I mentioned in my last letter that my body does not like sugar even though my taste buds do. What does that mean? Why wouldn’t my body like sugar… well let’s go from the outside in.
The first thing we think of is eating sugar and how good it tastes…yum. But then what? Before that sugar enters our blood stream it first travels around in our mouth, stomach, and intestines waiting for entry into our bloodstream. Well while it is waiting to be absorbed there are billions of critters in our gut that love the sugar as much as we do. They eat it up. Most of us know about the bacteria in our mouth because our dentist has told us about how they eat the sugar and rot our teeth. What most of us do not know is that there are bacteria, fungus, and yeast throughout our gut that eats sugar and rots our gut. That is right, they burn holes in our gut just like they do to our teeth.
(Interestingly, I wrote this article 2 weeks ago, but yesterday Mercola had an article that underscores this very subject titled Probiotics Benefit Metabolic Syndrome)
Sugar feeds the bad bacteria and other critters in our gut. Holes in our gut are a bad thing. They drive our immune system crazy. Holes allow undigested food to get into our blood stream. Since undigested food is not supposed to get into our bloodstream, our immune system reacts to destroy it. This reaction is called inflammation. If you eat sugar regularly you will have a chronically inflamed gut. Some signs of this might be bloating, indigestion, gas, constipation or diarrhea, nausea, abdominal weight gain, food sensitivities, and secondary inflammation sites like joints or even the brain.
Depending on the source of the sugar you ate, the majority of it will pass through the gut wall and be picked up by the tiny blood vessels around the gut. The critical concern is how much and how fast the sugar is dumping into the blood stream. The blood chemistry must stay within very narrow limits or your body will be damaged. Your body wants your sugar levels to stay between 80 and 90 mg/dl. If it stays higher than 100-110 mg/dl you are considered to be pre-diabetic and higher than 126 mg/dl you have full on diabetes.
A sudden surge of sugar is a shock to your system and stresses it greatly. Your body will pump out a bunch insulin to push this sugar out of the blood and into cells for storage (as fat and glycogen.) Insulin acts like a hotel doorman and open the doorways for sugar to get into cells. Normally a small amount of insulin is always moving small bits of sugar into all the cells for conversion into energy. But large amounts of sugar (especially fructose and milk sugar) damage cells by forming A.G.E.s – Advanced Glycation Endproducts. These cause rapid aging of the cells and destroy function through oxidative stress. In simple terms the sugar chemically cooks the cells. As you might guess the cells really don’t like that so if lots of insulin opens too many doors because of high sugar levels the cells start shutting down their doors and ignore the insulin doormen. This is called insulin resistance and leads to Type 2 diabetes. Around 30-50% of the American population is currently insulin resistant due to excess sugar consumption.
So, lots of sugar cooks your cells and makes you age faster. This is particularly true if the sugar you eat is high in fructose like in white sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Don’t be fooled by “natural” sugars like honey, agave, molasses, rapadura, maple syrup, fruit juice concentrate, and the like. They are all sugar and therefore at least half fructose or worse. In fact it was an article in Family Circle Magazine titled “Sugar-free cooking” that wanted you to believe that these “natural sweeteners” were not really sugar that prompted me to write this article. The lack of intelligence in our media is appalling.
If you recall from the last newsletter, too much fructose also drives your liver crazy and causes fatty liver disease just like alcohol does. The key here is the phrase “too much”. This means both too much at one time and too much overall.
Sugar needs to slowly slip into your bloodstream in small quantities. In this form you body knows how to use it effectively for energy production. It likes the sugar glucose – which is what starches break down into (as long as it only has to deal with a small amount at a time.) Your liver only likes a small total amount of fructose – about as much as in 2-3 pieces of whole fruit per day (which is less than in 1 soda.) So slow and small is the key. This introduces the concept of the glycemic index – a measure of how fast a food breaks down and dumps sugar into your bloodstream. The index defines pure glucose sugar as having an index value of 100. All other foods are compared to this. You want to eat foods that are below 55 on the glycemic index scale. Anything higher and you are damaging the cells of your body.
The glycemic index takes care of slow but what about small? Even a low glycemic index food will knock you for a loop if you eat a lot of it. The glycemic index is based on eating only 2 ounces of the carb food being measured. That would be like 1 cookie. I used to eat 5 or 6 cookies at a time, which multiplies the impact of the sugar by 5 or 6 times. Carbohydrate foods need to be eaten in small quantities. We don’t eat carbohydrates in small quantities. That is why almost 50% of us are pre-diabetic right now, and all of us are aging prematurely.
It is time to take a serious look at what we eat. We are killing ourselves with each bite we take. We have become dependent upon packaged foods from the store, most of which all contain loads of sugar and high glycemic carbohydrates. If your health and looks matter to you than don’t buy or eat packaged foods. Health requires you change your lifestyle to eating real foods and home cooked meals. You can not keep doing what you have done in the past and get health. There are no magic pills that will allow you to keep eating processed junk and still stay healthy.
We are talking about a change of priorities here. All the rush, rush, rush lifestyle trying to fill our lives with fun and entertainment (or work and more work) has to stop, or our bodies will stop us through illness. Turn off the TV and learn how to cook instead – at least well enough to be able to make real food for yourself. (Ellen is teaching me how to be direct in my communication.) TV teaches us to be passive consumers. To be healthy we have to be active participants in our lives. The rush, rush lifestyle is not about creating quality in our life. Quality can not happen if you are rushing. Let go of having more and instead fill what you have with excellence.
Yes, stress makes us crave sugar. Sugar is a disassociative drug that serves to help suppress our awareness of our stress. Sugar reduces our capacity to feel. The stress is still hitting our bodies and destroying our health, but on sugar we don’t feel it. It is kind of like getting a nerve block for our hands while we are playing with fire so we won’t feel when we are getting burnt. The stress is not going to go away, so we might as well learn more effective ways of dealing with life than numbing out on sugar. Gracework and Heartflow are here to help, as are the many fine professional counselors out there.
For all of us, who like the taste of sweet things, there are alternatives available. Stevia, erythritol, xylitol, maltitol, and Lo Han, are all excellent alternatives. And yes, it means that if you want sweet you will have to learn how to cook or find someone who will cook for you. There are very few low sugar and low carb foods out there commercially that don’t use toxic artificial sweeteners. So that means we have to make our own. It can be done – so let’s do it.