Mike Adams, Founder of the Consumer Wellness Center, Discusses Healthy Sweeteners

Thursday, June 12, 2008 by: Kevin Gianni
Tags: sweeteners, health news, Natural News

(NewsTarget) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's The Healthiest Year of Your Life Program which can be found at (http://www.thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) . In this excerpt, Mike Adams weighs in on sweeteners including one's to avoid and one's to try. He also shares great resources for natural health.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life Excerpt with Mike Adams, founder of the Consumer Wellness Center and on-line retailer, Better Life Goods. An author and speaker, Mike's mission is to spread the message of natural nutrition and healing.

Kevin: Let's talk about fake food. I want to talk a lot about artificial and chemical
sweeteners. I was working with a personal training client of mine who is a very well known doctor in the area and he loved diet soda. He just couldn't get over it and couldn't get over the fact. I gave him a book. I think it was Sweet Poison. I think it's Janet Starr Hull's book and he wouldn't even read it.

Mike: Oh, man.

Kevin: What are some of the best natural sweeteners that people can use with confidence?

Mike: All right. Well, my number one recommendation, a natural sweetener that has basically zero glycemic index is called stevia. This is from the sweet leaf herb and grows in Paraguay and grows in the high Andes in South America and it's 300 times sweeter than sugar. It's been used all over the world now for many, many years actually and it's a great choice, but it does have a little bit of a bitter aftertaste. Some people don't like that. The key is to blend it in with other low glycemic natural sweeteners, such as, for example, brown rice syrup is actually a pretty good
sweetener to use on the natural side.

Kevin: Okay.

Mike: There's nothing wrong with that. Another one to consider is molasses. Why molasses? Because if you think about it, when they're refining cane sugar out of the field, they take it into these big processing plants and they squeeze out all the minerals and the vitamins and they put that in kind of a waste pile. Then the white, nutrient depleted sugar comes out the other side and that's what they ship off to the food factories to use for human consumption. The waste pile, that's molasses. Everything they took out of the sugar cane that's supposed to be there, the vitamins, the minerals, the phytonutrients, that's in molasses and that's why it's dark. That's what you should
be eating. When you eat molasses, you're actually eating concentrated nutrients from cane sugar without all the calories.

Kevin: Wow.

Mike: Yeah. Again, some people say "well, I don't like the taste of molasses". Well, get used to it. I'm tired of people whining to me all the time about "I don't like the taste of this or
that". Well, you know what? Your taste changes. If you just stop eating sugar for 30 days and stop eating salt and MSG and fried foods for 30 days, your tongue will change.

Kevin: Yeah.

Mike: You will be able to experience the subtleties of nutrient rich foods, but it's never going to taste like a bag of Doritos, because it's far better than a bag of Doritos.

Kevin: I guess the counter question would be 'do you like the taste of a 1500 calorie diabetic diet that the doctor will put you on?'

Mike: Yeah, or even worse, how do you like the taste of vomiting after you have chemotherapy? Sometimes I'm kind of blunt about these issues.

Kevin: Yeah. That's kind of blunt.

Mike: But it's true. People are like, 'well, I'm not willing to make these dietary changes to
prevent cancer'. Sometimes they say, "I don't want to eat my greens. I don't want to take these medicinal mushrooms. I don't want to eat spirulina." But then they get diagnosed with cancer and they will go through 8 to 12 weeks of hell and hair will fall out. They'll undergo chemotherapy. They'll be nauseous and they can't eat anything and they're losing weight, have diarrhea and feel terrible and many of them die, but why is that okay?

People are willing to do that, but they're not willing to eat their grains. Are you kidding me? I don't understand that, but like I said, everybody's at a different stage in their own personal journey. Sometimes people will wake up sooner than others and sometimes people don't wake up at all. I'm not judging anybody for that. We're all in a different place and that's fine.

Kevin: Yeah. What about agave nectar? It's popular now in health food markets and you can even find it in some supermarkets.

Mike: Yeah. I like the fact that it is really low on the glycemic index, although that varies a lot based on the manufacturer. I've seen anywhere from 13 to 35. A lot of variation there and it depends on where it comes from.

Kevin: Okay. Now, do things like honey vary like that, as well?

Mike: Yeah, they do. The darker honey is actually lower on the glycemic index. So actually, whether you're dealing with agave nectar, or honey, or molasses, the darker the better.

Kevin: Okay.

Mike: The other thing to keep in mind is that if you drink fresh juiced vegetables at the same time that you're eating honey or any other sweetener you will stabilize the blood sugar effect in a big, big way.

Kevin: Okay.

Mike: So it's kind of like you'll be able to reduce the sugar hit from any other food by drinking vegetable juice with it. You can also use culinary herbs, like cinnamon. Cinnamon lowers blood sugar very powerfully, better than diabetes drugs, in fact. So you can use a lot of things together with your sugar intake to stabilize that and not have such a big spike. Of course, the best thing I'd say long-term for longevity is to eat a very low glycemic diet and that means more vegetable juices. Not so much in terms of sugar intake and certainly not liquid sugars. I think high fructose corn syrup is like liquid sugar crack.

