In this enlightening edition of Health IQ, Munson Steed sits down with Janet Reid-Hector, Ed.D, RD, an assistant professor and director for the MS Degree in Healthcare Management & Leadership at Rutgers University. Reid-Hector, a distinguished expert with a doctoral degree in organizational leadership and adult education from Columbia University, brings a wealth of knowledge from her extensive career, including her tenure as past president of the National Organization of Blacks in Dietetics and Nutrition (NOBIDAN). Today, she shares her expertise on a crucial topic: the impact of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and salt on our diets. With her profound understanding of clinical nutrition, Reid-Hector provides invaluable guidance on navigating these common yet often misunderstood components of our food, emphasizing the importance of making informed choices for better health outcomes. Join us as we explore the intricacies of these dietary elements and their profound effects on our well-being.
Munson Steed: I just want to not lose one of my favorite questions to talk about, the type of chemicals that we actually should be avoiding as it relates to nutrition. I’d like to start with, what should our relationship be to sugar, high fructose syrup, and anything that sweetens or adds sweetening to our diet? How should we think about and what do we need to really know about the impact of sugar and having high fructose syrup in our diet?
Janet Reid-Hector: Yeah, that’s a great question. Sometimes people scare themselves, and we as healthcare professionals, especially journalists and so on, scare the hell out of people by talking about the chemicals in food. One of the things we have to understand is that all of the nutrients that are in food, all food that we as humans consume, are comprised of chemicals. That’s what they are. Every single nutrient that exists on this planet is a chemical. The six essential nutrients of life, carbohydrates, protein, vitamins, minerals, water, are all chemicals. That’s one of the things that we have to make sure that we take that fear factor out of it because every time you put a food in your mouth, a whole food that came from the ground, you are consuming chemicals. That’s what they are. So, we have to make sure that we don’t really, you know, put everything together as chemical. So, people understand the difference.
When it comes to these chemicals that we know, that we call nutrients that are in food, Munson, you’re absolutely right. There are some of them that are wonderful for us, and they keep us healthy and vital. They reduce our risk of chronic diseases, and then we have others that are not so good for us. The best way to think about it is that the ones that are the most highly processed tend to be the ones that have the least health benefits for us. So, sugar, when people are talking about sugar, you are talking about monosaccharides or disaccharides. Primarily, the one that we need to be concerned about is a disaccharide, and all of its various forms, which is sucrose, that we know as table sugar. Sucrose, I think there are around maybe 35 or more different formulations of sucrose. We have table sugar, molasses, agave syrup, and just all sorts of them. They’re all the same thing. They’re all disaccharides, so they’re all simple sugars, meaning that as soon as you consume them, they’re digested and absorbed, then they hit the bloodstream in record time. So, all disaccharides, all forms of sugar, all of us as humans need to have that type of carbohydrate. Because for carbohydrates, we have monosaccharides, things like glucose, that’s the one that’s in your blood all the time. Then we have the disaccharides, like the lactose that’s in milk and dairy products, sucrose that we start to consume from the moment we wake up in multiple forms, honey, molasses, table sugar, agave syrup, all of that. Some people erroneously think that one is better than the other. They’re not. They’re the same chemical.
Then we have what’s called complex carbohydrates. Those are things that you find in corn and peas, and your root vegetables, and whole plant foods. So, all of that are carbohydrates, and the relationship that they have with sugar is that when we consume those, we’re going to break them back down through the process of digestion into sugar because that’s how all carbohydrates end up in our bloodstream. So, we take them in three different forms, we digest them and break them back down into glucose and fructose and galactose, and that’s how they enter the bloodstream because that’s the way the body uses carbohydrates for energy.
