I’m Healthy, So Sugar Won’t Hurt Me, Right?
While everyone has been taught that fat is bad, this was wrong. Turns out that the fat causes heart disease thing was a myth. The real public enemy has always been sugar. Now a new study shows just how damaging sugar can be.
Why Sugar Is Our Dietary Enemy
Besides the obvious, which is the inability to properly control weight, in recent years, sugar has been revealed to be quite harmful. It’s been linked to everything from cancer to heart disease to arthritis to unhealthy bacteria in the gut and much more.
Cancer cells, for example, thrive on sugar, and when there is an abundance of sugar, cancer cells can become too powerful for the immune system to destroy. Cancer cells occur in the body every single day, and our immune system does a great job at killing these cells before they turn into full-blown cancer.
Excessive sugar consumption can also change the environment in our gut, for the worse. It does this by throwing off the balance of good and bad gut bacteria (dysbiosis). Our bad gut bacteria also thrives on sugar and other junk foods, and when this happens the bad bacteria becomes the dominating force in the gut, leading to a whole host of problems, such as leaky gut, obesity, and more. Even Parkinson’s disease has been linked to the condition of our gut. Artificial sweeteners fare no better here, as these react like sugar and also damage the gut.
Cutting sugar has also been shown to benefit our stem cells. In fact, if you are considering a stem cell therapy using your own stem cells, ideally, your A1C should be at 5.1 or below, and a strict low-sugar, low-carb diet will help you get there. Additionally, sugar is a driving force behind metabolic syndrome common in middle age, which includes obesity, high blood pressure, type-2 diabetes, and more, and knee arthritis appears to be linked to metabolic syndrome and blood-sugar control.
Sugar Health Risks: Can Healthy People Handle More Sugar?
The new study compared the impact of sugar consumption on heart health in healthy and unhealthy men. The subjects in the study were separated into two groups: men with high levels of liver fat (with a condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease) and men with low levels of liver fat (the healthy subjects). The men in both groups were put on either a low-sugar (140 calories from sugar) or high-sugar (650 calories from sugar) diet.
After 12 weeks, the unhealthy men on the high-sugar diet experienced changes in fat metabolism that lead to heart disease, which would be expected. The more interesting finding, however was that the healthy men on the high-sugar diet had an increase in liver fat and also experienced these same changes in fat metabolism, thereby increasing their risk of heart disease as well. Another interesting finding was that men in both groups on the high-sugar diet gained weight, while men in both groups on the low-sugar diet lost weight.
The upshot? Sugar is awful. This holiday season you will be surrounded by the stuff. Don’t do it! Have a cookie or two or a glass of eggnog, but don’t let the sugar Santa get you!
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