Losing Weight and Feeling Great

‘blood sugar’

The previous post was the first 20 ways that sugar affects our health.  Anyone up for 20 more reasons?

Sugar can cause a decrease in your insulin sensitivity thereby causing an abnormally high insulin levels and eventually diabetes.  (This is called Syndrome X.)

Sugar can lower your Vitamin E levels.  (Do you get enough vitamin E in your daily diet?  Or should you take more?)

Sugar can increase your systolic blood pressure.  (As we get heavier, our blood pressures tend to go up…we don’t need help from sugar.)

Sugar can cause drowsiness and decreased activity in children.  (The is the flip side of the hyperactivity sugar can cause in children; this is the infamous “sugar slump”.)

High sugar intake increases advanced glycation end products (AGEs)  (Sugar molecules attaching to and thereby damaging proteins in the body).

Sugar can interfere with your absorption of protein.  (Protein builds muscle, and it’s also important in slowing down the absorption of sugar into the blood.)

Sugar causes food allergies.  (I know it does in me!)

Sugar can cause toxemia during pregnancy. 

Sugar can contribute to eczema in children.  (Eczema is not only itchy, but it can be disfiguring if the patches show up on exposed body parts.)

Sugar can cause atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease.  (As our hearts and blood vessels age, they lose function — we don’t need extra help to hasten heart attacks and/or strokes.)

Sugar can impair the structure of your DNA.  (This can open us up to all kinds of diseases.)

Sugar can change the structure of protein and cause a permanent alteration of the way the proteins act in your body.  (This can be the pre-formation of cancer.)

Sugar can make your skin age by changing the structure of collagen.  (We don’t need more wrinkles!)

Sugar can cause cataracts and nearsightedness.  (I wonder if this is part of the “aging eyes”?)

Sugar can cause emphysema.  (This is a terrible disease.)

High sugar intake can impair the physiological homeostasis of many systems in your body.

Sugar lowers the ability of enzymes to function.  (Enzymes are critical in the day-to-day  operation of your body.)

Sugar intake is higher in people with Parkinson’s disease.  (Not a fun disease; we need to do everything we can to avoid it.)

Sugar can increase the size of your liver by making your liver cells divide and it can increase the amount of liver fat.  (This can be a pre-cursor to cirrhosis and/or cancer.)

Sugar can increase kidney size and produce pathological changes in the kidney such as the formation of kidney stones.  (If you’ve ever had a kidney stone, you know how terribly painful they are.)

So, that’s 20 more reasons to take a long, hard look at your diet today.  Now I’m not saying you should ban all sugar forevermore.  What you might want to do, however, is take steps daily (or weekly if you are severely addicted) to reduce the amount of sugar you eat on a day-to-day basis.

Sugar is sweet; a healthy life is sweeter.