Sugar and Health

For most of the history of humanity man ate a diet of wild game and natural vegetation including some seeds, nuts, and fruit during certain sea-sons. In our era, with the advent of processed foods, mankind's diet has undergone a radical change. People are eating foods that never existed in nature before, foods which the body was never designed to utilize. The result is that the heavy consumption of refined sugar, and refined flour products too, has led to serious health problems for those who regularly eat them. Today 65% of Americans are overweight, and 27% are clinically obese. Even children are starting to show more and more symptoms of this growing health problem.Diebetes is starting to appear more frequently in the very young. When we look at the diet of the typical American, it is easy to see how this has happened. The average American each year consumes 125 pounds of sugar in the form of 300 cans of soda, 200 sticks of gum, 18 pounds of candy, 50 pounds of cakes and cookies and 20 gallons of ice cream. I want to make clear just how much sugar is found in the sodas people are drinking each day. There are 7 to 8 teaspoons of sugar in some form, in the average soda drink. If you have a soda at lunch, one as a snack in the afternoon, one with your dinner, and one as you watch TV or go out for a final snack later in the night, you have consumed 28 spoonfuls of sugar.
Americans are also consuming too many foods which are made from highly refined flour, which act just like sugar in the body, such as pasta, bread and cookies and cakes. In addition to all the many obvious sources of sugar in the typical American diet, sugar is used as an inexpensive additive to improve the taste of many items in which the producers in order to increase profits use cheaper inferior ingredients or use less expensive ingredients. Among these items, you may have guessed, because they taste so sweet, are ketchup, and jams and jellies, which really should have no added sugar and should be made primarily from the fruit. Fruit flavored drinks and fruit flavored yogurts, and especially, sweetened canned fruit have unnecessarily large amounts of sugar in some form in them. But it is also surprising how much sugar, unhealthy sugar, is found in items like peanut butters, bread, soups, pickles, mustard, canned dishes like baked beans, and salad dressings. Even American's general idea of proper cui-sine contributes to this problem. Making potatoes a staple at almost every meal has been an additional negative health factor. Potatoes, among all other vegetables, are the one of the most likely to affect the body in the same way as refined sugar.
A surfeit of carbohydrates in any form will lead to gaining weight and eventual obesity, but it is sugar in all its forms, and refined flour in our diets that do the most harm. They lead to a fast rise in blood sugar, which causes the pancreas to produce a large amount of insulin to lower our blood sugar quickly, because high blood sugar is dangerous to our health. Unfortunately, this strong dose of insulin makes the blood sugar drop below our normal level and makes us feel down in mood. In order to compensate for this psychological effect, we are driven by cravings to seek an immediate repeat of our ingestion of sugar to again raise our blood sugar to make ourselves feel better, and so the cycle continues on and on. This results in our taking in more calories than are necessary to supply energy to the body. The end result is overweight and eventual obesity. The high amounts of insulin also have other deleterious effects.


They make the insulin receptors become less and less sensitive, requiring the pancreas to produce larger and larger amounts of insulin each time, to deal with same amount of high incoming sugar. Eventually the receptors become very insensitive to the incoming insulin, and the person has developed a condition referred to as insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance aggravates another problem which results from the production of insulin in the body. When insulin in the body is high, another hormone called glucagon is low. Glucagon is a hormone which promotes the release and utilization of fat from the fat storage cells for energy. So that when glucagon is present, you will be burning and thus reducing your fat stores. In other words, you will be losing weight and the weight will be a loss of fat. However, the high level of insulin in insulin resistant people keeps them from burning any of their fat stores. They can only burn incoming sugar and carbohydrates, and when they are depleted, they will begin to break down and use muscle tissue as a source of energy. This is, again, because the insulin has blocked getting access to the body's fat by blocking the production of the necessary hormone, glucagon. Now you understand why people who have eaten a lot of sugar, and sugar acting foods like refined flour and grains, and potatoes, in their life all the time have had trouble losing weight, or permanently keeping off any weight they have lost through extreme measures like very strict diets or fasting.
Eventually people on these refined high carbohydrate diets exhaust their pancreas, which stops generating any insulin at all, and they become diabetic, and must take insulin regularly to keep their blood sugar from staying at dangerously high levels.
There is another serious problem with too much sugar, sugar addiction. For many years people have spoken of sugar addiction because of the seemingly addictive behavior of people who have a strong desire for foods with sugar. However, it is only recently that it has been scientifically been shown to be a genuine addiction. Rats fed sugar showed classic signs of withdrawal when their sugar "fix" was taken away from them. When they were allowed to eat sugar again, they binged on it. The sugar had triggered natural pleasure producing opiods in their brains. The effect is similar to morphine and heroin, though not as powerful. Actual studies of these animals' brains showed an accelerated growth of dopamine receptors in the nucleus accumbens in their brains. This helps explain why people who eat sugar regularly, have strong cravings and seek a sugar "fix" many times throughout their day.
You are probably addicted to sugar if you have the following: if you have cravings for food containing sugar, if you can't stop eating after one piece of candy or one bite of cake or other baked goods; if you can't go for more than a few hours without experiencing a letdown with fatigue or irritability or anxiety; if you have to have your sugared coffee and donuts or other baked goods every morning and have and eat candy and other sweets in your home all the time; if you regularly drink sugared sodas during the day to give yourself a pick-me-up because you're dragging.
Nutritionally, refined sugars present another problem. It takes vitamins and minerals to digest and assimilate ingested refined sugars. Unprocessed sugar cane juice is rich in vitamins and minerals and provides some nourishment to the body, though it is still too high in sugar to be good for the body. But refined sugar is an empty calorie, which uses up valuable vitamins and minerals in order to be digested without supplying any of them. Thus, eating a lot of refined sugars depletes the body of these valuable health promoting factors. That's why, you now can understand, even overweight people who have become so because of large amounts of sugar in their diets, can actually suffer from malnutrition.
Here's a list of some of the negative health effects of sugar, and the refined flour products and potatoes that act like sugar within the body.

Sugar can:
... cause an increase in insulin being generated in the body
... cause an increase in insulin sensitivity
... overstress the pancreas causing damage
... cause diabetes ... cause weight gain and obesity
... produce a significant rise in triglycerides
... reduce helpful high density cholesterol, known as HDLs
... promote an elevation of harmful cholesterol, know as LDLs
... increase total cholesterol
... cause atherosclerosis
... increase systolic pressure
... cause hypertension
... upset the body's mineral balance
... promote tooth decay
... cause hyperactivity, anxiety, concentration difficulties, and crankiness

in children
... lead to alcoholism
... cause depression

source : articlesbase