So, we have to make sure that we understand that on a basic level. Now, the disaccharide sucrose, which I think is the one that you’re referring to, is the one that we really need to pay a lot of attention to so we don’t over consume it. It does provide energy for us. Because it’s a quick source of glucose, and glucose is a carbohydrate that is the brain’s preferred source of energy. It can use other things, but that’s the one that it prefers to use. So, and we can get that from any carbohydrate that we consume. Whenever you consume any food that is a plant, it is a carbohydrate that is comprised of tens and hundreds of glucose molecules held together by peptide bonds. Some of them, I mean held together by chemical bonds. Some of them we can break real easily, and some of them we can’t break. Meaning that anything that we make in our digestive system, enzymes until one can break them, those are what we call fiber. Your fruits and your vegetables, and your oats, and so on. So, those carbohydrates are good for us, even though we’re going to eventually break them down into sugar because that’s how they’re going to enter the bloodstream. Those are good for us, but the disaccharide sucrose in its many forms is the carbohydrate that has limited benefits for us outside of energy. It really doesn’t have any other health benefits for us. So, we really need to make sure that we limit the amount that we take in all its forms, whether you’re taking it in agave syrup, honey, molasses, or just plain table sugar, whether it’s colored brown or it’s colored white. It’s the same thing. That one has limited nutritional value, and when we consume high amounts of it, we’re going to convert the excess amount of it into fat, and that can lead to weight gain and make us at high risk for things like diseases and so on, things like diabetes, mellitus, and so on. So, we really do need to limit the amount of sucrose, that disaccharide, that simple carbohydrate that we consume.
You’d ask me one more question about that. What was the other question you asked me, Munson?
MS: I wanted to kind of move to …
JRH: Oh! The other chemicals. Some of the other chemicals that we consume like high fructose corn syrup. Yeah, high fructose corn syrup, fructose like glucose. We have three monosaccharides. One is fructose. Fructose, just by the name of it, you can tell its number one source. We get it from fruits. Whenever you eat a fruit, and you love that taste in your mouth, that sweet taste that you get from your favorite fruit, that is fructose. It is metabolized differently than we metabolize the other carbohydrates. Now, high fructose corn syrup is something that manufacturers create because it is cheap. It’s even cheaper than table sugar, and so because it is so cheap and so easy to produce, it’s put in mass amounts in the foods that we consume. It has limited nutritional value. In fact, if we as humans never consume high fructose corn syrup, it wouldn’t make a difference in our lives. It adds nothing of value to our diet at all. So, it is a very good idea for us to avoid foods that have high fructose corn syrup. It is not the same as the natural fructose that is in every single fruit that God created.
That is a manufactured carbohydrate, that is a chemical. It is another form of fructose manufactured by food producers for the sole purpose of finding a very cheap sweetener to put in food. It has zero health benefits for us, none. So, it should be avoided.
MS: No health benefits at all.
JRH: Nope, there are no health benefits to high fructose corn syrup. You want to get fructose, get a bunch of fruits that you love to taste and go at it and get all the fructose that you want that way.
MS: Another question, lastly on sugar was one but salt.
JRH: Oh, yes, absolutely. That’s a good one, Munson. All of us, it’s recommended, every ten years scientists on all the continents pool all their resources, all the research that they have been doing for the past years, and then they comb through everything, and they make recommendations to their population. For us, on the continent of North America especially, we have the US Dietary Guidelines, and study after study after study says the same thing. Sodium, salt, is a combination of two chemicals, sodium, which is a cation. It is the dominant mineral that we use and depend on to control blood pressure and to control the amount of fluid that we have inside of us. So, it is a critical mineral for us. We can’t do without it. Absolutely, it’s an essential mineral, sodium. The other part of salt is chloride, which is an anion, meaning that it’s negatively charged. When you bring those together, you get sodium chloride. It is the original currency. People used to fight wars about it and kill each other because it is the spice that almost every single human on earth consumes. So, that’s sodium chloride.
Now, both of those minerals we absolutely need, and they’re critical for the way we function. Like I said, sodium is the dominant mineral that we use to control blood pressure and the amount of fluid that we have, how much we’re going to keep in to do all of the metabolic processes that we need, how much we’re going to pee out, right, to maintain fluid balance. It does a whole host of other things, too. However, we need it in very small amounts, but because we like the taste of it, we overconsume it. We like things that are salty.
