 Hello, welcome to Think Tech, I'm Crystal here. Wow, it is almost Christmas, it's the 20th of the 5-4 days, and you know what, I know you guys are all going to be eating lots of sweets, lots of yummy foods, and I don't mean to be a party pooper, but you know, sugar is really bad for you, yes, and I hate to say we need to know why the sugars are bad for us, but even more importantly is why we crave it, why, why do we want so much stuff, something that's so bad for us, this is the ultimate challenge for us as human beings on earth, I don't know, but Christmas is the biggest challenge for this, and why don't we open it up today to have a festive talk on what we shouldn't have too much of, but to celebrate the goodness of everything around us, alright? Okay, so our guest today to talk about sweetness in a natural way is a naturopathic doctor who is good in acupuncture, Chinese medicine, all the stuff that has to do with our body and everything, a reoccurring gas, yes, you can tell us everyone that I didn't like, Dr. Diana Ostrov, welcome again! Hi, Crystal, how are you? Great, thank you for coming again, and today we get to talk about some sweet things. Wonderful. But why is it not such a sweet topic? Well, it can be, so you know, moderation always is the key, and hopefully if we get to a little bit of time at the end, I have some things that we can do to give us little exercises that we can practice to make it so that we can have a little, because deprivation is no fun, especially at the holiday times, but knowing the reasons why we would want to maybe not think of it as too much of a different day of the year, I mean, when you think about it, you can go to Safeway any day of the week and pick up whatever you want, you know? So we need to learn how to just curb the temptation to eat too much, but there are physiological reasons why we crave it and why we, when we eat it, we keep wanting it, when we see it, we want it, and so we can talk about some of those things, and maybe it'll help put a perspective, because a lot of people think that, well, I know better, I should know by now that sugar's not good for me, and I'm so weak, and I'm so terrible, and I messed up again, and that's not the idea, you know? The reason that I am in the field, as I may have mentioned to you before and many of my patients know this, is that I had the sweet tooth of all sweet tooth, and I could not control my sweet tooth. My mom, too, who's sitting in the audience, she said she liked popcorn. It was that, too, but her mother was so strict with the candies that she would sneak candy and hide it under her pillow at night, and that's like, right? That's what we did back then, you know? If we thought it was the chips-a-hoi cookies, and she took the cookies, and like, that is not me, you know? And the more you control, the more somebody's going to try to... Right, so there's a lot of different things we have to be taking into consideration. Number one, just like any other addiction, when you... It is an addiction. It is an addiction, absolutely. An addiction is something that we do without really any restraint. We just, we see it, we want it, we eat it like the seafood diet. But with sugar, what happens is the sugars, the simple sugars that are broken down in the body, simple carbohydrates, they feed a microorganism in the system called Candida albicans. It's a fungus, and those little fungi, they get that sugar and they say, oh, thank you, mommy. I want more. I want more. They reproduce. They have a party, a festive time. They want more sugar. Now, think of it like you have, if you're a mother of ten, and the kids are all crying, mommy, I want sugar. I want sugar. And they're crying, and you know, they're really not going to be satisfied with the celery stick. So we end up feeding that craving, and what happens is that we feed it, and then more of the Candida albicans will reproduce, and they'll grow, and they'll breed, and they'll have babies, and they'll have parties, and they want more. And then the unfortunate news is that these microorganisms, which are live in our systems, they, not only do they eat what we feed it, feed them, they eliminate their waste in the body. And I remember we were talking one time before about the bloating. So unfortunately, again, the Candida albicans, they leave their waste in a gaseous form in the body, and then there's bloating. So, so sugar produces gas, in a way, in your intestines? Sugar will produce gas, because it's producing an overgrowth of Candida albicans, the micro, those little micro fungi that live in the body. So what we need to do is we need to replenish, rebalance the gastrointestinal tract. Right. So we, in the body, just like in nature, we have good bacteria, we have bad bacteria. So the good bacteria are like the army. The army is strong, and we want to strengthen the army by feeding, feeding those micro bacterium the healthy food. Do they actually kill the bad bacteria? We do have to kill the bad bacteria, so we have to strengthen the army, and then we apply a defense, and it has to be specific to the body's needs. It can't just be random, oh, I hear this is good, or that is good. We have to really take caution, because any substance has an effect on the body. So there's nothing that's