Is Sugar Dangerous to Consume?

I was eating my daily square of dark chocolate (quasi nutritious). It got me thinking, because intellectually I know sugar is poison, yet I have a little dark chocolate most days. I knew that there have been studies on sugar and dependence and likened it to cocaine dependence. I did some studying up on sugar and I was quite surprised on several fronts, what a knowledge journey this has been.

Dr. David Reuben, author of everything You Always Wanted to Know About Nutrition says, “white refined sugar-is not a food. It is a pure chemical extracted from plant sources, purer in fact than cocaine, which it resembles in many ways. Its true name is sucrose and its chemical formula is
C12H22011. The chemical formula for cocaine is C17H21N04. For all practical purposes, the only difference is that sugar is missing the “N” or nitrogen atom.” This is not, the only study that shows this. This alone is disturbing, but the more I dug the more compelling scientific information about the danger of sugar, and fructose I found. What a journey this has been. I have become turned off by sugar.

In 1854 a physician made a daring attempt to show that drinking feces-filled water could be hazardous to your health. At that time nobody trusted his studies, so he drank the contaminated water to prove his studies. Contaminated water breeds bacteria like cholera which kills 95,000 people a year worldwide.
Cigarettes caused greater deaths than cholera per year before the lethal dangers of cigarettes could be exposed.
Sugar may be killing more people than cholera or tobacco. If history is any guide, the majority will continue to eat or drink excess glucose - spiking sugars and starches despite the life shortening impact. The public has been slow to give up their sugar addiction. What I find interesting are people who would not tolerate tobacco or feces-laden water but have little concern about their sugar/starch consumption, that is how serious this is. 

What is the relationship to the tobacco industry and The Sugar Research Foundation?

The sugar industries strategies to mislead the public were sophisticated and are eerily similar to the strategies (lies) that the tobacco industry used in their marketing. Both industries knowingly altered the facts to mislead the public, in the name of profit. In 1965 the Sugar Research Foundation took to marketing that fats not sugar caused heart disease this was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The Sugar Research Foundation buried their actual research and its findings, that indeed it was sugar that created the unhealthy levels of triglycerides.

Now what has come to life in a study November 2017, published in PLOS Biology. The Sugar Research Foundation secretly funded its research but never published the findings, the findings showed that linked a high-sugar diet to increased levels of triglycerides in the blood and had negative effects on the microbiome, (gut bacteria). The researcher performing the study requested more research time, but the Sugar Research Foundation stopped any further research.

How does sugar consumption become the same as eating bad fats?

Sugar exists in many forms beside the white powdered (usually GMO) beet sugar we pick up at the grocery store. There are effects of sugar in all forms (including high fructose corn syrup, honey and maple syrup and we are consuming more of it than ever before. Sugar contains no nutrients, no protein, no healthy fats, no enzymes.

Imagine, there is an epidemic of obese six-month old’s. Similac infant formula is 43.2% corn syrup solids, and 10.3% sucrose imagine that. Parents who mean well are unknowingly harming their babies. There is only a .2% difference in the amount of sugar in a serving of Coca-Cola verses Similac.

Chronic fructose exposure causes:

Hypertension, Myocardial infarction (heart attacks), dyslipidemia, pancreatitis, obesity hepatic dysfunction (NASH), fetal insulin resistance, habituation if not addiction. Of all the 8 effects that are listed, they are the same as chronic ethanol exposure (alcohol), the only difference is alcohol can lead to 12 health issues instead of the 8 caused by sugar consumption. For this reason, non-alcohol induced fatty liver disease is skyrocketing.

Sugar is metabolized the same way as ethanol, ethanol is fermented sugar. Fructose is a carbohydrate. Fructose is metabolized like fat. High fat diets don’t do bad things, high fructose diets do because they are metabolized as unhealthy fats. A low-fat diet is really not a low-fat diet because of fructose which is present everywhere in our diet. 

Solutions for lowering sugar consumption:

1. Get rid of all sugared liquids in the house, be sure to check all, including juices, leave water and milk as options, no such thing as good for any sugar-filled liquid.
2. Eat your carbohydrate with fiber
3. Wait 20 minutes for second portions
4. Buy your screen time minute for minute-for-minute with physical activity
5. Look through all your processed food and notice how much sugar is added

Why is exercise important:

1. Because it improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, which burns calories and brings insulin levels down.
2. Because it reduces stress, and resultant cortisol release endogenous stress reducers, lowers appetite, stress, and obesity go hand in hand.
3. Because it, detoxifies fructose, improving liver insulin sensitivity.
4. It burns the food you are, so it doesn’t become stored fat.

Why is fiber important to obesity?

1. Reduces rate of intestinal carbohydrate absorption, reducing insulin response.
2. Increases speed of transit of intestinal contents and induces satiety.
3. Inhibits absorption of some free fatty acids that are metabolized by bacteria in the large intestine, to short chain fatty acids, which suppress insulin.

I have given quite a bit of information about sucrose. This information is based on several scientific journals, none of this is my opinion. I have been shocked with my new understanding of the danger of sucrose to our body and to our family.