It’s not important how much sugar is “added” to a product. What matters is the actual “sugars” percentage content . Sugar is sugar, and with a couple of exceptions it’s all bad for your health, in spades! Glucose is the fuel which powers just about all animal life.Lactose is milk sugar which metabolises as glucose when digested. In fact nearly every carbohydrate we eat ends up as glucose. The notable exception is FRUCTOSE, or fruit sugar. Sucrose (cane sugar) is a double molecule of glucose and fructose, so it’s 50% fructose. This sugar has three main harmful effects:
- In inhibits the gut hormones which control hunger and satiety. So the brain doesn’t get the message that we are full. This is why obese people can eat and eat when they are obviously not hungry.
- It inhibits the production if insulin in the pancreas, leading to the pandemic of Type-2 diabetes which accompanies that of obesity.
- All the fructose beyond the 10 grams a day we need goes directly to the liver where it is converted to fat which is deposited around the vital organs. Which is why so many overweight people have large bellies. Average daily consumption in Australia is about 30 g/day.which accounts for the large proportion of overweight and obese people in the community.
- In addition, fructose has been causally linked to a string of undesirable medical conditions as long as your arm, including tooth decay, leaky gut, non-alcoholic fatty liver, kidney failure, gout, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, hypertension, erectile dysfunction, and so on.
Cutting fructose from your diet will enable you to avoid most of these conditions. It’s easy to avoid eating excess fructose - limit your fruit to two small pieces (200g) per day, avoid fruit juices, dried fruits (concentrated fructose) and any processed food with more than 2% “sugars”. Yogurt s OK at up to 7% as the first 5% is lactose based. And watch out for “low fat” foods. The flavour is removed with the fat and replaced by sugar and salt.
Mainstream medicine is slowly getting around to recognizing the role of “sugar” in community health. But many doctors and nutritionists do not understand the role of fructose. Interested readers can check authors like David Gillespie, Robert Lustig, Peter Dingle, John Yudkin etc.