Fat-burning desserts: How the science of weight loss got a lip-smacking makeover...

Have you ever tried to kick a certain food that you knew was bad for you, but found that no matter how hard you tried you just couldn't stick to the plan? Promised you'd stop at that third cookie, but wound up devouring the entire bag?

Did you ever joke with friends that you thought you might be addicted to your daily slice of chocolate cake?

A flury of scientific studies^[3] conducted within the last decade show that there may be something to this. Refined sugars (like table sugar and high fructose corn syrup) and wheat-based flours, which are staples of a large class of traditional snacks and desserts, may be some of the most addictive ingredients you can put into food.

Sugar And Wheat.
Agents Of Addiction?

Yes, you read that headline correctly. But I don't blame you one bit for doing a double-take.

If you came to me looking for advice on how to lose weight and I told you to consider adding to your diet desserts loaded with potentially addictive refined sugar and starches I would understand if you suddenly felt the desire to reach out and slap me.

Results Of The First Study.
LCH = Low Carbohydrate,
BB = Big Breakfast

High Protein, High
Carbohydrate Breakfast

Imagine for a second there existed a hormone that could dampen your level of hunger. Switch the hormone ON and your hunger goes away. Switch it OFF and you get hungry again. Now imagine that you are able to control the on/off switch... What do you think that might do for your ability to stay at your ideal body weight?

Could Leptin Put An
End To Dieting?

30 years of overeating
is taking its toll.

The Leptin Feedback Loop
Controls Hunger Level^[9]

Leptin resistance can lead
to SNOWBALLING weight gain

Trigylcerides are "easy to
transport" fat molecules
that oppose leptin

Lower your triglycerides to
improve leptin sensitivity
(150 or less is good)

If the accusations of "junk food poisoning" made by several highly-vocal nutritional experts can be taken at face value, and REALLY DO bear on the question of what causes severe leptin resistance, then they offer an insightful window into what may be wrong with the food ingredients we are putting into desserts today that are blowing up waistlines everywhere we look.

Here is what the experts tell us we need to do to raise leptin-sensivitity through the careful selection of ingredients we choose to put into our desserts and snacks:

FAT-BURNING DESSERT REQUIREMENT #1:
ELIMINATE SUGAR

According to Dr. Robert Lustig, childhood obesity specialist and author of "Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease", fructose consumption is driving the current obesity epidemic^[12].

"Once upon a time, sugar was a condiment. Now it's a diet staple."

- Robert Lustig, M.D.

In other words, our runaway love affair^[13] with ordinary table sugar and high fructose corn syrup (a sweeter but chemically equivalent sugar variant) keeps our insulin levels chronically elevated and causes the kind of hormonal disruption that leads first to leptin resistance and later to insulin resistance and diabetes.

Excessive sugar consumption doesn't just make you fatter. Nobel prize winning chemist Linus Pauling was a vocal advocate of the work of British physiologist and nutritionist John Yudkin who warned of the health dangers of sugar as far back as 1972.

His book "Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us And What We Can Do To Stop It" was based on food studies carried out in the 1960s that showed how sugar, and not the cholesterol in saturated fat, was the driving force behind a host of chronic diseases that included obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

Yudkin foresaw a public health disaster with sugar at the center BEFORE high fructose corn syrup was even invented in the 1970s. As he pointed out, sugar is not a required component of our diet, and today we eat 20-30 times the amount we did only two or three hundred years ago.

SUMMARY: The science seems compelling. Sugar is not required in our diet, and it almost certainly contributes to leptin resistance. So we can, and should, do with without it.

FAT-BURNING DESSERT REQUIREMENT #2:
ELIMINATE WHEAT

Not fond of the idea of giving up bread, cookies, pasta, and all the other starchy but oh-so-enjoyable wheat-based foods you eat daily? What if you learned they were a primary cause of disease?

When the USDA released its "Dietary Guidelines for Americans" in 1980 its goal was to curtail the amount of saturated fat in the American diet. This, they believed, would stem heart disease. And to fill the nutritional void that reduced meat and dairy consumption would create they recommended a shift to grain-based foods as our primary source of daily calories (now depicted in the base of the well-known USDA Food Pyramid):

And yet though we have increased our grain consumption by around 25 percent since the recommendation came into effect and reduced our intake of (cholesterol-containing) saturated fats, the incidence of coronary heart disease has barely changed at all^[14].