Especially for us, people of color, this is something that has come down, unfortunately, through the centuries. You look at the way our slave ancestors used to eat. They used to get the scraps from the master’s table. The most fatty, salty, because before refrigeration was invented, that’s how all of our ancestors would preserve food over the winter. We would put them in brine, which is a salted solution. Why? Because our ancestors figured out really quickly that if they keep things in a brine, right, in a solution of salt and water, they would stay very well over the winter. We know why now, and that’s because bacteria hate sodium. It can’t survive in a high sodium solution. So, that’s how all of our ancestors were able to eat food over the winter before refrigeration was invented. So, we’ve been using salt for a long time as a preservative. I mean, you look at pickles. Pickle is a cucumber. It is a leftover of how our ancestors ate vegetables over long winters. Now we don’t need to eat pickles anymore. Because we have refrigerators that we can keep our cucumbers in.
But we have, over the centuries, developed a taste. We have a high affinity as humans for things that are salty. For the black population, especially those of us whose ancestors were enslaved, it’s particularly insidious because our ancestors got the worst part of the food left over as scraps that they would give our ancestors as food, and those foods were usually very salty and very fatty. Those tastes have come down from generation to generation. We don’t need to eat as much salt as we do, but unfortunately, we do because we have just developed this taste for it.
The average person needs probably 2,000 milligrams or less of sodium. Most people consume 6,000 to 8,000 milligrams per day. Why? Sodium chloride, we love the taste of it. And this is the other thing that people don’t realize. 30% of the excess sodium that we consume in our diet comes from salty foods, things that taste salty to us. But the bulk of it, and this is the dangerous part, 70% of the excess sodium that we consume in our diet comes from food that’s not salty. It comes from foods that are highly processed. Sodium chloride is a powerful preservative. However, there are much more powerful preservatives now that exist, things like sodium nitrate and all forms of sodium salt that is not salty because it’s not sodium chloride, but it has sodium. Sodium is the chemical. That’s the mineral that manufacturers use in their products to preserve things so they last a long time.
We consume so much sodium, much more than we need. In our population, we’re already at high risk for high blood pressure. When we over consume sodium, it puts us at a higher risk for developing high blood pressure, and unfortunately, maintaining high blood pressure. So, therein lies the danger for us. We, unfortunately, have a high affinity for things that taste salty. The worst part of it is that food manufacturers add other sodium salts to food that we never think about. So, a lot of the foods that we eat that are processed, that are even sweet, have even more sodium in them than foods that are salty.
We consume much more sodium from foods that don’t even have a salty taste. We’re not thinking about it, and we’re not recognizing how much sodium we’re consuming. That is a big problem for us, Munson.
MS: Well, I appreciate it.
JRH: That’s why we need to read labels.
MS: Reading the labels. How important is it to read labels?
JRH: Absolutely. It’s absolutely critical. You have to read the labels. You have to look at the back of the labels, and you have to see how many servings are in the package. What does the manufacturer consider one serving, and how much sodium is in one serving? A lot of times, we look at the packaging and see, 350 milligrams of sodium. Okay. But a lot of people think, “Oh, that’s how much sodium is in it.” Nope. You have to look. What is the serving size? Is it a quarter cup, a third a cup, and how many servings are in this little package? Sometimes manufacturers will put four servings of something in a little package. Why? Because they want it to look like there’s not that much sodium in it, so they can put 50 milligrams of sodium. But that one package may have ten servings, six servings. Yeah, you’re no longer consuming 250, you’re consuming thousands of milligrams of sodium.
So, yeah, you’re absolutely right. This is something that we have to pay a lot of attention to.
MS: Well, I just want to thank you for giving us insight and really your passion for educating us today here on Health IQ. We thank you for your dedication. We thank you for teaching and educating so that we can grow the number of individuals who are in this field. I’d like to thank everyone for watching and thank our guest here on Health IQ, Dr. Reid-Hector.
JRH: Thank you, Munson. It’s been a pleasure.
Editor’s note: This is an extended interview, errors will occur.
