Death By Sugar

SUGAR. It’s delicious. There are so many wonderful sugary treats in this world. Everyone has their favorites. The childhood memories:  running out to the ice cream truck, dollar in hand, sitting on the hot curb, in blissful enjoyment over that quickly melting fudgesicle. That morning coffee drink with chocolatey goodness and caffeine that gets you going. A big slice of that birthday cake at your son’s birthday party…and a couple of scoops of ice cream of course!  You try to cut back. You know it’s not great for you, but you only do dessert after dinner a few nights a week. You only drink three sodas a day. You only go through the coffee drive-through on workdays. Everything in moderation, right? Moderation. What does that mean really? Everyone thinks of it differently. Eating sugar every day is NOT moderation. It’s a daily habit. A routine. A staple. And it’s in EVERYTHING! Even in things you would think of it being in: bread, pasta sauce, that “healthy” protein smoothie you make every day, ketchup, pizza, bran flakes, etc. So, you may THINK you are not consuming foods with sugar in them all day, every day, but if you are not a diehard ingredient checker and you don’t consume products with sugar, you most likely are.

So, what’s the big deal? The big deal is that there is ample data now, after being a society that consumes more sugar than any nation in the world for decades, that sugar is killing us. All you have to do is Google “harms of sugar” and you can spend the rest of your life reading about how horrible sugar is for us. Yet most people still consume it on a daily basis without fail. Did you know sugar is the cause of high cholesterol (not what we were taught to believe- the consumption of fat). Do you know that sugar acts the same in our brains as an elicit substance (high inducing drugs)? Did you know that sugar literally impairs the structure of DNA and FEEDS cancer cells? (Hey! Cancer cells love cake too!) I am not going to provide a list of all the damage that sugar does in this blog, because those lists are already out there (here is a good one: https://nancyappleton.com/141-reasons-sugar-ruins-your-health/). What I will say is that if you are not willing to change anything else in your life but just ONE THING, that ONE THING should be to completely stop eating sugar and foods with added sugar in any form! We know the food industry has about a hundred fancy words for “sugar”.

Will it suck? Yes, at first. Because think about it…you are addicted. It’s a high. But once its out of your system, you will notice some things like having MORE ENERGY! Say what? Wait, don’t you get an energy rush from sugar? Sure! But then what happens, you have an energy crash. Your blood sugar spikes then plummets. When you eat complex molecule foods like medium chain triglycerides and proteins, they take much longer for the body to break down. Causing only a gradual bump in blood sugar and then a return to normal, over a long period of time. When off sugar you may notice that especially for those with arthritis, fibromyalgia and other inflammation related conditions, your inflammation in greatly reduced. Sugar causes inflammation. You will also see a change in your waistline. Sugar increases your body fat storage and makes you consume more calories because of blood sugar crashes. If you have gastrointestinal troubles such as frequent heartburn, irritable bowel, or just suffer from constipation frequently, you will see a decrease in some of those gastrointestinal symptoms.

I think I have kicked this horse enough. I know you are thinking, "if sugar is so bad for us, why does the government allow it to be put in all our foods?" Ah…you made the mistake of thinking the government cares about your health. Shame on you. They don’t. Especially ours. Our Nation is one of the worst when it comes to regulating food. Hundreds of chemicals that are allowed in our foods by the FDA have been banned or restricted in many other countries because of how bad they are for human consumption. If you are old enough, you may remember the old smoking ads touting all these wonderful benefits of smoking cigarettes. Yeah, we see how that turned out. Bottom line is, our ancestors did not eat sugar to survive as a species. They didn’t need it. You know why? Because our bodies already produce it! Our bodies break down food into glycogen. Glycogen is used as fuel. It’s not the most efficient fuel, but that’s for another blog. So why consume it, if your body already makes it? Your body knows how much it needs and will produce what it needs. It’s doesn’t need you making these decisions because good golly that cinnamon bun just smells sooo good! That cinnamon bun may taste fantastic, but it is also slowly killing your body: fueling cancer cells, storing fat, building cholesterol, and inflaming and overworking all your internal organs. Death by sugar. If we put that on tombstones, do you think more people would think twice before they ordered a soda?

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