What is it, where does it come from, and what does it do to you?
After seeing the truth in the blogs I have been researching and writing over the past five years I know about this toxic stuff, even though I love Butterfingers, and hated to give them up, I quit eating them. I read once that the results from eating the stuff are cancer, heart failure, and a plethora of illnesses, and is the price we pay today for the slavery in the islands and in America with the making of rum which involved sugar cane and sugar. Suddenly there was a ready source of something sweet, so we slurped it up not knowing the consequences.
Consequences
As soon as something sweet hits the tongue, your reward system ignites, unleashing dopamine. The sugar lands in your stomach, where it’s diluted by digestive juices and pipelined into your small intestine. Enzymes break it down into two types of molecules: glucose and fructose. Most added sugar comes from sugar cane or sugar beets and is equal parts glucose and fructose; lab-concocted high-fructose corn syrup. Just look at the labels on your grocer’s shelf. Most sweet products contain high fructose corn syrup. I immediately put it back, and you should too. It is an inexpensive substitute for sugar or fructose and next blog I will explain precisely what it does to you.
Glucose and Fructose
This killer seeps through the walls of your small intestine, triggering your pancreas to secrete insulin, a hormone that grabs glucose from your blood and delivers it to your cells to be used as energy. Insulin is pounding in your brain, a phenomenon that could eventually lead to Alzheimer’s disease.
Your pancreas has pumped out so much insulin that your cells have become resistant to the stuff; all that glucose is left floating in your bloodstream, causing prediabetes or, eventually, full-force diabetes.
Illnesses caused by sugar
Sugar-related illnesses are skyrocketing (heart disease, and dementia, among them). Yet Americans are shoveling in more of this poison than ever. We know it’s bad for us but we just can’t stop. Sugar, it turns out, is as addictive as hard drugs. Could you be hooked?
“Sugar can act like poison in high doses—and the amount in our diets has gone beyond toxic,” says Robert Lustig, M.D., a neuroendocrinologist at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine The typical American now swallows the equivalent of 22 sugar cubes every 24 hours. That means the average woman eats 70 pounds—nearly half her weight—of straight sugar every year.
My first encounter with caution about this substance
Around 40-plus years ago, I met four professors selling their new book about Sugar at a national bookstore in Baton Rouge. At the time, I was in my prime at around forty-five and shook their hands, looked at their book, and wished them luck. But I had no clue how vital that data was at the time. I basically ignored it for I was smoking, drinking, and in general sinning my way through life and loved my sweet stuff in any form.
Sugar proliferates
I pass the long aisle at Walmart which is stacked with various candies and another aisle loaded with cookies and cakes, cake, candy, and cookie mixes, and then there is the freezer filled with a city block of ice cream and sweet sodas. Just exaggerating here, but if you put all the aisles in a row you would have a city block. And have you gone into a gas station that also sells food items? Can you believe that one whole aisle on both sides are chock filled with sweets, candies, and cookies, and the cooler is jam-packed with sodas and beers? Nothing nutritious in that whole store, not to mention the wall behind the cash register is nothing but tobacco products.
Who are the customers?
Not who, but what are they? America is the most obese country in the world, did you know that? And the consequence of obesity is a litany of our most popular diseases, cancer, heart problems, diabetes, etc. Caused by sugar. Congratulations Americans, you spend more per capita on heal care than any country on the planet yet we are like 26th in health and 25th in life expectancy. Why? Sugar. Hershey loves us.
Future blogs on sugar
Stay with me. I will next discuss ways to handle the problems of addiction to sugar, the way to go cold turkey and other data you should know about this monster lurking even in your body’s cells as I write this. One would think it is intentional on the part of Big Food and America’s FDA.
Did You Ever Consider Having Your Own Private Label?
Would it be cool to have your own private-label product you could sell online or otherwise? You see others, including your friends, racking up online sales of their very own product under their own unique label and wonder if you could do it. Fill out the brief form below to learn all you need to know. You may be surprised. Have a great day!