Kevin: Yeah.

Mike: That stuff is so dangerous and it is, I think, a big part of why our nation is so
overweight and obese right now.

Kevin: What's the difference between something like high fructose corn syrup and a brown rice syrup?

Mike: Well, the glycemic index is very different on it and brown rice syrup is more of a whole foods syrup, whereas the high fructose syrup is really just an isolated extract from corn.

I was actually contacted by the Corn Refiners Association of America after one of my articles about high fructose corn syrup and it reminded me of big tobacco swearing that nicotine is not addictive. They said to me, "Mike, how can you do this? How can you say these things? We think that high fructose syrup is a wholesome ingredient made by hard-working Midwestern farmers who are growing corn." It was like they made this thing look like it was the healthiest food you can possibly consume.

But wouldn't that be great if those farmers were instead growing far more profitable hemp. For example, we can get hemp seeds, which are very rich in omega-3 oil and we can be enhancing our health and enriching farmers growing hemp instead of growing more corn to create high fructose corn
syrup.

Kevin: Sure.

Mike: So again, that's a case where if consumer demand shifts and we stop demanding one ingredient and we shift to something healthier, the farmers will decide to change their
crops.

Kevin: Is hemp being grown in the U.S. now?

Mike: Not legally, no.

Kevin: It's being grown in Canada.

Mike: Yes. Exactly.

Kevin: What is it going to take to get it grown here?

Mike: Well, I don't know. It's going to take a political miracle, because the war on drugs has targeted industrial hemp, which is not a smokable drug. It's a fantastic source of textiles. It can be grown without pesticides. It can be used to make biofuel and it creates the use of these really nutrient rich hemp seeds, but because of the political environment in this country, they will not allow hemp to be grown here. So we're importing it all from Canada and U.S. farmers are suffering.

Kevin: Yeah.

Mike: It's one of those just absolutely insane political decisions that is still in effect. It's like the situation where we're pasteurizing all our almonds now in this country.

Kevin: That's effective now?

Mike: That's happening right now. I've spoken with owners of companies that use raw almonds in their products and they have to import them now from Spain.

Kevin: Really?

Mike: Yeah. So we have decision makers in the U.S. that are just destroying U.S. farmers and then they wonder why they have to subsidize farmers, because they're all going bankrupt.

Kevin: Wow. Why don't you just briefly touch on where people can find some of the information that you give. I just think it's a huge resource and I think it needs a little more mention.

Mike: Okay. Sure. (www.Naturalnews.com) is the website and there we have over 22,000 free articles. We have over 20 free reports that you can download right now, interviews, exclusive reports. We have photo tours where we're examining grocery products. We have videos and all kinds of things and we're adding to it constantly. It's fast becoming the top natural health news website on the Internet. So thanks for letting me plug that, Kevin.

Kevin: Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's good for people to really realize the amount of people that are going to your site for information. This isn't your friend's blog.

Mike: No.

Kevin: This is the real deal.

Mike: We have a whole team of writers and researchers and we've got an office with a whole staff. Yeah, we're hitting about 800,000 readers a month right now and the only reason we're doing that, because we don't advertise the site, the only reason we're doing that level is because we're putting information out there that people value. We even go to nutritional supplement companies. We get them on the phone and we say, "can you offer a really great deal to our readers? Can you offer something for free or 60% off or something?" And they say "yes" and we put those out on the website. So we're able to bring people great deals too on healthful products. That's something that I believe in doing -- supporting those companies that are doing the right things in terms of nutritional supplements and green living products and so on.

Kevin: Yeah. Well, that's great, Mike. I want to thank you so much for your time here. Your time is valuable, as we all know, and to share this information, I'm sure that everyone listening will have at least taken some notes and gotten something out of it. Every time I talk to you I get something from it, so I'm sure that there was information out there that you just gave that someone is going to take and run with.

Mike: I think that, too. I hope they found something valuable. Remember, number one thing when you're going shopping is reading those labels. If that's the one thing you remember from this whole discussion, read the ingredients. If you don't recognize what it is, don't buy it.

If it looks like intro to a book in Chemistry 101, then leave it on the shelf. You don't
need that stuff.

Kevin: So again, Mike, thank you so much for your time. I truly appreciate it.

To read the rest of this transcript as well as access more information on creating and living a healthy lifestyle and hear from other health experts just like Mike Adams, please visit (http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) .

About the author

Kevin Gianni is a health advocate, author and speaker. He has helped thousands of people in over 85 countries learn how to take control of their health--and keep it. To view his popular internet TV Show "The Renegade Health Show" (and get a free gift!) with commentary on natural health issues, vegan and raw food diets, holistic nutrition and more click here.


His book, "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution," is a step-by-step guide to optimum health for the time and energy-strapped. To find out more about abundance, optimum health and self motivation click here... or you're interested in the vegan and raw food diet and cutting edge holistic nutrition click here. For access to free interviews, downloads and a complete bodyweight exercise archive visit www.LiveAwesome.com.