Because they got the science wrong says Dr. William Davis, cardiologist and author of "Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health".

"When my patients gave up wheat they lost and average of 27.6 lbs each!"

- William Davis, M.D.

Davis believes the shift to rapidly-digestible wheat-based carbohydrates as the primary source of nutrition was a colossal health-policy disaster and is now the driving force behind obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis and a host of other life-threatening chronic diseases^[15]. Wheat he says, is one of worst foods ever to have been introduced into the human diet.

Not only does the gliaden protein in modern day wheat (a) behave like an opiate that stimulates appetite to cause overeating, and (b) cause a chronic low-grade inflammatory response that prompts the immune system to glob onto leptin directly and interrupt the leptin signalling process, but the lectin protein in wheat likely binds to leptin receptors as well, desensitizing the fragile leptin hunger control mechanism even more.

In other words the consumption of wheat-based foods promotes leptin resistance.

SUMMARY: Given that we consume more calories daily from grain-based desserts than any other single class of food, elimination of wheat has to be considered mandatory in the design of leptin-sensitive desserts.

FAT-BURNING DESSERT REQUIREMENT #3:
ELIMINATE DAIRY

I could write a book on all the reasons why giving up dairy would be the smart move to make - even if you had NO desire whatsoever to lose any body weight. For example, consumption of high fat dairy, like cream or ice cream, is a great way (i.e. not at all recommended) to directly increase your level of blood serum triglycerides^[16].

But there's another reason for limiting dairy, having to do with food sensitivity, that I find especially compelling. So should anyone else who lives in the U.S., the U.K., Australia or New Zealand.

That's because according to Dr. Keith Woodford of Lincoln University, New Zealand, the author of "Devil In The Milk", most of the milking herd in these countries are comprised of problematic "A1 cows" (like the black and white Holsteins)^[17].

The milk from A1 cows contains a form of the beta-casein protein that, when digested, produces a peptide called BCM7. In the last decade this "rogue peptide" has been implicated in a host of health problems including sudden infant death syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, autism, and schizophrenia. Not to mention familiar digestive problems that people usually attribute (often incorrectly) to lactose intolerance.

Dairy cows that don't produce the BCM7 irritant are A2s - but good luck finding pure A2 milk in the United States!

The upshot is that high-protein content dairy, like milk and cottage cheese, is VERY LIKELY causing inflammation in your body, even if you do not notice the problem. Unfortunately one of the consequences of inflammation (your body producing an immune response) is that c-reactive protein (CRP) is released in quantity. That's unfortunate for us because CRP happens to have an affinity for leptin, and keeps leptin from binding to leptin receptors in the brain where it could do its job of controlling appetite.

SUMMARY: Dairy may be causing leptin resistance and halting weight loss even if you THINK you have no problems whatsoever with it!

For those of us who constantly seem to have difficulty fitting into clothes bought just two or three summers ago the act of saying no to desserts may be hard to do but it is easy to justify. "Too many calories," we tell ourselves regretfully.

Let's leave calorie counting
to the experts

Just how tolerant
should we be of the
chemicals in our food?

FAT-BURNING DESSERT REQUIREMENT #4:
ELIMINATE PROCESSED FOODS

Toxins can do more harm than just move the needle to the right on the bathroom scales. Especially if you are unwittingly feeding them to your children. This is especially worrisome given their smaller body weight. Because it means they are getting a WAY larger dose than you are ever likely to experience.

Harmless sprinkles or
chemical cocktail?

None of us would ever think of allowing another adult to spoon industrial chemicals down our child's throat. But when we send them off to a birthday party and they start in on the brightly-colored frosted cup cakes that's EXACTLY what we're doing.

Artificial food dyes, like FD&C Blue #1 and #2 (banned in many European countries), can cause skin rashes, breathing problems, and even change the delicate brain chemistry of your children^[18]. Other food dyes are known carcinogens.^[19]

But this is merely the tip of the processed foods iceberg. The dangers of hidden toxins go well beyond food coloration and extend to EVERY item of "food" that comes factory-sealed inside cardboard, plastic, or metal.

