I will like to give you 8 reasons why sugar is bad for your health. No doubt we all enjoy taking sweet things like candy, soft drinks, wedding and birthday cakes, sweet tea and lots of other sweet things. Sugar, mainly sucrose is used to sweeten most of these items.
When I say sugar in this context I don’t mean carbohydrates in general but sucrose in particular. Chemically sucrose is a disaccharide made up of Glucose and Fructose subunits joined by a glycosidic bond. Sucrose is extracted from sugarcane or sugar beets which are grown as a root crop. This sucrose is refined to give the table sugar which we use in our coffee and tea, the icing which we use in cakes; it is also used to sweeten some of the beverages, soft drinks and candy that we take. The refined sucrose has some other elements such as trace metals, vitamins and calories. The average person consumes about 24kg of sugar a year (33.1kg in industrialized countries) which is equivalent to about 260 food calories per day. These excess calories contributed by refined sugar are converted into fats and stored in adipose tissues. Over time this has a negative impact on the human system as a whole, so the next time you walk into a place and you order for a bottle of soft drink you should be sure of the consequences of your action.
According to Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, thus we should have it at the back of our minds while drinking down that bottle of coca cola that there is an opposite reaction which in this case can be any of the following conditions which are caused by the intake of these sucrose sweetened items;
1. Obesity: When sugary foods are taken they don't supply healthy amounts of protein or fiber, which means they don't fill you up and satisfy your hunger. This makes it more likely that you'll overeat, increasing your overall calorie intake and leading to weight gain. Each tea spoonful of sugar contains about 15 calories of sugar, averagely each person consumes about 260 food calories worth of sugar daily. These calories are besides those obtained from food and are converted to fats and stored in adipose
tissues and this can lead to unhealthy weight gain.
2. Immunosuppressant: Whenever you take a sugar rich item like a candy bar or a bottle of Coca cola, it suppresses or lowers your immunity and the effect can last for hours, imagine how long the effect will last when you drink that coca cola for more than once a day.
3. Tooth decay: Sugary foods cannot provide the necessary vitamins and minerals required for a good health; rather the sugar reacts with the ever present dental plaque to produce acids which can be harmful to the enamel producing holes and tooth decay. Thus, the higher the amount of sugar consumed the more the tendency to develop tooth decay.
4. Glycation: When sugar is ingested and it enters the blood stream, it looks for attractive things such as proteins and fat molecules to hook up with, this is called glycation. These glycated molecules move around recklessly causing havoc all over the body and end up forming what is called AGEs (Advance Glycation End products) which is a toxic compound. This AGEs is known to speed up the aging process.
5. Insulin resistance and Diabetes: Whenever you take sugary foods your blood sugar level rises which triggers the pancreas to secrete insulin to move the sugar from the blood into the cells. Over time the amount of insulin required to do the job increases and subsequently the pancreas may stop responding to the call by the high blood sugar to release insulin leading to Insulin-Dependent diabetes.
6. Promotes excessive inflammation: Inflammation on its own is not bad, but sugar makes this inflammation to become excessive and this can speed up the aging process.
7. Cardiovascular diseases: Sugar is associated with a decreased level of the good cholesterol, High Density Lipoprotein (HDL) and an increase in the level of bad cholesterol, Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL). This increase in LDL and a decrease in HDL increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as Arteriosclerosis and hypertension.
8. Decreased libido: High levels of sugar in your bloodstream can turn off the gene that controls your sex hormones. The excess calories from the sugary foods are converted and stored as fats in the adipose tissues. Increased fats synthesis deactivates your SHBG (Sex Hormone Binding Globulin) gene, causing your levels of SHBG protein to drop dramatically, and it is this SHBG protein that controls your testosterone and estrogen levels, thus libido is affected.
I know by now you must be thinking it’s unfair for such a sweet tasting substance like sugar to have such effects but too bad it’s true. Next time you want to buy food you might want to check the nutritional label just to be conscious of how much sugar you are putting into your system as the chronic consumption of high amounts of sugar is responsible for most of these effects. you can also substitute the sugar for other natural sweeteners.
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