inert, whether it's sugar, or whether it's medication, or whether it's even herbal medicine, has to be dispensed and taken in accordance to what the body needs, and what the body can handle at the time. And individuals, everyone's individualized. Last week we had a couple of beautiful farm girls talking about the importance of eating organic vegetables and different types of vegetables, and I asked what types, she says, well, it depends on what you're trying to do, so yes, you can't just have a general statement saying, okay, well, we know sugar's bad for you, but what are you going to do to get rid of it? So this is why we're breaking it down. Before we break it down, though, can we talk about the big reasons why sugar is so bad for us? You said they create these ugly germs that produce gas and all these other horrible consequences, but I know it causes diabetes, obesity, those are obvious. They say it's also can lead to cancer and other... There's a lot of things that will be out of balance when there's an overconsumption of sugar. The liver is involved, so the body's ability to create ATP or energy with our, from our food, is done in the liver, and there's a dysfunction that will occur with the glycogen, and it's biochemical. So alcohol and sugar is like the biggest horrible commerce. So sugar is not so good, again, needs to be done in moderation. The pancreas is a big thing, and in Hawaii especially, there's so much diabetes because everybody loves the potlucks, and you know, there's so much emphasis around food and eating, so, but our cells also cannot tolerate. Excessive sugar intake causes an inflammatory reaction in the body, and all diseases associated with inflammation, but all diseases, sugar will feed all diseases. Sugar, yes, and because cancer cells grow twice as fast as regular cells, so eating sugar can expedite tumor growth. So there's a lot of reasons that we don't want to consume. And what about teeth? You know, you get rotten teeth for the most obvious reasons for the kids out there who are speaking it. So we want to make sure that we don't overdo it. There's a lot of things that, for families who haven't already had their children, there's a lot of things that can be done to prevent the children from having that excessive sweet tooth. It's best if it's done early on. Well, that's good. You know, first of all, for parents who are already really attempting to curb their sugar tooth but haven't mastered it yet, just hide the sugar. I mean, there's a theory that little boys, they'll open the fridge, and if they don't see it right away, they don't know it's there. So if it's not, if they don't see it, they're not going to eat it. Girls are, it's a little more tricky, so hide it well, you know, or put it, they'll look more thoroughly, but you can put it on, yes, you can put it on a shelf that's unreachable or in a cabinet for while you as the parent is. I don't know, Diana, I've tried this trick many years and sometimes I hide them in different places, but they now know to look in different places. They even know to look in the freezer and in my bathroom. They're on to you. But the key for all you parents that have not yet had children or expecting mothers, don't bring it in the house. Can we really control people because of that? Can we really prevent it? Well, they're going to go outside, they go to school, they eat sugars out there. They do eat sugars out there, but if you begin the process early of not training your children to want the sugar, then they're not going to crave it as much. And I've done the research in my own family, whereas I was so addicted because it was there and I was restricted from it. In my family, I never introduced sugar, simple sugars. The kids loved fruit. What did you do for Halloween when the kids were growing up? Well, it's very funny. It's cute. You didn't give them a banana to chew. No, we would go out trick-or-treating and they would count their candy and I would ask them, well, how many are you going to eat? And they would say one or two. And then my little boy was so sweet, he would say, well, I'm going to donate mine to the starving children in Africa. And I was like, that's beautiful. That was really nice. They're still very able to control it and they might have their candy in the freezer for up to three or four months. And by then, you'd be like, past it? Yeah, they're past it, but a few. Just to learn how to have self-restraint. So restricting it completely in your children, that would be a problem because they want what they're not supposed to have. But to give them and ask them, and I also do this with the patients that are children, I say, can we shoot for one or two pieces per day this week? And then they come back and tell me, they come back and tell me, yes, I had two pieces a day or they'll brag and then they maybe had one or maybe they say they had three, but they're working their way down from state 10. So we discuss it while I'm working on balancing their internal system and giving them certain herbal medicines to help control the craving. That's really good. If you don't crave the sugar, you're not going to be as tempted to eat it if you're not craving it. So you want to do this, whatever we can do in the system to prevent the cravings and to create a