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Sugar! Sugar! Sugar! Sugar everywhere…sweet, white & Deadly! So why do I say Sugar is deadly? Before we get into the details of this let’s examine the various types of sugars we consume:
1. Glucose (natural nutrient)
2. Sucrose (Table sugar) (most harmful).
3. Lactose. (least harmful)
Glucose is the nourishing sugar which is most natural for our body cells to digest and get energy from.Glucose is therefore the most nutritious and the least harmful. In fact it is the primary food.
When I refer to “Sugar” here it is sucrose – or what is most popularly known Table Sugar (refined/processed sugar). This refined sugar which is really sweet and most deadly! So what makes it dangerous?
To understand this we go a bit into chemistry of refined sugar. Each Sucrose molecule is made up of : 1 part glucose and 1 part Fructose. This means 100gms of sucrose contains 50% glucose and 50% fructose.
As mentioned, glucose is our primary nutrient and doesn’t really pose as much of a problem. It is actually the fructose that is truly dangerous.
When in the body, glucose and fructose are digested very differently by our bodies.
Though both glucose and fructose are broken down by our livers, there are profound differences between these processes.
Firstly when glucose is ingested-80% of it is consumed directly by every cell of the body giving a burst of energy. In contrast to this fructose is ONLY METABOLISED BY LIVER and NO OTHER CELLS. Hence all the fructose ingested becomes a load on to our liver cells for its breakdown.
Further, glucose ingestion stimulates insulin and the “satiety hormone”- which not only helps glucose breakdown into energy but also regulates our appetite. In contrast to this, fructose DOESNOT act on insulin and the satiety hormone at all! This means that inspite of consuming calories fructose doesn’t have the ability to “tell” the brain’s satiety center to stop eating! Thus if we consume high quantity of fructose we will ultimately consume much larger amount of food before we stop eating. This ultimately leads to more calories than what we can burn. The food that is not burnt is ultimately converted into fat, causing obesity.
Let us see what more damage can fructose do:
Once fructose enters your liver cell, it produces several metabolites which ultimately produce-very high uric acid levels and very high levels of VLDL (very low density lipoprotein-a bad cholesterol).
The VLDL in turn gets deposited into the muscles and fat cells blocking insulin activity. The blocked insulin activity results in diabetes Type 2.
Lets turn our attention to high uric acid. This substance is to be excreted out in our urine, but when a large quantity is produced in the body, it begins to collect at various places in our bodies. This especially happens in the joints leading to a condition called Gout.
Further collection of high uric acid damages the arterial wall resulting in hypertension, atherosclerosis and heart disease!
I believe this should be sufficient to let us believe that fructose is truly toxic for our bodies.
Now the question is: Where do you get fructose from?
Naturally fructose is present only fruits. Which is actually not in a very large quantity to cause toxic effects. Also there are several other ingredients in fruits which dampen the effect of fructose.
The real concern is the fructose present in processed food- e.g. soft drinks, packed juices, burgers, pizzas, sauces etc. Very often this fructose is added in the form of High fructose corn syrup. Hence while purchasing packed foods it is vital that we read the ingredient and look for : Sugar, high fructose corn syrup, invert sugar.
Sugar content of some common indian foods:
Now the point to note is – at a meal we eat more than 1 food with high sugar content!!
