While sugar and products made with sugar, have a sweet taste, it doesn’t mean they’re sweet for your health or body. In fact, they may be ruining your health. Man has always had a taste for sweetness. It’s obvious when you feed a baby and find they love applesauce or pudding far more than green beans. One anthropologist hypothesized that man was created to love sweetness, since sweetness in fruits and vegetables meant they were safe to eat. While that may be true, manufacturers of food have taken that love to a whole new level and put sugar in almost all food we eat.
Just because it’s natural, doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
You hear a lot about healthy sugars, like honey, can sugar or corn syrup. While honey does have some health benefits, like its antioxidants, heart healthy benefits and aid with healing wounds, consuming too much is extremely unhealthy. Remember those commercials for high fructose corn syrup—HFCS—it’s natural so it must be healthy. No matter what type of sugar you’re discussing, too much increases your risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and impairs your immune system and accelerates aging. Not all natural things are healthy. Tobacco is natural and so are many poisons.
You might be surprised that fat isn’t the enemy.
While it’s not healthy to eat too much fat, especially trans fat, it’s not the enemy that it’s been made to seem. In the 1950s a mega study by Harvard scientists were conducted. Mega studies take all the available studies and compare the results for an overall conclusion. They found that fat caused heart disease. What wasn’t explained is that the sugar industry paid for the study and provided extra money to the scientists for that conclusion. They only used those studies that leaned toward fat and ignored the problems of sugar. While trans fat does contribute to heart disease, most fat, which includes the fat in avocado, coconut oil and the fat in nuts actually add to good health.
Science has taken it a step further with HFCS.
Check the label of those processed food and you’re bound to see a lot of sugar added. Some of the sugar comes from high fructose corn syrup—in fact, a lot does. It may be called natural, but it’s not. It’s removed from corn stalks by using a chemical and that product is even worse than normal beet or cane sugar. It’s a combination of glucose and fructose. The body doesn’t process fructose well. It doesn’t suppress your appetite, plus has all the negatives caused by sugar, insulin spikes, metabolic problems, increased risk for heart disease, dementia, fatty liver disease, obesity and damage to the stomach lining.
They’re different chemically and how they react in your body. Fructose causes all the same problems as regular sugar, but also adds more. It goes into the blood stream rapidly, can cause fatty liver, spikes insulin and creates metabolic problems. It boosts your appetite, increasing the risk of weight gain. It increases the risk of heart disease, dementia and can even cause damage to the stomach lining.
- HFC is cheaper to make, so it’s in many processed foods. That means you’re eating it even when you aren’t aware of the sweetness, making it easier to eat more than you thought and overwhelming your body with it.
- Sugar is addictive. It affects the same receptors as cocaine. It also alters the sense of taste to make naturally sweet fruit taste less sweet.
- While doctors may focus on salt as an offender in high blood pressure, sugar plays a big role in making the numbers rise, too.
- If you’re reading labels to see how much sugar is in a product, you might be surprised to find that manufacturers use several types of sugar in a product and when listed individually, are lower on the list. However, when added together creates a product high in sugar.
For more information, contact us today at The Worx by Maia