discipline, a natural discipline within the body. Okay, wait, before you talk about these herbal medicines and all the wonderful things that can balance and take away the craving, we're talking about kids here, but there are many adults, some grown men in our room, Ian in our producer's room, saying he can't stop eating lemon meringue pie. So adults who think they have control over their lives and their diets, what do you do for these people? You can't say, did you have only two today? No, but people have to want it. It's just like quitting smoking. You have to be ready. So a plan can be set up. And again, there's no black or white. There has to be some gray area. There has to be an allowance. And I think once we understand that it's not a weakness, I mean, I was really smart. I went to 12 years. I was all the way through medical school, and I still had the cravings. And I still had the sweet tooth. It wasn't until I optimally balanced my body. And that takes a process. And please don't think of yourself as weak or not smart enough to get it together. It takes a rebalance of the body. That's crucial. That's a crucial step because just trying to wheel away the sweet tooth, you can do it. You can do it. You can do it by going more to fruits. You can eat more proteins or plant proteins, things that are going to satiate your hunger. You know, even as a complex... But that's education. You need to be knowledge on what people do. You need to be educated. You need to just have some action steps. But do you think it's genetic sometimes? Because some people just tend to eat more sweets than others. I think even the... It could be genetic, but I think even genetics is something that we can control. So saying that, well, my father was that way. My mother was that way. My grandmother was that way. And my aunties are that way. That doesn't give us the green light to be that way. We have to, at some point, make a decision how we want to be and then how we want to raise the generations to come. It takes some willpower. It takes some readjustment in the system. It takes some behavioral things. And it takes really acknowledging where you are right now and accepting this is where I am right now. But I think also it depends on the generation at the time. For example, maybe my grandparents didn't eat any sugars because there was no sugar to eat. That's right. So in the last 200 years with all the grocery stores and all the processed food has caused this overconsumption of things. Absolutely. And also then with people who don't have time or use that as a reason why they don't have time to create healthy meals or have time to shop in a place where their children can find. There are healthy sweets. There are transition stuff. I sometimes refer to it as the healthy junk food. We have actually those. Can we talk about that after the break? We're going to talk about healthy foods. We're going to talk about herbal medicines and how to balance your body to slowly prevent from the craving or to go away from it. We're going to talk about a lot of very important things to kind of transition your body to know and willpower that we're in don't need all these junky sweets. But there are some healthy junky ones that Diana's going to tell us about later. So don't go away. We're going to come back and talk about really, really important aspect of how sugar affects our lives and our cravings and whatnot. All right. So we'll be back. I'm Gordon with here on Think Tech Hawaii where we co-host Hibachi Talk where we talk about technology and bring in all kinds of cool guests. Also, my co-host with me today is Andrew the security guy. Thanks for watching. Thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii and thanks for watching Hibachi Talk. We also have Angus. Hey, you better laugh. Angus, I'm bringing in all kinds of weird things. Oh, look, you can see my lips moving. Back here at Think Tech, I'm Crystal on Quoketalk. We're talking about how we can't control that sugar craving. Now, you know, yesterday incidentally, this is a very topical issue here on the New York Times, there's an article about how people are just honing in on this whole sugar craze and that people are complaining that the sugar, the fact that it's bad for you is unscientific. So who backs all this crazy report that this is very untested and it's no grounds that you can't trust those reviews saying that sugar is not bad for you. Aha. Well, apparently they were supported by a lot of companies like Coca-Cola and I know Jay was drinking a Coke today, sorry, but it's true. Hershey's, Kraft's, all these big companies are backing these kind of protests, if you will, that sugar is not necessarily bad for you. Coming back to Dr. Ostrov talking about the naturalistic aspect of why and what sugar does, I mean, it's proven what sugar does to our bodies and yet people are still saying, oh no, it's really, you can't trust all those studies. What do you take on that? I mean, how long was Linus Pauling stating that vitamin C was beneficial for the body and people were just ignoring the research. So there has been research that's been pushed off to the side evidence that having acidity in the body with sugar when broken down will create an acidic environment in the body as well and that will precede