Your Office Makes You Fat

If you can catch fat from the people around you, this may make sense: Your office can make you fat. Is all that sitting making you wider? Although office snacks might boost morale are they also sabotaging your health? The conclusion, based on increases in sick days, is yes. It has been shown that just the sight or smell of candy, cookies, donuts and other sugary sweet concoctions triggers a desire to eat some. Since most of us are lugging around excess body-fat, this kind of morale booster is not helping our diet efforts and may inadvertently contribute to increasing sick days and perhaps anxiety, listlessness or moodiness when the resulting sugar rush wears off.

Just 2 pieces of candy each workday totals about 480 calories, and a person weighing 160 pounds would need to walk 157 minutes, ballroom dance 132; golf (carrying clubs) 88 minutes, backpack 56 minutes or run fast for 29 minutes just to burn off those extra calories. You don’t even want to know the amount of exercise it would take to burn off most donuts and cookies! In addition, these sugary treats wreak havoc with our bodies, spiking insulin levels and making fat burning impossible. Tom Griesel points out, "Today the average American eats his or her weight in sugar every year. The typical person eats 50 teaspoons of sugar EVERY day—most of it hidden in processed and packaged foods. We believe more health problems can be traced to sugar use than any other single item eaten today." Maybe you need to get a job that involves more exercise?

But sugar has its uses: Researcher James Collins has developed an effective, low-cost–and surprising–way to treat chronic bacterial infections, such as staph, strep, tuberculosis, and infections of the urinary tract. He and his team of scientists discovered that a simple compound–sugar–dramatically boosts the effectiveness of antibiotics.