Sugar season is rapidly descending upon us. It begins with the first bag of Halloween candy we buy and ends with the solemn promises of turning over a new leaf New Years Day. Some new evidence and resources may help with how we handle this years sugar rush.
For almost 30 years now I have been warning people about the dangers of too much sugar. Everyone knows that excess sugar makes you fat and gives you no nutrients, but that rarely impresses people. Well now we have news that is really important…SUGAR MAKES YOUR SKIN WRINKLE.
Wrinkles are caused by the loss of elasticity of the collagen under the skin. The main thing that causes this is a process called Advanced Glycation End (AGE) products. Funny how the shortened term is AGE. What happens is sugar – mainly Fructose – binds to the collagen causing it to twist and shrink up into a hard inflexible wrinkled mass. Zap, your nice soft wrinkle free skin becomes old, saggy, and filled with character. Guys can get away with this in our culture as wrinkles are a sign of maturity (a valuable and by some reports a rare commodity amongst men). However men in this culture, for some reason I can’t relate to, don’t find maturity attractive (perhaps because they don’t like being outclassed but more likely because of the loss of gullibility maturity brings.) So, if you want to slow the wrinkle process, slow the sugar consumption.
So what are some of the other useful things about sugar we need to know. Back in the 50’s when nobody complained about doing human research on prisoners a fascinating sugar study was done that has been largely forgotten. Half the prisoners in one prison were feed meals made with normal table sugar as the sweetening agent and the other half were feed meals using glucose as the sweetening agent. (Table sugar is half glucose and half fructose.) They were then watched to see if any differences in their health resulted over several years. The differences were dramatic. The table sugar group showed typical heart disease, and other degenerative disease development while the glucose group did not! What did this tell us? This study told us that the fructose in the table sugar was a major cause of degenerative diseases. Well that study was quickly shoved under the carpet as serious money interests did not want to tarnish the image of sugar.
Well here we are in 2008 and the same evidence has come back up to the light. Pure fructose is now known to be the major cause of Metabolic Syndrome – the cause of so many of our modern diseases. That is why all of a sudden there is so much bad press about High Fructose corn syrup as a sweetener. This stuff has replaced table sugar in almost all prepared foods because it is cheaper to make. But the whole story is not in yet. Fructose is the sugar found in fruit. That would imply that fruit is not good for you. Yet in the very few studies of fruit consumption and metabolic syndrome, the higher the fruit consumption the lower the metabolic syndrome. All sugars are not the same!
What can we conclude at this time. Table sugar is bad for you. High fructose corn syrup is bad for you. Pure fructose is bad for you. That is all we really know for certain at this point. It appears that fruit sugar is not a problem eaten in the fruit. The evidence is not there yet to tell us if fruit juice is bad or ok. Glucose seems to be ok but where the heck do we get that? The commercial name for glucose is dextrose and it can be purchased by special request at the health food store.
Other sugar-like substances like xylitol and erythritol seem to be ok for you as does the sweetener herb stevia. Some new research I just came across suggests that palm sugar is ok to use. Wild raw honey is not bad, but commercial honey is just like table sugar because the bees are force fed table sugar or corn syrup to make the honey. Maple syrup is a good alternative as it has a glycemic index of 56 and can be found as dried flakes. Check it out at http://www.decacer.com/faq-en.aspx I stay away from Agave Syrup simply because it is so high in fructose in a concentrated form.
I don’t believe that fooling your body into thinking sugar is coming down your throat when in fact an artificial sweetener is coming down is a good idea. Your body starts pumping out insulin to transport sugar into the cells as soon as you register the sweet taste on the tongue. Your body is preparing for a load of sugar in your food that isn’t there when you use artificial sweeteners. This triggers low blood sugar and a rebound adrenaline fight or flight response to pull sugar out of your muscles and liver to replace the sugar loss in the blood. Adrenaline is a super oxidizer (the things you need anti-oxidants to fight) and literally burns your blood vessel walls.
There is one more piece to the puzzle to consider, and that is the famous glycemic index. This is about how fast the food you eat slams into your system and sends your blood sugar reeling. The higher the glycemic index is of a food the worse it is for you. The body can handle a little sugar at a time and still stay in balance. The problem is the massive loads of sugar in modern highly processed food. The high processing basically pre-digests the food for you so it enters your blood stream easily. Think of a hunter-gatherer 10,000 years ago grabbing a handful of raw wheat berries and chewing on them for a good long time compared to modern man biting into a white bread sandwich. Those wheat berries take forever to digest. The white bread takes only a few minutes to end up in your blood stream.
So the goal is to make digestion take a lot longer. This not only slows down the sugar absorption but keeps us fuller so we don’t eat as much. In nature this happens because of fiber in the food. When the sugar is hidden inside plant cells with cell walls made of fiber we can’t break down, we take a long time to get the sugar out of the food. This is one of the main reasons processing foods is not healthy for us (aside from the mass destruction of the vital nutrients). Most of us are not likely to return to eating our wheat fresh off the stalk and limiting our sugar cravings to chewing on sugar canes. So what can we do to return the benefits of fiber to our diet? Most fiber supplements have been a disappointment in lab studies of slowing down sugar absorption into the blood stream. But a new fiber supplement seems to have won the battle – PGX. I am using it myself and find it does indeed keep me fuller and slow down the impact of any sugar I have consumed. I have been using 10 to 15 grams of fiber daily – 5 grams 20 minutes before each meal. I consume my fruit whole for more fiber, and do not eat refined flours.
I know what we are talking about here is a major lifestyle shift away from convenience foods and back to more wholesome styles of food preparation. If you want your body to function the way it was designed to function then you have to feed it the way it was designed to eat. This is not rocket science, this is common sense. If you want to eat a sweet food then you need to either use safe sweeteners in small doses or load up on fiber to eat with the sweets.
The sweet season is here. Prepare yourself accordingly.