conditions that cause degenerative disease such as cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis and stroke and heart disease, all of the diseases. Now, what about mood disorders, depression? So how many people have ever had the experience of eating sugar and then getting depressed or getting tired? You have a moment of elation and then you go down. Empty calories, right? Exactly, but it does give the body a little bit of a boost and help the body to feel invigorated. Is it the dopamine that it releases? It can release all kinds of neuropeptides in the body, but it is very short-lived and there's always equal proportion to what goes up must come down. So in all of life, the higher we go, the harder we drive. But why don't we always associate sugar with the highs? We remember the highs, but we don't really care about the lows. I think when we're young, we don't put those things together. The brain doesn't fully develop till mid-twenties. So to be able to correlate that, unless a kid is educated, and again I go back to my kids because that's who I have the most experience, my little boy once broke out. He got some pimples after he ate some chocolate. So I said, oh honey, you might be allergic to chocolate. And the next time we went to a little little Hanukkah party, he's like, here mommy, you can have my chocolate. I'm allergic. And it was so darling because he understood, he made the connection. But again, the more we empower our children and help explain the physiological mechanisms that are going on, the more that's going to click in and help them to feel empowered about, oh I can make some changes. I got some control here and I'm pretty excited. And the schools are trying. I mean my younger son right now in school, they had a whole thing of having to break down the nutrition aspects of everything they ate and every meal for a week. And it was tedious. But you know what? They know. Like he knows to look on labels, oh if there's high fructose corn syrup, it's a big no-no, we don't eat that stuff. What is it with high fructose? Can we tell educators, listeners, why that is such a bad... High fructose corn syrup is very deleterious to the arterial walls. It can break down the arterial walls of your cardiovascular system. So it can predispose to a lot of heart disease. So that's one that's kind of not being paid attention to. But the after effect of excessive high fructose corn syrup is dramatic even with the how it affects the brain, the neurological system, the frontal lobe. So there's a variety of problems associated with it. It's such a fake food. It's such a non-food substance. The corn that it's made from is genetically modified obviously. We don't know what's really going on there. And so basically chemicalized. Then they break... There's a breakdown product that happens when they're creating the high fructose corn. Their high fructose means really high sugar. And the corn being genetically modified and mass produced is a problem. And then syrup. What does syrup imply? Excessive. Oh god. All right. So it's a quadriple. And then also it's even sweeter than the sweetest of sugars. And our bodies get used to having this excessive amount of sugar. So going back to the addiction is that you have that level. You need to keep that level. It's almost like the stimulation that goes on when you see one of those video games or something, you know, the real... Overstimulation. Overstimulation. Right. It's excessive overstimulation to the system. You can't watch a drama after that. The pancreas. The liver. The intestines. Everything's just going crazy. The nervous system. So then the addictions are even stronger. And you know, obesity now is happening starting at age three. Still again? What? Well, and that's a lot of it's attributed to the high fructose corn. Aren't they in every soda? Now what do you think? They've started taxing the sodas, which is a good start. But some states don't agree on that. Well, just like research. Research will be skewed based on who's doing the research. So that's right. So if the alcohol companies are always going to say wine is good for your heart, wine raises your HDLs, which it does. But they don't mention what it does to your brain cells or your liver cells. Same with sugar. So the companies that are producing a lot of sugary products, and you know nowadays there's even caffeine's being put in simple sweetened cereals for children. Why? Contributing to the ADHD. The hyperactivity in kids. So reading labels and really getting to know what are all those chemicals in there. If you can't understand what the word is. If you can't pronounce the word, if you have never seen that word, you might want to think twice about consuming that. That's a great tip, Diana. But what about all the different little aspects of alternative substitute sugars for a time? It's likely you can use that. Those are bad in different ways, right? Well, again, it's chemical. So making something that tastes sweet makes it an artificial product. Artificial products are 100% of the time made out of chemicals. So we don't naturally have receptor sites for chemicals in our bodies. But what our body will do is it'll graciously create a little receptor site. But that receptor site takes the form of, say, a pre-radicalized