It’s scary to consider that Australians consume on average around 31 teaspoons of sugar (both added and natural) each day! (Saxelby, Catherine http://www.ahm.com.au/content/showpagenum.asp?page=9782 June 8, 2013) What’s worse is that about 75% (Ibid) of this sugar intake comes from packaged and pre-prepared foods and drinks. Convenience could well be killing us! Certainly some sugar is fine and most nutritionists recommend we have around 10-12% of our daily energy intake from sugars which equates to around 50 grams or 12 teaspoons. Still sounds quite a bit doesn’t it?
It is quite an amount, but on a positive note it just shows how good our body (especially the liver) is at handling excesses and toxins. Most carbohydrates we consume end up being broken down into the monosaccharides glucose and fructose (galactose is another). Put simply, healthy amounts of glucose are easily absorbed into the bloodstream and if not metabolised quickly end up as stored glycogen in the liver, body fat and muscles for fuel reserves. Nothing untoward here, as long as the glucose intake is not excessive as mentioned.
But what about fructose? This simple sugar is certainly naturally occurring in good stuff we eat like fruit and honey. Unfortunately, much of the excess sugar we eat in the form of soft drinks, energy drinks, and other processed foods, comes in the form of fructose. Firstly, this fructose if not metabolised in the liver, ends up in the small and large intestines. In the large intestine it literally ferments and can cause bloating, diarrhoea, flatulence, and gastrointestinal pain. Worse still for weight control, fructose is starting to loom as a major enemy.
There is now evidence that excess fructose can cause insulin resistance and obesity, plus elevated LDL cholesterol and triglycerides then ultimately a condition known as metabolic syndrome. Essentially, with metabolic syndrome the insulin resistance can cause diabetes and really mess with the body’s ability to properly process glucose as well. What often happens then is it becomes a vicious cycle. People put on weight, exercise less, get depressed, eat more refined sugars, develop cardiovascular disease, put on weight… and on it goes.
So as always my solution is to eat natural, unprocessed foods. Drink plenty of water, and enjoy plenty of fruit but watch your honey intake. Remember that all sugars are acid-forming in the body so they should be kept to a minimum anyway. And please, lay off the soft drinks! They will leach minerals out of your bones and could well be the thing that leads you down the slippery slope towards metabolic syndrome.
jasonparkerhealth 