Home
Newsletter
Events
Blogs
Reports
Graphics
RSS
About Us
Support
Write for Us
Media Info
Advertising Info
Sugar

Q&A: What's the real story about sugar, does it turn into body fat, how does it affect health?

Sunday, October 24, 2004
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: sugar, white sugar, refined white sugar


Most Viewed Articles
https://www.naturalnews.com/002038.html
Delicious
diaspora
Print
Email
Share

A reader asks, "What's the real story on using sugar? What does it do to our body, does it get turned into fat?"

This is an excellent question, and one that I think applies to almost everyone. In answering it, I'm going to give you a brief description of the biochemical events that take place when a person consumes sugar.

In explaining this subject to many people over a period of several years, I found the most useful metaphor to be that of an automobile engine. Let's take a Toyota Corolla, one of the most popular cars on the street today. The Toyota Corolla has an engine that's designed to burn a certain type of fuel. That fuel, gasoline, has a certain flash point and a given output of power per gallon of gasoline. There are other fuels that power other types of vehicles -- for example, jets run on a high-octane petroleum product that has far more energy per gallon than automobile gasoline. Diesel fuel, on the other hand, burns more slowly.

So you have different types of fuels for different vehicles. Most people understand the idea that if you took your Toyota Corolla, drove it down to the airport, and filled it up on jet fuel, you wouldn't get a faster Toyota Corolla. Instead, you would get a critically damaged Toyota Corolla engine, because the fuel would burn too hot, too fast, and it would overpower the design of the engine. In fact, you probably wouldn't drive more than 10 miles before the engine burned up, and you would have to overhaul the entire engine in order to drive your car again.

This is sort of what goes on when it comes to the human digestive system and sugars. The human digestive system was designed to consume foods that are readily available in the natural surrounding environment. These foods can be compared to certain types of fuels because each food releases energy at a given rate during digestion (primarily based on fiber and fructose content).

As an example, let's take a look at an apple. It contains fiber, vitamins and minerals, and lots of carbohydrates. The carbohydrates are the fuel. But the carbohydrates are bound up in the fiber of the apple so that it takes your body a fair amount of time and effort to release those carbohydrates and convert them into fuel. So you could call the apple a medium-burning carbohydrate, or in medical terms, it has a lower glycemic index than straight sugar.

But if you take straight sugar, that is, refined white sugar, which is something that does not occur naturally in the environment, and you put that in your mouth, then your body converts that into blood sugar very rapidly. It's like pouring jet fuel down your throat. This is the same as filling up your Toyota gas tank with jet fuel and trying to drive away. When you eat sugar you consume soft drinks -- which are even worse because they are liquid sugar -- you are trying to run your metabolic engine on jet fuel, and the human metabolic engine was not designed to run on jet fuel.

So what happens? When you first consume any sort of refined sugars or refined carbohydrates (like white flour), the digestion process begins immediately -- in fact, it begins even before you swallow the foods. There are digestive enzymes in your saliva that go to work on these sugars and start converting them into blood sugar, even before they hit your stomach. Once they're in your stomach, they are mixed with acidic digestive juices and physically churned through stomach muscle contractions so that it creates a liquid paste. This liquid, sugary paste is then very easily absorbed through the intestinal walls, causing a rapid spike in blood sugar levels.

So your blood sugar, which might have been around 80 or 90 before you drank the soft drink or ate that candy bar, now suddenly starts spiking up to 150 or 200, or perhaps even higher. This creates an emergency situation in your body. High blood sugar is very dangerous for human beings. If it is allowed to continue, it will cause symptoms that are more classically known as diabetic neuropathy, which means the nerves that feed various limbs in your body (feet, mostly) start to die. Diabetics who maintain high blood sugar over a long period of time often have to have their feet amputated because the nerves in their feet are wasting away.

In part two of this Q&A article, we'll talk about how your body regulates blood sugar and attempts to protect you from the dangers caused by sugar consumption.


Receive Our Free Email Newsletter

Get independent news alerts on natural cures, food lab tests, cannabis medicine, science, robotics, drones, privacy and more.




About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

comments powered by Disqus



Natural News Wire (Sponsored Content)

Science.News
Science News & Studies
Medicine.News
Medicine News and Information
Food.News
Food News & Studies
Health.News
Health News & Studies
Herbs.News
Herbs News & Information
Pollution.News
Pollution News & Studies
Cancer.News
Cancer News & Studies
Climate.News
Climate News & Studies
Survival.News
Survival News & Information
Gear.News
Gear News & Information
Glitch.News
News covering technology, stocks, hackers, and more