Most people are not aware that sugar has two faces to it — one side that can actually be helpful to the body and another side that is destructive to the body. When we look at sugar we see pretty white crystals of lovely sweetness. But hidden beneath that crystalline deliciousness, you find that it is actually two different sugars chemically hooked together.
The first sugar is called glucose. It is a very simple sugar that our body easily burns to produce energy. This is what doctors are measuring in your bloodstream when they check your blood sugar levels. An ideal level of blood sugar is a reading of around 80. That number is a measure of a certain amount of glucose by weight per a measured amount of fluid blood. Amazingly, that measure amounts to only about one teaspoon of sugar in your entire 5 liters of blood. An extra ¼ teaspoon in your bloodstream makes your readings show you as diabetic. What is your bloodstream to do when you drink 16 teaspoons of sugar from a liter of soda pop?
Blood sugar is only required by a couple of tissues in the body as an energy source, as most tissues in the body actually burn fats more easily than sugar. But because it is the required fuel for white blood cells and a small portion of the brain, the body can manufacture its own sugar by breaking down non-sugar sources like muscle tissue to make the needed sugar. This means that even if you had nothing to eat in weeks, your blood sugar levels would still read normal because your body will manufacture the sugar it needs for those specific tissues and switch all the other tissues over to burning fats. Sugars and carbohydrates are completely non-essential in our diet. We can live very healthfully without any sugar or starch in our diet at all. It is proteins, fats, minerals, fibers, and phytochemicals, like vitamins, that are essential in the human diet. In fact, a meat-only diet is the current best health protocol for autoimmune disease.
Glucose is like the Dr. Jekyll in the story Jekyll and Hyde, and like most doctors, should be taken in only small doses. Glucose in excess, like drinking soda or eating sweets, raises your blood sugar to high levels which damages your artery walls and nerves. Too much sugar dehydrates tissues and turns them into candy-like versions that do not work right. A good example of this is the peripheral nerve damage diabetics get and the diabetic ulcers caused by damage to the tiny blood vessels.
One other important understanding about glucose is how plants will hook lots of glucose molecules together to make starch. When we eat starch, it breaks down into sugar in a matter of minutes. If you think you are avoiding sugar by eating pasta, think again. Within minutes that pasta (or rice, or bread, or potato) will turn into glucose and come charging into your bloodstream. That is why you want to eat plants that make it difficult for your body to break down starch. In this way, the starch does not all turn into glucose at once but does so slowly over several hours to give us sustained energy. This is usually achieved by using starch sources that are also high in cellulose and other fibers that we can not break down. Legumes and vegetables are good examples. They encase the starch in fiber boxes we can’t break down and make it hard for our digestive enzymes to get to. Plant cell walls are usually made up of cellulose that acts like a wooden box. We have to chew well to break open the boxes or cook the plant to burst the boxes by turning the water inside to steam in order to make the starch inside available for digestion. This is the healthy way we were designed to encounter starches in our diet. When we refine foods, we remove all these plant walls and make the starch easily digested. In this fast digestion and absorption, the starch is converted into glucose blood sugar.
In spite of all these issues, glucose is not really the bad guy. Yes, in a refined form and in excess it produces problems. But the real bad guy in this story is the other half of the sugar crystal called fructose. We like fructose the most because it is twice as sweet as glucose. Table sugar is half glucose and half fructose. Two-thirds of the sweetness in sugar comes from fructose. That is why the beverage industry invented high fructose corn syrup; it is sweeter than table sugar because it has more fructose.
For many years the scientific community thought that fructose was the healthy part of sugar because fructose is slowly absorbed by the intestines and does not cause a blood sugar spike as glucose does. In fact, it is still being promoted by many companies as a “healthy” sugar because of this old data. The biggest example of this is the promotion of agave syrup in the health food world. Agave syrup is up to 80% fructose. It is actually a waste product from the tequila industry that has been re-purposed as a health food. Many health products proudly proclaim that they are diabetic-friendly because they sweeten with agave. Most food scientists and medical nutritionists still believe that fructose is a good diabetic food. To get to the truth you have to look at the recent scientific research that shows that it is actually fructose that is the primary culprit that causes type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome.
This is another example of the lag time between the time researchers find something out and it becomes commonly known in the health professions. Research takes time. It has to be published and then it has to be replicated by several other researchers. Then those results are published then discussed at conferences endlessly until a general consensus is reached. When that finally happens, the information will make it into textbooks that new students will read and eventually apply once they get jobs and start seeing actual patients. So, all in all, it takes a very long time before new research ever gets applied to the medical model. That is assuming the information is not suppressed and the funding hasn’t been cut off for any research if the initial findings threaten the profits of corporations invested in the status quo.
At this point, the research on fructose is in the conference discussion stage of this process. The dangers of fructose were first uncovered about 15 to 20 years ago by biochemists when they discovered that fructose is metabolized by our livers by the same enzymes that metabolize alcohol. There is a small need for fructose in the body — about as much as you get in a cup of fruit or 6 teaspoons of sugar. Beyond that amount, fructose overloads the system and starts damaging the liver and setting off a cascade of inflammation that results in the formation of metabolic syndrome. It triggers the formation of fat storage amidst a storm of inflammatory chemicals that promote insulin resistance and eventual diabetes. It will even cause a fatty liver and cirrhosis just like alcoholics get. One writer I was reading described the process as “inflammaging” to link the idea that this inflammation is the root cause of early aging of the body.
That was the state of knowledge about 7 years ago. Now a new wrinkle in the fructose story is bouncing around the research world. Like glucose, the body makes its own fructose. Strangely this increases in response to salt levels in the blood. Much worse than that, this process frequently goes awry due to the production of uric acid from this fructose. Uric acid is a metabolic poison and one of the chief causes of kidney disease as well as metabolic syndrome. Eating fructose by eating regular sugar is like pouring gas on a fire.
The takeaway message here is that you do not need to be afraid of sugar in small amounts — less than six teaspoons per day. It should be used as a flavoring like salt or pepper, not as a food. Beyond those six teaspoons, you are playing with a loaded gun. Every time you use sugar in excess of those six teaspoons you are damaging your health. So a teaspoon of sugar in your morning coffee is not a big deal. The 16 to 26 teaspoons of sugar in your can of soda or glass of fruit juice is a big deal. One piece of candy is not a problem, but a diet of candy bars and sugar-filled granola snacks is a big deal. We won’t even go into muffins. There are healthy ways to make and enjoy your sweet treats. Some of these are even making it into the commercially produced world. Stevia sweetening is becoming more popular, and I expect to see more and more of these types of food as awareness of the dangers of sugar becomes mainstream.
In the meantime, it is up to us to guard our health with better choices.
Take care,
David