I never had a sweet tooth, but I was still addicted to sugar. Yes, you read that right. The sugar I was addicted to didn’t look like doughnuts, cookies, pastries, candies, and cakes, but it looked more like pasta, bread, cornflakes, nachos, and potato chips. Being a university student, I always leaned towards buying food that was easily affordable but not the healthiest. Even though I would look for “high in protein” or “low sugar,” I realized it was just a trick the food manufacturers used to get more of their products sold.
When I had that revelation, I decided to stop letting food packaging mess with my head and always chose fresh, organic produce, even though I had to pay an extra buck.
Sweetness has an almost universal appeal. So adding sugar to processed foods makes them more flavorful. Whether it’s to give baked goods texture or help preserve foods like jam or peanut butter, it fuels fermentation that enables bread to rise and serve as a bulking agent in ice cream.
And, can we not get started on Coca-cola? Let’s say men should consume no more than 36 grams (9 teaspoons) of added sugar per day and women, no more than 25 grams (6 teaspoons) per day. And only a can of coke has about 39 grams of sugar.
What sugar does to your body
Before I explain why sugar is the culprit or why you shouldn’t eat it, let’s understand what sugar does to your body.
Your pancreas plays a vital role in digesting sugar by secreting insulin, regulating your blood sugar levels. To give you a rough idea, here is where the pancreas is:
Inside your pancreas is a small cluster of cells called beta cells. We have only about 2 grams of these beta cells. Anytime you eat sugar or highly-refined carbohydrates, the sugar passes through the lining of your stomach and gets absorbed into your bloodstream, the sugar molecules are delivered to cells throughout your body. The hormone insulin makes sure that these sugar molecules are transferred from your bloodstream to your cells.
The beta cells signal the secretion of insulin to pull all of that sugar out. Insulin’s job here is to take all that sugar out of the blood and feed it to our liver, muscles, or store it as fat instead of leaving excess sugar in your blood. That sounds right, right? But here’s the problem:
In this current age of modernization, we have been overworking our beta cells. This doesn’t just happen with obvious sugary foods, like cake and ice cream but also highly-refined carbohydrate foods, like yogurt, granola, cereal, bread, pasta, alcohol, even when used in moderation.
Every time we eat these foods, our beta cells signal to make more insulin.This slowly leads to beta-cell burnout. This is otherwise known as Type 2 Diabetes, which accounts for about 90% of all diabetes cases worldwide.
Beta-cell burnout could happen to anyone in the world. As our beta-cells weaken through the years, the blood sugar levels begin to rise to a dangerous level. And if this continues, without any change in our lifestyle, we’re prescribed to insulin injections every day for the rest of our lives to stay alive.
What sugar does to your brain
In humans, foods that cause a rapid rise of blood sugar have been found to activate specific regions of the brain associated with the reward response, provoking a more intense feeling of hunger when consumed. These foods produce a greater addictive drive in the brain. That’s why you always find yourself reaching out for another oreo, and just before you know it, you’ve gobbled up five of them.
This reward system leads to a vicious cycle of overeating by causing our brains to build tolerance against them.
This also means that sugar affects our mood; in a study on people with type 2 diabetes, reported increased feelings of sadness and anxiety during high blood sugar levels. In the Whitehall II study, a dietary analysis of sugar consumption on the mood of 23,245 individuals enrolled found higher rates of sugar consumption was associated with a greater incidence of depression.
It is no surprise that elevates blood sugar causes damage to blood vessels, which is the primary cause of vascular complications of diabetes, leading to coronary heart diseases, such as obesity, high blood pressure, and inflammation.
Long-term diabetics show impairment in cognitive functions such as learning and memorizing is demonstrated by a study.
These days teenagers might be staying away from coke, but they’re still drinking gallons of energy drinks that promise to “energize,” and that’s already doing damage for the long-term.
Even as adults, we continue to eat white bread or sugary cereal or the good old “pizza and beer” at least once a week.
To give you the benefit of the doubt, nowadays, it’s easy to fall into the traps laid by the 5891 million dollars processed food industry today. So many foods are labelled as “healthy,” we would instantly pick up a cookie box that would brand their packaging as “low sugar,” “high protein,” or “vegan.” These major food brands are known to psychologically trick a customer into purchasing their product. The fact is the sweeter a food is, the more it sells, no wonder we keep coming back to get the same cookies, yet once again.
Only being more mindful; reading the label, ingredients list every time you purchase something is the way to choose better foods. Several foods in the industry claim to be healthy but aren’t actually, such as cereal, flavoured yogurt, flavoured instant oatmeal, or choco pops you have for breakfast. It’s really easy to fall into this trap.
Please, just read the label once.
Small Steps to take
Besides being more mindful and conscious of your choices, there are small tweaks you can do that will help you reduce sugar and highly-processed carbohydrates from your diet.
Have a high protein breakfast
Cut the highly sugary cereal and milk or worst so pancakes and waffles, they are made out of refined carbs (all-purpose flour, sugar) and drizzled with even more sugar (maple syrup or agave syrup or whipped cream).
Get some protein in your body and start your day with a balanced blood-sugar level. It gives your body the balanced energy it needs. More so, get some fruit in your system; it gives you not only the most natural form of energy but also gives you fibre, vitamins, and minerals.
Drink more water
Next time you feel like you need something sweet after your meal or just in the middle of the day, grab a glass of water first. Being dehydrated can feel like being hungry. Try water first.
Chances are you’ll forget about your craving and feel even more energized because a 5% decrease in hydration can correlate to a 20% decrease in energy. Unlike the sweet thing you were about to grab, which would only make you feel happy and energized just for a while and then drop your energy levels again, water will keep you energized.
Find a healthier replacement or MIY (Make It Yourself)
There are so many wonderful low-carb replacements now for high-carb foods. We like in the day and age where pizza crust can be made out of cauliflower, and pasta can be made out of zucchini and taste just as delicious.
Substitute your flour for almond flour or oat flour and opt. for raw and unprocessed versions of foods such as buy oats instead of instant oatmeal or eat fruit instead of drinking packaged fruit juices.
Ditch White Sugar (or Any Sugar)
Ditch store-bought refined white sugar or brown sugar. Or as a matter of fact, any refined sugar, read the list of secret names of sugars the food industry loves to use. There’s about 56 of them!
Use jaggery or dates to sweeten your homemade treats or try using stevia, a natural sweetener, which is free from calories and carbs.
That’s it from me
I am not asking you to cut sugar out completely; I agree it’s not enjoyable to live like that. Follow the 80–20 rule, where 80% of your diet comprises whole plant-based foods, and 20% of your diet comprises of other stuff.
Let’s protect our beta cells, and be grateful we have them, unlike Type 1 diabetics, who naturally don’t have any beta cells and have to take insulin injections throughout their lives.
Let’s begin to treat sugar as the treat it is.