What You Need To Know About Sugar

This post is a bit of an aside from my typical Monday technology post but since it is science and it is because of technology that we know these facts now I feel it is a close enough fit. As I learn more and more about a topic the more, my habits change to fit my new found knowledge. So if I read a study about why something is terrible for my health, I may only change my habits by five percent.

It's this same studying that leads me to a low carbohydrate diet. I was addicted to sugar and carbs more than most people I know. If I walked past a cookie or doughnut, my mind raced about how good it will taste and immediately I needed to eat one. I would even think about these sugar and carb filled treats and crave them until they filled me up to the point of nausea.

Now I can walk past the same cookies and doughnuts and not think twice about eating them. It's as if I reset my body and the cells forgot how the food tastes. Of course, I remember the taste of cookies or an excellent jelly-filled doughnut, but now it seems my body no longer cares about these foods. If you have a sweet tooth like I had you can reverse the "curse" and free yourself from the addiction. All it takes is some willpower, but even then you can make it easy with a few hacks.

However, this is not the post to show you how to make it easy to live a low carb diet but why the sugar is killing you. If you are an intelligent person, the information I came across over the past year will have an impact on you as it did me. Take small steps to improve your health, maybe today you skip that sugary Starbucks drink and have your coffee black or try a salad at lunch. Whatever you do, do not try to pile it all on at once but go one step at a time.

Since man began to produce his food instead of hunting and gathering it, his diet has contained large amounts of carbohydrates of one sort or another. It did not occur to anyone that it made any difference whether this carbohydrate consisted almost entirely of starch in wheat or rice or maize, or whether the starch was gradually becoming replaced by increasing amounts of sugar...
- John Yudkin

Sugar Is A Poison

Much like alcohol, sugar is a poison and as soon as we consume any amount of it our bodies work hard to get it out. With alcohol, our body displays signs that we are intoxicated by the drug in physical ways that we can gauge and measure. However, sugar does not show these same sign because our brain does not metabolize the sugar as it does with a beer or glass of wine. Even though humans do not feel intoxicated after eating sucrose (sugar) in general this chemical does the same damage to our liver and body as being drunk on a daily basis.

Our bodies do not require sugar!

Think about our ancestors even 150 years ago. They did not have an overabundance of fruit year round as we do and the same fruits were most likely not as big and sugar-filled as they grow to be today. Go back even further in history, and we would never see fruit like we do today an average human may have only come across these sweet foods a few times per year depending on their location. Just how some alcohol will not kill you, the same goes for sugar, but we are eating way more than our bodies are expecting.

So if sugar is just as bad as consuming alcohol why are we eating so much of it without a second thought? We don't need it to survive like most other foods since there is no nutrition in the sugar like we find in spinach or kale. Heck! There are ever specific compounds in some fats (essential fatty acids) that we need to consume because our bodies can't make what they provide.

For an in-depth look at sugar and alcohol check out this video.

Fat Gain By Soda:

When I saw these calculations I was in shock. Just by drinking once 12 ounces (59.1 ml) can of Coca-Cola each day has enough sugar to have our bodies gain an extra 16 pounds (7.24 kg) a year! But it gets worse as we increase the amount of Coca-Cola with our bottles and big gulps.

Ounces Of Coca-Cola To Weight Gain Per Year:

• 6.5 oz per day = 8 lbs per year
• 10 oz per day = 13 lbs per year
• 12 oz per day = 16 lbs per year
• 20 oz per day = 26 lbs per year
• 44 oz per day = 57 lbs per year
  from "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"

Sugar Is In Everything

Low Fat crazy lead to a rise in sugar in processed foods. The reason being that when we take out the fat from a food that same food tastes like trash and no one wants to eat the product. So what do the food companies do? They dump a bunch of sugar into the processed food so out mouth loves the taste. But as we just saw above consuming only one soft drink each day cause use to gain weight over the course of a year.

Now we add in all the sugar from the low fat food and we all eat way to much sugar. Which causes us to get fat. It's a bit ironic that when we take the fat out of fo,od we get fat. But this is exactly what eating sugar does along with many other health issues that Jonh Yudkin pointed out many years ago. These same health effects from sugar are one becoming public knowledge again as new science reinforces Yudkin's findings.

For More Information:

• "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"
• "Pure, White, and Deadly" by John Yudkin
• "Why Sugar Is As Bad As Alcohol"

Thanks For Reading!

If you have any topics that you would like me to cover please feel free to comment them below and I'll add them all to my list!

All images came from royalty and attribution free sources unless specified.

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