Home > Healthy Eating > Scary Sugar

Healthy Eating - Not So Sweet

By Charlotte Watts Dip.ION BANT – Nutritional Therapist at totalbeing.com and healthyconvenience.com

In this article we address one of the most pernicious, insidious factors to have permeated our lives and society as a whole; something that may contribute to obesity, degenerative diseases, mental health problems, eating disorders and tooth decay. We are talking about sugar, the white or brown stuff everybody has in their cupboard (even if just for visitors) and that creeps into most aspects of our diets unseen or even in naturally sweet foods.

Our relationship with sugar is bound up in our evolutionary process¹. Firstly, sweet foods are generally not poisonous so with no refined or processed sugars around, choosing them worked well as a safety mechanism for our ancestors. Also our major fuel source is carbohydrates, so we have an affinity for sweetness to help us find ripe fruit; this is a mechanism that plants use to attract animals to eat their fruit, therefore spreading the seeds inside. An interesting fact is that apart from guinea pigs and the fruit bat, human beings are the only mammals that cannot make vitamin C in the body; we have to eat it in large amounts for optimum health and sweet fruits and vegetables are a rich source of vitamin C.

In true human form, we soon learned to extract the sweet bit that attracted us to the foods we needed and to discard the part that stopped the sugars from harming us – the fibre and nutrients that ensure a safe, slow release of sugar to the bloodstream and healthy, sustained energy. All forms of concentrated sugar hit the bloodstream running (white and brown sugar, malt, syrup, honey) and white sugar has had 90% of the nutrients that ensure stable blood sugar levels removed¹.

It is said that the origin of cane sugar, the first refined form of sugar is most likely Irian Jaya, from where the sugar was spread to the Asian mainland. In fact, archaeologists have found writings from the fourth century indicating the use of sugar. Sugar was introduced to Europe by the Arabs and was seen to be as luxurious as tea and coffee. It was therefore very expensive and seen as the reserve of the upper classes; rather ironic when you now consider the cheaper, less exotic image that white sugar and very refined foods have now.

Our health and the steady increase of sugar in our diets have correlated; the rise of degenerative diseases such as arthritis, diabetes, cancer and osteoporosis has increased with our sweet tooth and this is no coincidence. Although the Elizabethans were said to have such a love for sugar that they had appalling teeth, they did not have the pernicious sources we have in our obsession for refining; that has built up speed since the Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Our 21st century love of convenience has exacerbated this trend and the resulting collective “sweet tooths” have even caused us to breed fruit and vegetables with high sugar content. As we wrote in the article “Food Ain’t What it Used to Be”, Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition at King’s College London said, “As a rule, most fruit juice (today) provides about 10 grams of sugar per 100 grams – about the same as Coca-Cola”.

So in the West we have definitely formed ourselves a sweet palette. Nutritionists see people who claim not to have a sweet tooth, but then say that they can munch through half a pound of grapes or a box of dates at a time or cannot stop eating potatoes, which are essentially big balls of sugary starch. We often assume that in the UK, at least we are not as bad as the States, however, a packet of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes has 10% more sugar than the US version at 8g per 100g (US has 7.14g).

As a matter of interest, breakfast cereals², which are often considered a “healthy” start to the day can be shockingly high in sugar. Alpen, considered as a healthy choice by many contains a whopping 21.6g of sugar per 100g – this is in the added sugar, dried fruit and skimmed milk products; to those weaned off sweet foods it tastes very sugary indeed. Special K, the slimmer’s favourite, contains 18g sugar per 100g, not very healthy at all and All Bran contains 17g sugar per 100g. As excess sugar in the bloodstream can be converted to fat and sugar disrupts the balance of beneficial gut bacteria, health claims around many of the most popular cereals on the market may not hold up to scrutiny.

It is said that we eat about 20 teaspoons of added sugar on average a day³; that means sugar in foods that do not naturally contain it, like the cereals above. Just start to look on labels in supermarkets and you will realise how difficult it is to find anything, even savoury that does not contain sugar. Food manufacturers also use many names to conceal the sugar content of their products. All those listed below are names for forms of sugar – the names in bold are just the more familiar ones:

Just because an ingredient like honey seems natural and full of goodness, does not change the fact that it is a monosaccharide, a single sugar that requires very little energy for the body to quickly break down and hit the bloodstream. It is not as harmful as pure white sugar, but the delusion that these quantities do not add up to a big daily load of sugar has lead to our massive sugar intake statistics.

Look at the labels of foods like baked beans, peanut butter, ready meals, soups, tinned vegetables, pies and bread; savoury is not always a strictly accurate description.

