snacks, etc.
Interestingly, his first breakfast got him easily to 20 tsp just by having a “healthy” whole-grain cereal, sweetened yogurt, and juice.
He kept his calories at 2300, the same amount he had been eating before, and also exercised the same amount as before.
He had a team of doctors evaluate his health markers before, during, and after the experiment.
Change in Damon’s health after 60 days on sugar:
He gained 18 lbs despite eating the same number of calories as before because he replaced fat calories with sugar. (Dr. Fung’s book The Obesity Code explains that this happens because sugar triggers insulin, your fat-storing hormone.)
His body fat increased by 7%. Is a calorie really just a calorie?
His waist increased by a whopping 4 inches in just 2 months!
His triglycerides (a fat molecule formed from sugar or carb consumption) went from 0.8 to 1.5, so almost doubled. I don’t know how to convert that number to American units, but his doctor said he went from a healthy level to a high risk for heart disease (while eating “heart-healthy” low-fat foods.)
He developed fatty liver disease. His liver enzymes showed that he was well on his way to cirrhosis, insulin resistance, and diabetes.
How he felt eating the same amount of sugar as the average Australian:
I often talk about how much I like hard data but I also find subjective data compelling as well. After all, many of these labs that we rely on now, such as A1C, didn’t exist a hundred years ago. People had to rely on how they felt.
The biggest thing Damon noticed was that he had huge mood swings on the high-sugar diet. He would feel overly excited for about 45 minutes after eating sugar, but then his mood would quickly plummet and he would feel lethargic and listless. His girlfriend said he didn’t seem like himself. He was distracted and didn’t seem present.
One of his doctors explains in the movie that when brain energy levels are stable, you have mental clarity. But when there are wild energy swings, the brain has a difficult time adapting. This coincides well with Dr. Chris Palmer’s exciting research of healing all kinds of psychiatric conditions by taking people off of sugar (see post here).
Damon also noticed he had a harder time maintaining his old level of exercise and often felt lethargic.
Surprisingly, when the 60 days were up and Damon came off the sugar, it took him a full two months to feel like he had before the experiment. If you would have asked me to guess, I would have thought it would take him only a couple of weeks. He said the first week was the hardest. He had headaches, was moody, and hardly slept. He had terrible sugar cravings.
Two months is a long time to be in withdrawal. The thing that kept Damon going was his memory of how good he felt prior to the experiment. But it’s harder for people who don’t have that frame of reference. It’s easy to give up in the middle of detox and just think, “My body just feels better on sugar.”
Another interesting note is that after giving up sugar, all the other food tasted bland to him at first. It took weeks for his taste buds to recover so that he could appreciate complex tastes again.
Thankfully, after being off of sugar for a few months, all of Damon’s blood work eventually returned back to normal. His fatty liver disease reversed, he lost the excess weight including his gut, and heart disease risk factors returned to normal.
He ends by saying how sad it is that so many people lead a life burdened by excess sugar consumption and never realize how much better life can be without it. I highly recommend watching this well-made documentary!
Until Next week:
Never stop learning about health and the tremendous capabilities your body has to heal itself when given a chance.
Fast, Feast, stay away from sugar so you can stop giving your hard-earned money to pharma and big food corps, do something hard, heal, and spread the word,
Leslie Taylor
