SUGAR
Sugar. It’s sweet, but definitely not a treat for your body.
Sugar has so many negative effects on your body, and here a just a few:
- It pulls calcium out of your body – bones and teeth
- It lowers your immune system
- It causes Diabetes
- It contributes to cavities
Some things to keep in mind:
- DO NOT DRINK SODAS.
- Fruit and honey are ok. Try to buy raw, unheated honey as it has all its enzymes, vitamins, and minerals intact.
- Also, eat fruit/honey with something that burns slower, like raw nuts, or some type of natural nut butter. It will keep your blood sugar more stable.
- If you’re diabetic, use Stevia. It’s an herb you can use as a sweetener that won’t raise your blood sugar at all.
- The sugar you eat is sucrose, a disaccharide C-12H-220-11. The sugar in your blood is a monosaccharide C-6H-120-6. Sorry to get so technical, but I hope in seeing the chemical formula you will recognize that a difference exists. At any one time the glucose level in your blood stream should be 90 mg. per 100 ml. This means the total amount in your blood is about 5 grams or about one to three teaspoonfuls.
- When you eat a candy bar containing eight teaspoonfuls of sugar, or pie at ten, or ice cream at eight, you send in a high charge of 8 to 20 spoons of sugar into a system that is geared to maintain itself with only one to three teaspoonfuls, a chaotic problem is encountered. This overload must be dealt with first by your pancreas and its hormone insulin. Then, when the insulin gets too high, the adrenal gland must manufacture and distribute into the bloodstream its insulin-governing hormones. Normal, natural food is not so highly concentrated and, more importantly, contains essential vitamins, minerals and enzymes which help the stomach to utilize what you have eaten. This in turn helps each cell to obtain its proper nutrients.
- The continual overcharging of one’s glands with sugar has a depressing influence on your metabolism. That is, instead of speeding it up, it actually slows it down, resulting among other things, in a lower than normal blood sugar.
- The slowdown foods are sugar, refined breads and packaged cereals, pie, cookies, pastry, ice cream, candies, coffee, tea, alcohol and soft drinks.
- If you really want a pickup, use the speedup foods instead, for they stimulate metabolism. Meat, fish, seafood, poultry, fresh fruits and vegetables, cheeses, eggs, butter, seeds, nuts, etc., all invigorate and vitalize the system. The actual time of absorption and development of energy from these foods is but a little more than with sugar itself. Besides, an important fringe benefit of the good speed-up foods is better handling of stress and one’s vigor is sustained over longer periods of time.
Bottom line: for a healthy life, avoid sugar, whether it’s in the form of white sugar, brown sugar, NutraSweet, etc..
by George E. Meinig, DDS, FACD