Quit Sugar For Good

Do you find yourself drawn to the confectionary, biscuit or cakes aisle in the supermarket every time you go in, even though you only went in for a cucumber?

Or do you leave your home daily in search of sugary treats? When you have guiltily scooped up what you like the look of and got it all home, do you then delve in, gulping it all down as if possessed and barely stopping for breath?

If this sounds familiar, you're quite possibly addicted to sugar, which leaves you unable or barely able to control your intake of it, not to mention that it occupies your mind constantly or a lot of the time.

But why might you want quit eating sugar at all? Is it really a problem?

Judge for yourself.

It's not the glucose in sugar that's the issue so much as the fructose. Glucose is our body's prime source of energy and gets used by every cell in the body whereas Fructose doesn't serve us any purpose and has to be processed by the liver. 

The American Heart Association recommends that women should only take in up to 100 calories from added sugars and men 150 per day. Since there are 4 calories in a single gram of sugar, that would be 25g and 37.5g a day, respectively. On average we now take in 55g per day, compared with 15g per day in the early 1900s. 

This amount overloads the liver, since it can't turn fructose into energy reserves as it can with glucose. This in turn leads to insulin resistance in the liver, forcing the pancreas to release extra insulin. This results in new fat being created in the liver which is also carried into the blood as triglycerides. If your cholesterol reading is high in triglycerides, you have an increased risk of having a heart attack, compared with a low reading.

Two important things to note in relation to weight loss are firstly that there is now a connection being made between eating too much sugar and gaining fat. The second is that eating fructose leads to our internal "full-up" indicator to fail.

Add to this solid scientific evidence which links the over-consumption of fructose to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to mention a few and it's becoming clearer that we might be better off moderating our intake.

The mounting evidence linking fructose to such diseases may eventually force the food industry to take notice and make changes for the sake of our health.

In the meantime, it's up to us.

Taking in our daily 25g or 37.5g via fruit and veg is probably a good idea, and for those of us who feel as if we are addicted to sugar, there is help out there. We just have to look for it.