The Sugar/Flour Conundrum

​It's hard to believe but the amount of sugar and flour consumed by the average person has skyrocketed over the past 65 years. In the 1940s the average person at 22 teaspoons of sugar a month, today, the average person eats 30 teaspoons of sugar a day and the average teen eats 54 teaspoons of sugar a day.  Added together experts say the average person today eats 1 pound of sugar and white processed flour a day. You should know that both of these get processed as sugar in your body. With all that sugar, how can our bodies process fat?
Your body burns the fast burning energy first—that's the energy you get from sugar and white processed flour.  It doesn't burn fat until it no longer has fast energy to burn. This is why so many people find success with the Atkins and Paleo diets. But your body needs grains. Note I said grains, not flour.  Flour typically has been stripped of the parts that provide all the nutrients; then it has to be enriched or supplemented with nutrients to keep people from getting sick from lack of nutrients.  Historically, that's not how people ate. Grains are an important part of our fall/winter diet but we want to make sure we're getting nutrient rich grains, not supplemented, stripped, processed grains. 
When grains are overly processed, as stated above, your body processes them as sugar.  This taxes your pancreas and it's ability to produce enough insulin to handle all the sugar.  This causes your pancreas to burn out, your liver to try and handle the extra sugar and your kidneys to malfunction—not good. The difficulty in trying to eat processed foods and avoid this is that there are 78 different names for sugar: sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, cane sugar, evaporated cane sugar, crystal dextrose, just to name a few.  Some of the names for wheat flour are all purpose, bread, bromated, cake enriched, wheat gluten, atta, durum, farina, graham, kamut, semolina, spelt, and triticale to name a few.
The moral of this story: as much of a pain as it can be, it is essential to read labels if you're buying anything processed. Know your labels. And if you're not sure, look it up before you buy!!