According to Andrea Donsky and Randy Boyer, specialists in child nutrition and authors of "Unjunk Your Junk Food", we need to be paying close attention to food labels. When it comes to processed foods we must train ourselves to look past simple fat, calorie, and sodium assessments. We must be especially vigilant if we wish to unjunk our desserts and steer clear of all foods containing ANY of the following toxins:

• Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) - Headaches, vomiting and blackouts can afflict those most sensitive to this common flavor enhancer and neurotoxin that goes by many names^[20] and is linked to a slew of chronic medical conditions
• Artificial Colors - Neurotoxins and sometimes suspected carcinogens. Reactions include hyperactivity, nasal congestion, and respiratory ailments. Be on the look out for names like FD&C Red #40 or (E129), FD&C Green #3 or (E143), FD&C Yellow #5 or (E110)
• Artificial Sweeteners - Implicated in a wide range of chronic inflammatory conditions - including depression, altered metabolic function, and liver and kidney dysfunction. Be on the look out for the chemicals acesulfame potassium, saccharin, sucralose, aspartame (bacterial excrement), and neotame
• Artificial Flavors - Proprietary chemical formulas of which little is known, about half of which in the U.S., according to the USDA^[21], are made up of aliphatic acyclic and acyclic alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, carboxylic acids and related esters, lactones, ketals, and acetals. Possible causative agents in many allergic and behavioral reactions
• Preservatives [including: benzoates, sorbates, nitrates and nitrites, sulphites, polysorbate 80, carrageenan - the list goes on]. Studies have linked many of these compounds to a host of conditions including infertility^[22], inflammatory bowel disease^[23], and cancer^[24]

It is important to note that the term "toxin" covers a broad spectrum of agents that can cause both short and long term health problems, beginning with the hallmark of toxic build up - (usually undetected) whole body inflammation. If your body cannot properly metabolize a substance, you should not be ingesting it.

The bottom line: processed foods have no place in a healthy diet and certainly do not belong in any formulation of a healthy dessert. That means cake mixes and the like should be banned from your kitchen.

FAT-BURNING DESSERT REQUIREMENT #5:
SWITCH OFF YOUR OVEN

Who doesn't love the aroma of a freshly-baked chocolate cake? Or a tray of crisp cookies ready to crumble in your mouth? Cooking is truly one of the great pleasures of life.

Just how safe to eat is
this baked cup cake?

In fact the act of baking is so rewarding it can seduce us into believing that every home-baked item that emerges from our oven must be brimming with nourishment.

But this is far from the truth. High temperatures may be required to bring many of your favorite creations to life but they also catalyze chemical reactions that can turn harmless food ingredients into dangerous, even carcinogenic, toxins.

Ever wonder why those muffin tops taste so great? It's because the "browning stage" that alerts you to the end point in your cooking session is really a visual indicator of the Maillard reaction^[25], wherein complex flavorsome chemical compounds begin forming in response to prolonged temperatures above 250 degrees Farenheit.

In 1912 French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard studied the flavor-inducing chemistry of amino acids and sugars at high heat. Until that time there was no proper science of flavoring - and it would take another four decades before others followed up on his ideas and finally figured out the chemistry that goes on every day in hundreds of millions of home ovens across the globe.

ACRYLAMIDES - THE BAKING TOXINS THAT SCARED THE FDA
Eight-five years after Maillard's initial studies an accidental industrial chemical contamination led to the surprising discovery of suspected human carcinogens known as acrylamides in the blood of the general population. But how did a substance used in processes like papermaking and the manufacture of dyes get inside us?

The source of the acrylamides was tracked back to highly processed cooked foods and the Maillard reaction^[26].

sugar + eggs + flour
+ baking = acrylamides

The FDA now classifies acrylamides, which are known human neurotoxins, as foodborne chemical contaminants which they group right alongside other toxic substances like benzene, dioxins, and radionuclides^[27].

They state: "Acrylamide forms in food due to a reaction between the amino acid asparagine and reducing sugars such as glucose and fructose [i.e. table sugar]." Asparagine-rich foods of interest to the dessertier would include eggs and whole grains. So the basic baking ingredients trio of sugar, flour and eggs sets the stage rather well for the production of acrylamides in your baked goods. But this is not the only toxin that you need to worry about when you use your oven...

