Sugar Is Super Deadly
Okay, so you are a sugar addict. If you want to stop it altogether and go in for a "sugar cleanse", you need to be mentally prepared. You can chart out a plan to kick the sugar habit.
However, what are the cons of that super-white ingredient?
1. Sugar, ie table sugar, is mostly extracted sugarcane or beetroot. It is also called sucrose, which is composed of 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Both are important to differentiate as they get processed in a different manner by the body, which affects our health too differently, according to mindbodygreen.com.
2. Fructose = Fat. Glucose sugar gets processed in our guts even as we digest food and ultimately, gets processed by every cell in our body. Fructose, also present in sucrose, does not get processed by the gut and makes a dash for the liver. While some of it gets stored as glycogen, a bit of it turns into triglycerides, or fat. Thus, fructose is fat, you can rest assured! Fructose is 70% sweeter than table sugar, making it sweet and addictive. No more than 25 grams or 5 teaspoons of fructose per day should be consumed, while obese people should bring it down to just 10-15 grams or 2-3 teaspoons of fructose per day.
3. Sugar is addictive: Sugar tampers with the biochemical pathways to our brain and also with dopamine receptors. Every dopamine spike calls for a large dose of sugar. Hence, out of 600,000 food products in America, 80% are laced with some form of sugar, especially fructose, which is cheap and addictive.
4. Fructose is toxic to the liver: When you overdose on sugar, then you lead to "slower metabolism, higher cholesterol, heart disease, fatty-liver disease or cirrhosis, hypertension, obesity, hepatic insulin resistance and even gout", when there is too much production of uric acid by the body. Fructose also leads to leptin resistance, a hormone that signals whether you are full or not.
5. Most plants with fructose have fiber: Fiber acts as a security check to our bodies, because it not only makes us feel full and lowers the digestion, but also helps to slow down the absorption of fructose into our bodies. Nowadays, with juices and smoothies, even as fibre is removed from foods such as white rice, puffed wheat and white bread, and fruits are produced for more sweetness and longer shelf life, we are destroying our chances of healthy bodies.
6. "Natural" sugar is not necessarily "good". Even if fructose is present in most natural fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, it doesn't automatically translate into food that is good for you. The percentage of fructose in most products is as follows:
Agave nectar = 56-97%
High fructose corn syrup = 42-90%
Tapioca syrup = 55%
Table sugar / cane sugar / beet sugar = 50%
Honey = 38-50%
Coconut sugar = 38-48.5%
Yacon syrup = 35%
Maple syrup = 30%-45%
Molasses = 23%
7. Just because sugar has a low glycemic index (GI), it doesn't mean it's good for you. The GI scale was created to see how high your blood glucose rises after ingesting 50 grams of carbs of a specific food. But most of the time, sugar is more than just glucose, as most of the time, it consists of fructose. Hence, GI and glycemic load are not useful tools for measuring fructose in the body. However, the calorific content of sugar matters. Sugars in different foods are metabolized differently, each one with different effects on the body.
Sugar needs to be removed from the diet, bringing it down to safe levels. In a statement published by The American Heart Association in 2009, it was found that Americans consumed 22 teaspoons of sugar everyday. It needs to be reduced to six for women and nine for men.
So there you are. Sugar is sweet but does not help you to cut down on the fat production or retention, but increases it. So make sure to decrease the consumption of sugar.