Many people believe that fructose, sugar from fruit is a healthy natural alternative as it is slow to break down, but according to Dr Paul Clayton, author of the best-selling book Health Defence our bodies use glucose as a primary fuel as it is the least harmful monosaccharide. Fructose can have a very damaging effect on cells and their functions when in the body. Sucrose is the scientific name for table sugar, which is simply made from two glucose molecules, pretty much an instantaneous hit of sugar. We have evolved to derive our glucose from complex plant sources like vegetables, fruit, grains, nuts and seeds so that the body can receive a steady release of energy throughout the day, rather than the jolted shocks and highs and lows that a refined diet can cause.

After eating any plant food or carbohydrate, the pancreas reacts to the sugar (glucose) content by producing insulin, which takes the glucose out of the blood and into the cells. If the food has more of the sugars mentioned above, they will hit the bloodstream more quickly and demand more insulin to be produced. Some unused glucose is stored in the liver and muscle cells and reconverted back to glucose as and when the body requires it, but any excess amounts are stored as fat. This is because glucose is dangerous if just hanging around and not used as energy; it is safer stored as fat. Think how this will affect you if you eat sweet foods late at night and then don’t expend any energy to use it up; this is often how weight creeps on.

If we constantly eat sugar, we ‘flood’ the system and the pancreas may over-react and overly secrete insulin in an attempt to reduce blood glucose levels. With time, this could lead to a rapid fall in blood sugar, or hypoglycaemia, as it is more commonly known. When levels are too low, it is common to experience symptoms such as fatigue, poor concentration, irritability, nervousness, depression, sweating, headaches, digestive problems and hunger. This is when we reach out for sugar and stimulants such as tea, coffee, chocolates and cigarettes to ‘keep us going’ – creating a vicious cycle as our pancreas is again stimulated to produce more insulin. A cycle of “highs and lows” is therefore set up, which takes effort to break, especially as it feeds cravings. This poor “blood sugar balance” is the single most discussed topic of nutritionists and their clients and always the first port of call for weight issues, mental health, stress and fatigue.

Sugar is not just a substance that makes us feel moody or irritable or fat or tired; it is a highly damaging substance when eaten in anything more than the body needs for fuel. According to www.organicnutrition.co.uk⁴, “to make sugar, it is first pressed as a juice from the cane (or beet) and refined into molasses. Then it is refined into brown sugar, and finally into strange white crystals C12H22O, that are an alien chemical to the human system.” These crystals can be the main cause of diabetes, contribute to heart disease, morbid obesity, mental illness and chronic fatigue, unbalance the endocrine system, lead to damage in the adrenal glands, liver, kidneys and brain and cause an overgrowth of the yeast candida in the gut, leading to digestive and other symptoms.

Sugar “denatures” or deactivates proteins, causes calcium to be leached from bone, dissolves B vitamins in the digestive tract, lowers disease control and depresses the body’s immune system response and resistance to disease, by inhibiting the release of growth hormones. Need I go on?

Total Being Opinion

So, sugar is scary, but sometimes the thought of cutting it out is even more so. A sweet tooth or cravings for sweet foods are habits and symptoms of nutritional and hormonal imbalances; they can be changed. This is where a nutritionist can really help, by advising which supplements will help support your body as you wean yourself off sugar.

Education is power and the more knowledge you have about the foods you put into your body, the more in control you will be. If you prepare food yourself, you will know what you have put in it. If you start to read labels on food packets, you will quickly see which brands make an effort to avoid sugars and which pander to a sweet palette and make dubious marketing claims. Healthy versions of products usually contain less sugar; look at a commercial brand of peanut butter next to one in the healthy eating section of your supermarket as a prime example. They may be more expensive, but that is because sugar is a cheap ingredient and the sweeter more refined foods last longer on the shelf and are made in mass quantities.

Start doing taste tests and understanding how your palette may have been trained to respond more to sweet tastes. It is possible to wean yourself off; if you take sugar in tea or on cereal, reduce the amount you have over several weeks until it tastes good with none. Going cold turkey can just make you feel like you are denying yourself and send you back to the white stuff – as usual the goal is long-term change, not the quick fix that the sugar provides. As you reduce sugar and sweet foods, you can increase your sense of taste and begin to enjoy other foods more. Do not use sweeteners as an alternative, they keep the sweet tooth alive and have an entire gamut of their own harmful effects – that's a whole different article!

See totalbeing.com for a Nutritional Assessment to choose the right diet and supplements to help stop sugar cravings and get in control of your health!

See healthyconvenience.com for help remembering how to get healthy – for posters, shopping guides and recipes.

References

1. Holford P. The Optimum Nutrition Bible Piatkus 1997
2. “Row over breakfast cereal sugar levels” The Metro 26 July 2004
3. Geary A. The Food and Mood Handbook Thorsons 2001
4. http://www.organicnutrition.co.uk/articles/is-sugar-bad-for-you.htm