There’s nothing better than exercising regularly, unless it’s eating a healthy diet. Both play a significant role in your health. There are some general rules that can help you create a healthy diet, such as eating plenty of colorful vegetables, avoid highly processed food and most of all, avoid food with added sugar. Of all the food that has a negative impact on your health, food with added sugars is among the worst. The words “added sugars” are important, since fruits and vegetables also contain natural sugar, but also contain fiber that slows the absorption and other healthy nutrients.
Eating sugar makes you want to eat more sugar.
The sugar habit is quite addictive and even worse, when you eat something filled with sugar, it makes you want to eat more. Sugar triggers the opioid receptors, which gives you a natural high and boosts your energy, spiking it. What goes up rapidly, also comes down rapidly and those spikes can create dangerous changes to your body, putting out high levels of insulin and causing insulin resistance, which can cause metabolic disease and other problems. As the spike drops, you want more sugar, because your energy level is even lower.
High amounts of sugar can cause a condition called non-alcoholic fatty tissue liver disease.
When you eat too much sugar, it causes the pancreas to work hard to produce insulin, but it also makes the liver work harder too, especially if the sugar is fructose. It creates stress on the liver, inflammation and allows fat to accumulate. It’s the primary cause of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. One study followed the number of sugary soft drinks people consumed and found this condition occurs more frequently in people that drank more sugary soft drinks than those that didn’t.
Don’t be fooled by the word natural when it comes to sugar.
Unless you’re eating an apple that contains sugar, or other fruit or vegetable, no matter how natural the sugar is, it’s not healthy. While raw honey may have some benefits for health, it’s still sugary and eating too much isn’t healthy. HFCS is corn syrup that’s been altered in the manufacturing process and while it started out natural, it’s anything but that. Even if you ate the purest of cane sugars, they’re still not healthy. Foods containing added sugar increase your risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. It also accelerates aging and can reduce the effectiveness of your immune system.
- Some forms of sugar, such as HFCS—high fructose corn syrup—causes leptin resistance. Leptin is a hormone that makes you feel full. It takes more and more leptin to give you the feeling of being full, so you’ll eat far more than normal.
- Too much sugar can take its toll on your smile. It encourages dental carries. It is consumed by bacteria in your mouth. The bacteria metabolize and produces an acid that eats destroys the enamel and leaving the tooth defenseless.
- Too much sugar can lead to obesity and cause visceral fat to form around the abdomen. Visceral fat is the most dangerous type of fat. It crowds the organs and can lead to high blood pressure, stroke and other diseases.
- If you want to stay younger looking, avoid food with added sugar. It combines with your body’s protein during glycation and creates a new molecule called advanced glycation end products—AGEs. They attack your skin’s collagen and elastin, causing premature aging.
For more information, contact us today at Prime Fitness Studio