Sugar and Health
grains, and potatoes, in their life all the time have had trouble losing weight, or permanently keeping off any weight they have lost through extreme measures like very strict diets or fasting.
Eventually people on these refined high carbohydrate diets exhaust their pancreas, which stops generating any insulin at all, and they become diabetic, and must take insulin regularly to keep their blood sugar from staying at dangerously high levels.
There is another serious problem with too much sugar, sugar addiction. For many years people have spoken of sugar addiction because of the seemingly addictive behavior of people who have a strong desire for foods with sugar. However, it is only recently that it has been scientifically been shown to be a genuine addiction. Rats fed sugar showed classic signs of withdrawal when their sugar “fix” was taken away from them. When they were allowed to eat sugar again, they binged on it. The sugar had triggered natural pleasure producing opiods in their brains. The effect is similar to morphine and heroin, though not as powerful. Actual studies of these animals’ brains showed an accelerated growth of dopamine receptors in the nucleus accumbens in their brains. This helps explain why people who eat sugar regularly, have strong cravings and seek a sugar “fix” many times throughout their day.
You are probably addicted to sugar if you have the following: if you have cravings for food containing sugar, if you can’t stop eating after one piece of candy or one bite of cake or other baked goods; if you can’t go for more than a few hours without experiencing a letdown with fatigue or irritability or anxiety; if you have to have your sugared coffee and donuts or other baked goods every morning and have and eat candy and other sweets in your home all the time; if you regularly drink sugared sodas during the day to give yourself a pick-me-up because you’re dragging.
Nutritionally, refined sugars present another problem. It takes vitamins and minerals to digest and assimilate ingested refined sugars. Unprocessed sugar cane juice is rich in vitamins and minerals and provides some nourishment to the body, though it is still too high in sugar to be good for the body. But refined sugar is an empty calorie, which uses up valuable vitamins and minerals in order to be digested without supplying any of them. Thus, eating a lot of refined sugars depletes the body of these valuable health promoting factors. That’s why, you now can understand, even overweight people who have become so because of large amounts of sugar in their diets, can actually suffer from malnutrition.
Here’s a list of some of the negative health effects of sugar, and the refined flour products and potatoes that act like sugar within the body. Sugar can:
… cause an increase in insulin being generated in the body
… cause an increase in insulin sensitivity
… overstress the pancreas causing damage
… cause diabetes … cause weight gain and obesity
… produce a significant rise in triglycerides
… reduce helpful high density cholesterol, known as HDLs
… promote an elevation of harmful cholesterol, know as LDLs
… increase total cholesterol
… cause atherosclerosis
… increase systolic pressure
… cause hypertension
… upset the body’s mineral balance
… promote tooth decay
… cause hyperactivity, anxiety, concentration difficulties, and crankiness
in children
… lead to alcoholism
… cause depression
If you are seriously craving sugar, you should avoid all sugars. The following is a list of sugars and sweeteners that act like sugars, though you may not have recognized them as sugars before reading this article. Of course, if a label just says “sugar,” you will avoid that too!
AVOID THESE SWEETENERS: corn syrup, fructose, high fructose corn syrup, honey, sucrose, maltodextrin, dextrose, molasses, rice milk, almond milk, white grape juice, fruit juice sweetened, brown rice syrup, maple syrup, date sugar, cane sugar, corn sugar, beet sugar, succanat and lactose.
There are many other points to be made if one wishes to guide oneself correctly. Raw sugar and brown sugar, which was at one time sold in a lot of health food stores and still may be found in some supermarkets, is actually highly refined white sugar with some molasses put back in to give it brown color. Fructose doesn’t increase leptin, a hormone that decreases your appetite, and doesn’t suppress ghrelin, the hormone that makes you hungry. Thus, people who eat food containing fructose are likely to take in more calories, not less. And remember, almost all simple sugars, fructose included, and not just refined white sugar, are metabolized quickly and raise