By itself, sugar can kill you.
If you like to experience bigger and better health problems, get and keep a lot of sugar in your diet. It will eventually kill you. It’s not that sugar is all bad. We need it. We need enough to feed the cells of our body. But sugar, in the amounts most of us consume these days, lurks in the background as we experience its hedonistic pleasures, quietly undermining our vulnerable immune systems and opening the door to arthritis, asthma, high blood pressure, heart disease and multiple sclerosis. Among other equally serious diseases.
It is important to consider the source of the sugar. The fruit has a lot. Vegetables have their part. Getting too much sugar from fruits and vegetables is a long shot. But these days we are being inundated with a source of sugar in a way that didn’t exist forty years ago. These things are everywhere! One hundred years ago, the average daily consumption of sugar was just under a quarter of a pound per day. A huge jump from 1700, when the average person only consumed about 4 pounds throughout the year. Today we are consuming twice as much, an average of half a pound of sugar every day! And for this we can thank the premiere discovery of the ’70s. That’s when the Japanese learned how to make high-fructose corn syrup. And indeed we are forced to consume it, whether we want it or not.
Look at the label of almost any processed food you can buy at your local market. Anyone who does will have a hard time finding a label that doesn’t list high-fructose corn syrup among its ingredients. In the quantities that we are almost forced to ingest, this is pure poison! High fructose corn syrup turns off the body’s regulatory system that tells a person to stop eating. Things make us hungry, even when we’re not! HFCS Increases our uric acid levels, which contributes to gout, heart disease, obesity, and hypertension. It’s cheap, it’s sweeter than table sugar, and it’s addictive, making it the go-to ingredient for marketers.
Ever wonder about the childhood hypertension epidemic? Just about every soft drink you can think of is absolutely loaded with HFCS. Most Americans, and almost all children, drink a lot of soft drinks. The recommended amount of fructose to consume daily is 25 grams. That amount of fructose can be beneficial. The average can of soft drink contains 70 grams. How much do your children drink? Never mind the “Lite” tag. Look at the ingredients.
Fructose increases LDL cholesterol levels (the “bad” kind) and lowers HDL levels (the “good” kind). Fructose, in the amounts consumed today, has a multitude of toxic effects, including fatty liver disease, a condition generally associated with excessive alcohol consumption. Now, if you’re not convinced by all of this, leave things for about three months and see how much better you feel. Or would you prefer to enjoy and continue to suffer?