My all time favorite snack was Oreo cookies and milk. When I was young that was my comfort food. I would eat them after school and in the evening. As I started to watch my weight, I cut them out. However, on occasion I would have one. I found that it is hard to stop with only a few. Now that I am gluten free, I don't find them as desirable, but I do understand the addiction to them.

Let's look at an Oreo. The Oreo is the number one cookie in America. One cookie is 23 grams of pure sugar.  Chocolate is the very last ingredient. There are 370 calories with nearly NO nutritional value. Instead of eating the cookies, you could really eat almost 2 whole medium sized chicken breast for about the same amount of calories.  If you read the label, you will find that 6 cookies will have 12 grams of fat, 2.5 grams of saturated fat and 40 grams of carbs. That is more than 50% of your daily recommended carbohydrate count. If you remember from a prior Daily Dose, the average American will eat between 300 and 500 grams of carbohydrates per day. That is 3-5 times the amount of essential carbohydrates that our bodies are designed to eat. We are still operating on the original system. We call that Human OS 1 (Operating System 1.0). It has not changed since we were created. However, we are breaking it down fast because of what we put in the system. 

Once you eat all of this junk, it is typically less than 2 hours later before you start craving more sugar. This is often followed by a reactive hypoglycemia. 

The funny thing is that the manufacturers will advertise that they have "natural flavors" that are in their goods. Most of these natural flavors are manufactured chemicals that are designed to taste like natural flavors. Again, Oreo cookies contain a very low amount of chocolate. Look at where it is on the ingredient list.

When we take in a large amount of sugar, we are exposing our metabolism to a significant amount of stress.  Sugar runs our metabolism hard utilizing all of our co-factors, namely vitamins and minerals. Once they are used up by the metabolic and detox pathways, there are none left to use in our repair system and in building new tissue. The result is that the body begins to break down.

As part of my standard approach to health and wellness, I will often times collect a homocysteine and a hsCRP (high sensitivity C-reactive protein). These blood tests are a gauge of how our metabolism is running and how much inflammation is in our body. Have you thought about what you are doing to your body? Keep a food journal over the next week. You might be very surprised!