 The FDA has finally taken an official stance against added sugar, recommending that consumers limit their total daily intake of added sugar to no more than 10 percent of their daily calories. “Added sugar” is simply sugar added to food during the production process; 10 percent amounts to an average of about 50 grams (12.5 teaspoons) per day, or about as much sugar as in a single can of Coke. But with over 60 forms of added sugar, it can easily be disguised on ingredient labels.
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 Obesity is one of the greatest current public health concerns, as it is a major risk factor for metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndrome, which is a cluster of risk factors that raises risk for heart disease and other health problems.
 In my practice as a weight management physician, I routinely see patients with medication lists that are a mile long. This is not entirely unexpected. With obesity comes comorbid disease, and with disease often comes pharmacotherapy. In fact, it’s not unusual to see people on 10 or more medications when they first walk into my office. As a result, one of the first questions I usually ask myself is not, “What new medication can I start this patient on?”, but rather, “What old medication(s) can I stop?”
 We’ve all heard why eating non-organic animal products is a bad idea: the animals may be raised in poor conditions, industrial agriculture produces large amounts of air and water pollution, it’s a leading cause of deforestation in the U.S., and the animals may be fed antibiotics.
 In my last blog entry, I highlighted how the high fat/low carb Inuit diet could counter-intuitively be healthy for its adherents. One of my students read the article and asked me if I knew anything about the (also) high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet. Sometimes used as a treatment for pediatric epilepsy, the diet has also become increasingly popular not just for weight loss, but to change body composition - that is, to increase muscle mass and decrease body fat percentage. The student asked me if the ketogenic diet could do that in a safe way for a young person like him.
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