It seems that every day I see or hear another report saying that sugar needs to regulated or that it is killing us. So is it?
It is easy to become confused by the various sugars and sweeteners. So here is a basic overview:
- Dextrose, fructose and glucose are all monosaccharides, known as simple sugars. The primary difference between them is how your body metabolizes them. Glucose and dextrose are essentially the same sugar. However, food manufacturers usually use the term "dextrose" in their ingredient list.
- The simple sugars can combine to form more complex sugars, like the disaccharide sucrose (table sugar), which is half glucose and half fructose.
- High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.
- Ethanol (drinking alcohol) is not a sugar, although beer and wine contain residual sugars and starches, in addition to alcohol.
- Sugar alcohols like xylitol, glycerol, sorbitol, maltitol, mannitol, and erythritol are neither sugars nor alcohols but are becoming increasingly popular as sweeteners. They are incompletely absorbed from your small intestine, for the most part, so they provide fewer calories than sugar but often cause problems with bloating, diarrhea and flatulence.
- Sucralose (Splenda) is NOT a sugar, despite its sugar-like name and deceptive marketing slogan, "made from sugar." It's a chlorinated artificial sweetener in line with aspartame and saccharin, with detrimental health effects to match.
- Agave syrup, falsely advertised as "natural," is typically HIGHLY processed and is usually 80 percent fructose. The end product does not even remotely resemble the original agave plant.
- Honey is about 53 percent fructose, but is completely natural in its raw form and has many health benefits when used in moderation, including as many antioxidants as spinach.
- Stevia is a highly sweet herb derived from the leaf of the South American stevia plant, which is completely safe (in its natural form). Lo han (or luohanguo) is another natural sweetener, but derived from a fruit.
Glucose is the form of energy you were designed to run on. Every cell in your body and in fact, every living thing on the Earth uses glucose for energy.
A century ago, we consumed about 15 grams of sugar per day. Today, the average person consumes about 73 grams per day. Even worse, 25 percent of people actually consume more than 130 grams of fructose per day!
It isn't that fructose itself is bad—it is the MASSIVE DOSES you're exposed to that make it dangerous.
So why is it worrisome that we are consuming more sugar, mainly in the form of fructose?
- Your body metabolizes fructose differently than it does glucose. The entire burden of metabolizing fructose falls on your liver.
- People are consuming fructose in enormous quantities, which has made the negative effects much more profound.
If you read food labels you'll notice that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is in nearly every manufactured food product. Food manufacturers claim that it is the same as sucrose, or table sugar, and are even trying to relable HFCS as "corn sugar." And on a basic level HFCS is no different from granulated sugar. There is a catch though.
Food and beverage manufacturers began switching their sweeteners from sucrose to corn syrup in the 1970s when they discovered that HFCS was not only far cheaper to make, it's about 20 percent sweeter than conventional table sugar that has sucrose. Because HFCS is so cheap, thanks largely to government farm subsidies to grow corn, it is added to virtually every processed food. Even if you consumed no soda or fruit, it is very easy to exceed 25 grams of hidden fructose in your diet.
HFCS contains the same two sugars as sucrose but is more metabolically risky to you, due to its chemical form.
The fructose and the glucose are not bound together in HFCS, as they are in table sugar, so your body doesn't have to break it down. Therefore, the fructose is absorbed immediately, going straight to your liver. From there it is turned into FAT (VLDL and triglycerides), which means more fat deposits throughout your body.
However, the problems extend well beyond a couple of pant sizes:
- Fructose elevates uric acid, which decreases nitric oxide, raises angiotensin, and causes your smooth muscle cells to contract, thereby raising your blood pressure and potentially damaging your kidneys.
- Increased uric acid also leads to chronic, low-level inflammation, which has far-reaching consequences for your health. For example, chronically inflamed blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes; also, a good deal of evidence exists that some cancers are caused by chronic inflammation. I wrote an earlier post about the dangers of chronic inflammation.
- Fructose tricks your body into gaining weight by fooling your metabolism—it turns off your body's appetite-control system. Fructose does not appropriately stimulate insulin, which in turn does not suppress ghrelin (the "hunger hormone") and doesn't stimulate leptin (the "satiety hormone"), which together result in your eating more and developing insulin resistance.
- Fructose rapidly leads to weight gain and abdominal obesity ("beer belly"), decreased HDL, increased LDL, elevated triglycerides, elevated blood sugar, and high blood pressure—i.e., classic metabolic syndrome.
- Fructose metabolism is very similar to ethanol metabolism, which has a multitude of toxic effects, including NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). Chemically, it's alcohol without the alcohol!
Addiction
There is also a claim that sugar leads to addiction. Is our desire to consume sugar merely a strong liking or is it a true addiction, with physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms?
According to Marcia Pelchat, PhD, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a basic research institute in Philadelphia, "The jury's still out." Scientists aren't sure if people can become physically dependent on sugar, although some animal studies suggest that such a thing is possible, she says. "There are the same kinds of changes in brain dopamine, in these animals given intermittent access to sugar, as in drug addicts."
Unlike with substance abuse, people don't get the shakes when they stop eating sugar. But people with constant sugar cravings do exhibit one symptom of dependence, Pelchat says: "continued use despite knowledge of bad consequences or having to give up certain activities."
There is a "but," though: "Sugar does seem to be special in some ways," Pelchat says, even in the womb. Doctors used to treat the problem of excessive amniotic fluid by injecting a sweet substance into the liquid, she says. The appealing taste would prompt the fetus to swallow more fluid, which was then flushed out through the umbilical cord and the mother's kidneys.
Not only do infants prefer sweet tastes, but when babies drink a sweet solution, it can ease pain through a natural analgesic effect in the body, Pelchat says.
Way back, the preference for sugar may have conferred an evolutionary advantage by leading people to seek out ripe fruits, which are sweet and serve as a good source of calories, she says. "We're born to like sugar," Pelchat says.
Regulating Sugar
Alright, so sugar itself isn't bad for us but the amount and type we consume is? Basically, that is right. Sugar is a carbohydrate and our bodies run off carbohydrates. The sugars in fruits and vegetables are mainly fructose but they are mixed with vitamins, minerals, fiber and other nutritional components. This is where we should get our sources of sugar. Fruit juices, on the other hand, are no better than soda and should be limited. Even chocolate milk has high levels of fructose in it and should be limited as well. In fact, many school districts are removing it from their school lunch menus for that reason.
We shouldn't fear or demonize sugar but should instead make attempts to lessen the amount of hidden sugars and fructose in our diets by reading labels and decreasing our consumption of manufactured food products. Do we need to regulate sugar? I guess there could be an argument about the regulation of clearly labeling sugar in our foods but I would argue against any other regulation. If we decrease the demand for it by ceasing to purchase and consume manufactured foods, there is little reason to demand regulation.
We need to remember that we control what we consume with each bite or drink we take. Take the responsibility for your food choices and reap the rewards of prolonged health and resistance to obesity, diabetes, food addictions, and metabolic disorders or cardiovascular disease.
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Use this chart to estimate how much fructose you're getting in your diet:
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