UND is considered one of the healthiest campuses in the nation. It doesn’t take an expert in nutrition to realize that, either. All you have to do is look around. But childhood obesity has been growing exponentially since the 1980’s along with the use of artificial sweeteners for reduced fat items.

The simplest approach to this problem has been to eat less and workout more. Every year it seems there’s a new popular diet for those who are seeking to lose the weight they have gained. The new diets usually stresses eliminating something that is the single purpose for our weight gain, and offers a healthy substitution instead.

For many of us, the diets don’t work. If they did, there would be no need to have a yearly fad diet.

Since the 1980’s a wave of low and reduced fat has swept the nation. Many food items have a so-called healthy option that reduces the number of calories by shaving grams of fat off of the product. It’s a miracle that the healthy foods taste similar to their normal-fat counterparts. I wonder how they did that?

Sugar.

By adding sugar into their products, they can keep the same taste while minimizing the calories and fat we’ve grown to believe are the cause of our weight gain. Sugar can come in a variety of forms: anything ending is -ose, anything that is _____ syrup, dextrin, and malt.

There was one study done on mice to study the addictive effects of sugar. They exposed the mice to cocaine and sugar before taking both away. when they allowed the mice to choose which substance to take, 40 out of 43 mice chose the sugar.

Does anybody else find it odd then that added sugars have began to be put in our foods around the same time childhood obesity exploded in our country?

Added sugars are just the start of the problem though.

Fruits have a lot of sugar in them. They also have a lot of fiber. Fiber takes time to be processed, so the sugar that’s in the fruits we eat aren’t processed immediately.

This allows us to burn the sugar as instant energy when we work out before it is stored as fat.

When sugar enters our body without fiber to keep it from being processed by our liver, the pancreas come to its aid. Insulin is released by the pancreas and the sugar turns into fat as stored energy.

The release of insulin reduces our brain’s sensitivity to the feeling of being full, causing overeating.

To summarize that- eating refined sugars end up becoming fat anyway, insulin causes us to eat more and increases our risk of developing diabetes, and many supermarkets lack fiber-rich foods to help us slowly digest the sugar.

So what can we do?

We can choose to become aware that natural foods contain the life-giving nutrition that our bodies need without all the harsh added chemicals that processed foods contain. We can do more exercising while the weather is still nice. We can choose to eat a diet rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals and natural sugar by eating more fruits and veggies. If you have a meal plan, look for the stars to guide your healthy habits.

Nick Sallen is the opinion editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected]