Sugar .....a Drug ?

 

Is sugar a sweet old friend that is secretly plotting your demise?

There is a vast sea of research suggesting that it is. Science has now shown us, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that sugar in your food, in all its myriad of forms, is taking a devastating toll on your health.

 

Sugar is loaded into your soft drinks, fruit juices, sports drinks, and hidden in almost all processed foods—from bologna to pretzels to Worcestershire sauce to cheese spread. And now most infant formula has the sugar equivalent of one can of Coca-Cola, so babies are being metabolically poisoned from day one of taking formula.

 

It is easy to become confused by the various sugars and sweeteners. So here is a basic overview:

• Dextrose, fructose, and glucose are all monosaccharides, known as simple sugars. The primary difference between them is how your body metabolizes them. Glucose and dextrose are essentially the same sugar. However, food manufacturers usually use the term "dextrose" in their ingredient list.
• The simple sugars can combine to form more complex sugars, like the disaccharide sucrose (table sugar), which is half glucose and half fructose.
• High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.
• Ethanol (drinking alcohol) is not a sugar, although beer and wine contain residual sugars and starches, in addition to alcohol.
• Sugar alcohols like xylitol, glycerol, sorbitol, maltitol, mannitol, and erythritol are neither sugars nor alcohols but are becoming increasingly popular as sweeteners. They are incompletely absorbed from your small intestine, for the most part, so they provide fewer calories than sugar but often cause problems with bloating, diarrhea, and flatulence.

Sucralose (Splenda) is NOT a sugar, despite its sugar-like name and deceptive marketing slogan, "made from sugar." It's a chlorinated artificial sweetener in line with aspartame and saccharin, with detrimental health effects to match.

Agave syrup, falsely advertised as "natural," is typically HIGHLY processed and is usually 80 percent fructose. The end product does not even remotely resemble the original agave plant.

Honey is about 53 percent fructose², but is completely natural in its raw form and has many health benefits when used in moderation, including as many antioxidants as spinach.

Stevia is a highly sweet herb derived from the leaf of the South American stevia plant, which is completely safe (in its natural form). Lo han (or luohanguo) is another natural sweetener, but derived from a fruit.

Glucose is the form of energy you were designed to run on. Every cell in your body, every bacterium—and in fact, every living thing on the Earth—uses glucose for energy.

But in this country, sucrose is no longer the sugar of choice. It's now fructose.

 

If your diet was like that of people a century ago, you'd consume about 15 grams per day—a far cry from the 73 grams per day the typical person gets from sweetened drinks. In vegetables and fruits, it's mixed in with vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and beneficial phytonutrients, all which moderate the negative metabolic effects. Amazingly, 25 percent of people actually consume more than 130 grams of fructose per day.

Making matters worse, all of the fiber has been removed from processed foods, so there is essentially no nutritive value at all. And the very products most people rely on to lose weight—the low-fat diet foods—are often the ones highest in fructose.

It isn't that fructose itself is bad—it is the MASSIVE DOSES you're exposed to that make it dangerous.

There are two overall reasons fructose is so damaging:

1. Your body metabolizes fructose in a much different way from glucose. The entire burden of metabolizing fructose falls on your liver.
2. People are consuming fructose in enormous quantities, which has made the negative effects much more profound.

Sugar Feeds Cancer

 

"Death by sugar" is not an overstatement...

Evidence is mounting that sugar is the primary factor causing not just obesity, but also chronic and lethal disease.

There's really no doubt anymore that excess sugar can be toxic to your body, and it's only a matter of time before it will be commonly accepted as a causative factor of most cancers, in the same way as we accept that smoking and alcohol abuse are direct causes of lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.
 

Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, is one of the leading experts on childhood obesity, and has been a pioneer in decoding sugar metabolism.

 

His work has highlighted the major differences in how different sugars are broken down and used by the human body.

 

If you haven't already seen it, I would strongly encourage you to watch Dr. Lustig's lecture featured here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM 

 

Source: www.mercola.com