ADVANCED GLYCATION ENDPRODUCTS - THESE BAKING TOXINS WILL AGE YOU!
If you have ever caught yourself looking at an "age spot" on the back of your hand you'll be aware of another form of browning reaction that bodes no good.

Advanced Glycation Endproducts (AGEs) are toxins that are the result of naturally-occuring chemical reactions that take place over time in your body. They are studied intently because of their suspected role as triggers in a number of age-related chronic diseases, including atherosclerosis, kidney dysfunction, and Alzheimers.

Why speed up the aging
process unnecessarily?

This toxin-producing process is another instance of sugar molecules reacting with the free amino groups found in proteins, lipids or nucleic acids.

You can think of it as your body "cooking" at low heat over a period of decades. Diabetics, with their elevated blood sugar, are particularly susceptible to the disease complications that inflammatory AGEs can bring about within them^[28].

But AGEs also occur as the end stage of Maillard-browning in baked foods containing the right ingredients. So when we consume them directly through the foods we eat we are literally speeding up the aging process within us by increasing our AGE load - a frightening scenario indeed!

Verdict: Once again we find that the baking ingredients of traditional desserts - sugar, flour, eggs - generate inflammation producing (AGE) toxins that work against our fat loss goals (not to mention the assortment of other chronic health problems they cause). So they have no place in the formation of the kind of healthy desserts that interest us.

So, what do all of these findings mean, and can those requirements for an alternative, healthy formulation of a dessert actually be put to use?

What If You Could Create
Fat-Burning Desserts Like:

Lime Cheesecake Cups...

Barfi...

Carrot Cake... And 100+
More Recipes Like These?

Or is it all just wishful thinking?

Perhaps the most important lesson the science seems to be telling us is that there are MANY ways the traditional dessert can fail us when it comes to our health.

We have seen how every day we are tempted by "junk" foods whose addictive low-nutrient ingredients (like sweeteners and wheat flour) punish us severely for sampling them by fostering an irresistible desire to come back for more.

In our zeal to take care of our bodies we convince ourselves that natural ingredients (like milk and cream) surely cannot be all that bad for us. But in reality, adding them to our dessert recipes can set up paths of inflammation in the body that can persist unnoticed for decades.

Worse yet, this inflammation can snowball into myriad chronic health issues, including the frustratingly persistent creep of body weight.

Invisible toxins, which we may add directly when we employ processed ingredients in our recipes, or produce directly ourselves through the act of cooking at high temperatures, only make it that much harder to understand the nature of the threat that the innocent-looking dessert poses for us.

In a very real sense then, there is probably not a SINGLE dessert you have tasted that was not in some sense predisposed to RUINING your health. Not one that was not fattening.

Not one that did not push your body AWAY from its ideal weight rather than pull it TOWARD that goal.

For someone who loves desserts and who might already be struggling to keep their weight in check this could seem like seriously disappointing news.

And yet...

Obvious because now that we have spelled out the 5 requirements of fat-burning desserts it is apparent that it OUGHT to be possible to architect the kind of dessert that would promote fat loss, rather than the normal outcome which is heavily biased toward fat storage.

In Need Of A Midriff Friendly
Approach To Tasty Treats?

The bottom line is this. Because we now know the fundamental science behind the processes that drive weight gain - and especially as they apply to the ingredients that typically go into a dessert - we can get creative. We can use what we know to bypass the usual objections that accompany high-calorie but nutritionally sparse snacks and desserts.

Instead we can create dishes that counter these objections because they are prepared in a totally different way using alternative ingredients that promote health and feelings of well-being, rather than illness and feelings of shame and guilt...

Imagine how reassuring it is to be able to wake up each morning and know with complete confidence that...

	You don't have to give up desserts just because you wish to remain trim
	You need never feel guilty again simply because you have a sweet tooth
	You will never again have to fight the desire to indulge in a treat
	Heck - If you want to have a dessert for breakfast, you can. In fact...
	Adding healthy desserts to the menu will displace the real junk food in your life - for good!

Would you like to learn how to get started with the uniquely-crafted fat-burning desserts described on this page?