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Sugar

How to reduce blood sugar levels by understanding glycogen storage and body fat

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


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In part one of this article, we talked about how eating refined carbohydrates or processed sugars is a lot like putting jet fuel in the gas tank of your Toyota -- it burns up the engine and causes permanent damage. When a human body maintains high levels of blood sugar, permanent damage may also sustained. Here, we'll look at how the body tries to protect itself from the ravaging effects of high blood sugar.

Starting off, recognize that there are serious consequences for having high blood sugar coursing through your veins. Your body knows this, and if your blood sugar reaches unsafe heights, your body immediately goes to work to lower that blood sugar back to normal levels. There are also ways that you can manipulate your own blood sugar levels through activities:

There are really two things that you can do as a human being to lower this blood sugar once it's spiked. First, you can burn it off by using it to contract your muscles -- so if you happen to be running a marathon at the same moment that you drank a soft drink, then the marathon effort will probably counteract the high blood sugar effect of the soft drink.

In fact, high sugar foods are really only appropriate for people who are exercising several hours a day (and who have the metabolism to burn off these sugars). Even myself -- I engage in cardiovascular exercise on a regular basis, often biking 10 miles a day, and even I don't eat the quantities of sugar that our children are eating these days in public schools. In fact, I don't eat any sugar at all, but I eat fruits and other natural forms of complex sugars in order to give me energy for my workouts. But for most people, they're not working out at all, and thus there's really no reason to eat sugars in the first place.

Getting back to the main point here, let's suppose you're not exercising at the moment, you're eating dessert sitting at a table. So the body has to do something else, and this is where the answer to your question really comes into play. In order to remove sugar from your bloodstream, your body has a mechanism by which it can force your muscles cells to open up and accept blood sugar, then to convert that blood sugar to a stored form of energy called glycogen.

The conversion of blood sugar to glycogen, of course, involves the liver, and it is a rather complicated physiological function that I'm not going to explain in detail. The short, simple version is that your muscles (and liver) absorbs this blood sugar and store it for use at a later time. So your body has a sort of gas tank where it can store a certain amount of sugar energy and use it later.

But just like in your Toyota Corolla, your body's gas tank can get full. When it's full, it means you have all the glycogen in your system that you can store. Once your glycogen levels have reached their peak, your body has one more strategy for reducing the blood sugar in your bloodstream.

The second strategy


Before I reveal this, it's important to note that most people walk around 24 hours a day with their glycogen levels already maxed out. Most people never get to a low level of glycogen because they're not on a carbohydrate-controlled diet. Accordingly, the vast majority of people, when they consume refined carbohydrates, are going to be in a physiological state where circulating blood sugar gets quickly converted into stored body fat.

This is the last strategy the body can use to remove blood sugar from the bloodstream. This process also involves the liver, and it essentially converts the sugars into fatty acids, then stores them in the fat cells around your body.

That was a long-winded way to answer your question, but the answer is, yes, sugar can be converted into body fat, but it is not the first strategy that your body uses to lower your blood sugar. If you're exercising, that will help lower blood sugar levels automatically, or if your glycogen levels are low, your body will first try to store glycogen. But again, most people are not exercising, and their glycogen levels are already topped out, so when they consume sugars, they are directly promoting the creation of body fat.

In the third part of this article, we'll talk about how dietary sugars cause adult-onset diabetes, and we'll present strategies for both preventing and reversing diabetes.


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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.

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