For years, so many of my friends and colleagues tell me that “sugar is a poison”, and I dismissed their talk as just the latest health fad or another scare story. I thought it wasn’t that important. How wrong was I.
By the time you finish reading this article, you, like me, will have changed what you eat and transformed your understanding of sugar.
Excess sugar = Metabolic Disease
Remember from my previous article in this series “Obesity isn’t the real problem”, obesity is actually simply a “marker” for a more serious group of conditions that make up metabolic syndrome. These conditions include increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels.
So why does excess sugar lead to metabolic disease? It’s because of the way it’s processed by the body; not about what’s in it, but of what happens to it.
Sugar is half glucose and half fructose. Glucose is the six-membered ring on the left, it’s the energy of life. Every cell on the planet burns glucose for energy. Glucose is so important that if you don’t eat it, your liver will make it. All that doesn’t make glucose good. The more you eat, the more your insulin goes up, and that’s bad because the insulin will store energy in fat cells and will drive weight gain. More insulin equals more fat. That said, the glucose calories are not the same as the fructose calories.
That five-membered ring of fructose is particularly bad. It’s the sweet molecule, the one we crave so much, and it presents a completely different problem. Glucose can be used and metabolised by every cell in the body. Fructose can only be metabolized in the liver. When the liver is overwhelmed by too much fructose (and eaten without fiber to slow digestion), it has no choice but to turn the excess energy into liver fat, and that is at the heart of chronic metabolic disease. We are always told, “You are what you eat.” Not true. Why? Because when consumed in excess, sugar IS a poison.
Because the fructose in sugar is processed differently, sugar breakdown bypasses the natural systems that keep us fit and healthy. For each of us, there is a “tipping point” beyond which it can disrupt your natural appetite hormone regulation, making it difficult to tell if you are hungry or full.
That’s why a little sugar is fine, and you don’t need to completely eliminate sugar from your food choices, but by staying under your own tipping point, you will recalibrate your own system so that you are able to eat sugar in safe and enjoyable quantities.
“You are what your body does with what you eat.”
Excess sugar is a poison. So what does excess sugar do inside our bodies?
Back in 1977, the main public health concern was heart disease. Everybody wanted to know what caused it. There was a battle then between dietary fat on one side and dietary sugar on the other side. We ended up betting on the wrong horse.
We decided dietary fat was the problem, like meat, milk, and eggs (it wasn’t). So food providers removed the fats from their products and the public removed it from their diets, leaving the food to be tasteless. The food industry had to do something to make it palatable. What did they do? They dumped in more sugar to processed food to make it taste good.
Yes, sugar makes food taste sweet, but it also makes food last longer on the shelf (it’s a preservative). That’s great if you’re selling food, but not if you’re eating it. As we continue to consume sugar in the amounts and dosages that we consume today, sugar becomes hazardous to health because of the way our bodies turn it into energy, and that excess sugar gets stored as fat (liver fat in particular).
So what happened when we cut out the dietary fat? Our waistlines grew. The US department of agriculture was tracking what the population ate during this time and found that protein intake remained steady and constant. But carbohydrate went up as a percent of total intake, particularly sugar. The data shows in the last sixty years we have almost doubled the amount of sugar we consume.
Looking at the global intake of sugar consumption, the population used to consume around 45 pounds (20kg) of sugar a year in the mid-1950s. Today, we eat around 90 pounds (40kg) of sugar per year, that’s twice as much. That means if you have a family of four, it’s like you’re bringing home six large bags of sugar a month to feed everyone on. You would never do that willingly, so where’s all that sugar coming from?
- Soda, Sweetened Drinks – 34%
- Desserts – 17%
- Processed Food – 50%
About one third is in soft drinks as you’d expect, about one-sixth comes from desserts, then that means that an entire half of the sugar that you and I are consuming is in things you didn’t even know had it, like condiments, sauces, bread, and other packaged items. Sometimes sugar is hiding in plain sight (easy to find), but it doesn’t always say sugar on the ingredients list. You’ve probably heard of high fructose corn syrup, and today it can even be called “corn sugar”. We need to know the numerous code names that the food industry uses for processed sugars. There are fifty-six of them!
When you read food labels, look out for them hiding everywhere. On the left is a pastry and wow there are seven different sugar ingredients there. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know some of those names so you can identify the sugar?
On the right is another example, here is a brand of BBQ potato chips. Potato chips! They’re baked for god’s sake. But they still have sugar added. The package says 65% less fat, fantastic right? No, look at what you get instead. Five types of sugar.
One of the reasons we’ve gotten into this mess is because sugar and refined carbohydrates actually cost less compared to fat or protein. The industry actually saves money to make a low fat (high sugar) version of their product.
When the food industry swapped in sugar, food prices went down, but metabolic diseases went up, and they’re breaking the bank in every developed and developing country all around the world.
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