I have been absent from posting articles for a little while now because of the expansion and some other things we have in the works. So I thought I would take some time out today and hopefully shed some light on a complicated subject. Sugar. What is sugar? Is sugar bad for you? Why is it in 90% of foods? What is sugar? Lets get complicated or a moment here and then I will put it into laymens terms. Sugar is the generalized name for sweet, short-chain, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. They are carbohydrates, composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. There are various types of sugar derived from different sources. Simple sugars are called monosaccharides and include glucose (also known as dextrose), fructose and galactose. The table or granulated sugar most customarily used as food is sucrose, a disaccharide. (In the body, sucrose hydrolyses into fructose and glucose.) Other disaccharides include maltose and lactose. Longer chains of sugars are called oligosaccharides. Ok so what does that all mean? It means that no-matter the source, the chemical structure of sugars are all the same. Clean eating publications, blogs, magazines, web pages and Facebook pages would like you to think that one source of sugar can be treated differently by the body than another source. This myth is driven mostly by product placement and less by accurate science. If they can convince you that sugar in the raw, maple syrup, agave nectar, honey or even evaporated cane/beet juice is treated differently inside your body than they can sell you more products. Thats how any industry works. This however is a lie. Sugar in any form spikes the insulin. It does not matter if it is regular table sugar or pure maple syrup they both spike the insulin. This brings me to the next subject... Is sugar bad for you? The answer to this question is quite complicated so I will start saying that sugar is not bad for you conditionally. Thats right, some people under certain conditions can eat sugar without doing harm. However, the people who can assimilate sugar to be used as fuel without harming their bodies are rare, especially these days. If you have never EVER been overweight and you exercise moderately on a consistent basis than you could potentially get away with regular sugar consumption. For everyone else, sugar will cause eventual weight gain, slow down your carbohydrate metabolism, put you at risk for a multitude of life threatening diseases and form a severe addiction. Make no mistake, unless the beginning of this paragraph describes you than sugar IS bad for You. Unfortunately, most of the people writing articles about cheat meals or cooking with what they think are healthy sugars have rare body types with a higher sugar metabolism. Their advice wont apply to average people. Why is sugar in 90% of Foods? I put the word food in quotations for a reason. What most people consider food isnt really food, it is a product that loosely resembles food. Real food comes from something living and it should resemble the plant or animal it came from when it is consumed. Real food needs to be preserved with refrigeration. Have you ever heard the saying that if you want to start eating healthy than you should only shop on the parameter of the grocery store? This saying is true because refrigerated foods are kept on the outskirts of the store and usually, if a food is refrigerated than it is still alive on a cellular level. Understand? As soon as real food dies, it begins to rot unless microbes like bacteria and fungus can be killed. There are a few main ways to kill microbes. Dehydration is the main way but this wont extend shelf life so dense sugars and salts are added because most microbes wont consume dehydrated sugars. Have you ever found a piece of candy left over from a holiday a a few years back and wondered why it still looks new? Its because the high amount of dehydrated sugar kills microbes. Sugar is also highly addictive. So when companies add it to their food, they sell more of it. When you combine a long shelf life with something highly addictive it makes sense, well ,only if you care about profits more than public health. So in summary, sugars are any high glycemic carbohydrates that spike the insulin. It does not matter if it comes from sugar in the raw, maple syrup, agave nectar, honey or evaporated cane juice, all sugars are the same. Companies will continue market and label multiple forms of sugar in a way that the uninformed public will perceive as healthy. Sugars are bad for most people. There is only a small sector of the population that can consume sugar regularly. Sugar is in most food because it elongates shelf life and forms a long term addiction. I hope this post was informative. I apologize for any errors. I wrote this on my iPhone while doing my cardio. If this post was useful to you please like and share :)
Posted on: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 18:09:47 +0000
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