At Revolution Training in Stamford, CT, I urge clients to adopt a healthier way of eating. That means to give up highly processed food, especially sugar, since it’s incredibly bad for all parts of the body. Eating a lot of sugar also makes losing weight nearly impossible, plus it affects your organs and is highly addictive. Sugar assaults the body today more than ever, since it’s in just about everything you eat, from ketchup to yogurt. Even worse than the inclusion of natural sugar, today’s products have an artificially created type. It’s called high fructose corn syrup—HFCS—which create even more health problems.
Why is man so attracted to that sweet taste?
There are a lot of theories about why our bodies are conditioned to crave sugar. One of those is that sweet plants and berries were normally safe to eat. However, just like fire, which is good when controlled but bad when it’s out of control, consuming sugar has gotten out of control. Those commercials for HFCS say it’s natural, so it must be healthy. Well, that’s just not true. Too much sugar boosts the potential for diabetes, heart disease, obesity, tooth decay and impairs your immune system. It also accelerates the aging process.
HFCS doesn’t digest like normal sugar.
When you start reading labels, you’ll notice many of the products contain HFCS. It’s cheap to make, so it’s extremely popular. It’s the sugar that’s released from corn stalks via a chemical process. It has a chemical formula that’s not like any natural sugar. In fact, it’s far worse than cane or beet sugar. It’s chemically different and reacts in your body differently. The fructose in HFCS causes many of the same problems as other types of sugar, but adds even more. It enters the bloodstream rapidly, causing insulin spikes, fatty liver and metabolic problems. It doesn’t trigger the satiety hormone and leaves you feeling hungry, while increasing the risk for dementia, heart disease and stomach lining damage.
Even though fat has been labeled the damaging food for heart disease, it’s really sugar.
Since the 1950s fat has been called the evil food villain. In reality, it’s sugar. In the 1950s the sugar industry paid a group of Harvard scientists a large sum of money to do a mega study and blame any link to heart disease on other causes, in this case, fat got the blame. That omitted any studies that showed sugar was the problem and focus only on those that blamed animal fat. That study has influenced eating habits until recently when the truth was finally revealed. While trans fats do cause heart problems, coconut oil, avocado and nuts improve heart health.
- HFCS causes leptin resistance. Like insulin resistance that requires more and more insulin to get the sugar into cells, it takes more and more leptin to make you feel full.
- Sugar is addictive because it triggers the same receptors as cocaine. These pleasure receptors make you feel good. It also changes your sense of taste so it takes more and more sugar for something to taste sweet enough for your palate.
- While salt can make your blood sugar rise, sugar can also do the same. In fact, sugar may be as bad or even worse than salt for people with high blood pressure.
- When you’re reading labels, be aware there are a number of different names for sugar, such as fructose, corn syrup, dextrose and sucrose. Often manufacturers use several types you it doesn’t appear in the top position of ingredients, tricking you into thinking the amount is less significant.
For more information, contact us today at Revolution Training