cell. So basically one electron is knocked off of a cell to create a space for something that's artificial in the body. That causes damage to the cells and damage to the organs and damage to the glands. And these are long-term effects that you don't see in your immediate future. And so then that's why I'm very busy in my practice is because people have to come for, let's repair this now. Time to repair. When it gets bad enough and people are ready to make a change and people are ready to address the situations that they've created over the years unknowingly, innocently, then there's a lot of work to be done. But it is doable and the result of taking care of your body with the guided assistance of someone that's knowledgeable of how to create optimal health even when a body is compromised or broken down. It is a systematic science. It takes effort. It takes time. And it's doable. But do you think it's doable? But there's much more work and much more effort and much more knowledge that we need in order to do it because there's more process to it now. And it's so contradicting because on one hand, the whole world is going for processed food and all these chemically induced products. On the other hand, we've got this whole movement of organic foods and organic sugars like agave replacing coconut sugars. So how do you find that balance is so extreme? Well, you make a choice. Is it that black and white or do you find a way to mix it? You can mix it. You can do it in gradual steps. Whatever way you feel it's going to work for you. Every family is different. Every person is different. So just finding, thinking about what would work for me and how do I get this support I need from my family, from my extended family, within my small circle of even work colleagues is that you want the support but yet we can't rely on the people around us to make sure that we do a good job. It has to be a personal thing. But when one starts to feel the benefit, when one starts to notice, oh, my stomach's flat. Oh, I don't feel as tired. Oh, I don't have that headache again in the afternoon. I don't need as much alcohol. I'm losing weight or whatever it is that's making them uncomfortable now. When those things start to improve, people get motivated. But do you think women in particular have a deeper craving for sugars than men, would you say? And why? I think that because a woman has a monthly cycle. That's when you usually crave the sweets. There is some emotional element to eating. I think probably the large portion of people have emotional attachment to food and eat when they're under stress and eat when they're sad, eat when they're lonely, eat when they're depressed. Whether or not it's women, it possibly is men have different ways of dealing with their things. Smoking and drinking. Maybe watching a game, maybe going out for a long bike ride. Every man is different. Every woman is different. But we all have our cravings and vices, don't we? And everybody's working, trying to figure out the best way to go. Yeah. But again, it's a false sense of high. We were talking about that, that empty calorie. So in our last couple of minutes, maybe we can talk about how we can replace those yucky sugars with some better choices. But before we do that, I'm just curious, Christmas time, you know, I'm about to make more cookies and I bought these sugars and I looked at the counter and it's like, oh no, do I have to use white sugar in this ingredient? Are there alternatives? If you use brown sugar, it doesn't come out the same when you make perfect cookies, you know, Christmas cookies. What do you think? What I did when my kids were little, I would get all organic ingredients. I would get agave nectar or the, I would use, I make a beautiful cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. I put all kinds of dried fruit in it. Brush fruit makes it so sweet. I never have to add sugar. And you can make it chocolate or well, chocolate chips a little bit difficult, but like oatmeal cookies with raisins and cinnamon and you know, there's all kinds of things that you can do using foods from the earth, natural food. So give us that list of natural foods that you think our audience would love to take away and having a healthy attitude towards the Christmas sweets this year. You know, even if you make a little bit more effort, have a piece of dried fruit or a dried apricot, a dried fig or dried date, it's very sweet. And then you might even, if it's not satisfied, put a little almond butter on it, put a little sesame tahini on it, sunflower seed butter or even peanut butter. And it gives it a really nice sweet salty taste. So it could be just as good as the Reese's Peanut Butter. Do you have a website that people can go on for their information? I do. Our website is naturalhealinghawaii.com. We also have one, weightlossinhawaii.com. We assist people all the time in the restoration of physiological conditions such as obesity and sugar cravings. There you go. Sugar cravings. We'll wrap it up then. Dr. Ostrov, thank you so much for all your information and wealth of knowledge. And please listen to your bodies and enjoy the Christmas, but in a healthy way. So thank you so much. Merry Christmas to everyone. And thank you for having you. Thank you. Bye-bye.