We love sweets. Today, we put sugar in — or on — just about everything we eat. Coffee, tea, soda, cereal, juice — Sugar is everywhere and it’s in everything. In fact, the average person consumes 150 pounds of sugar per year. In just one week you will consume more sugar than an average 18th century American would have eaten in an entire year! And it’s not just sugar that we’re eating, but other sweeteners, as well. Corn syrup and artificial sweeteners now make up over 50 percent of all the sweeteners used in foods, even though many studies show that corn syrup and other high-fructose products may be even more destructive to our health than table sugar. And unlike the natural sugars found in fruits, which provide a great deal of fiber and nutrition in exchange for their sweetness, refined sugars come with no nutritional value whatsoever.
For generations sweet foods were rare in the human diet. Many years ago the sweet foods that were available —primarily fruits—were smoothly but not rapidly metabolized into energy because they contained a host of vitamins, minerals and fiber.
Our bodies are not designed to handle large amounts of refined and artificial sugars. The average American consumes two 12-ounce sodas a day, but these sodas dump sugar into the blood very rapidly straining the pancreas to produce and release insulin very rapidly as well. This problem is made worse when the soda is caffeinated as caffeine doubles the rise in blood sugar (Journal of Caffeine Research April 16, 2011).
Our bodies, which are designed to receive carbohydrates in an unrefined form, are now being overwhelmed with sugar excess. Today our bodies are being forced to metabolize large amounts of sugar rapidly. This is especially true if we’re snacking throughout the day, drinking sodas or coffee with sugar, and eating meals rich in refined carbohydrates as most Americans do. The pancreas simply can’t keep up. Eating a lot of sugar, sodas, and snacks is like driving a car very fast up and down steep hills all day. We push the accelerator to the floor on the way up the hill and jam on the brakes coming down. Cars driven this way wear out much more quickly. The same thing happens to our pancreas if we force it to handle large amounts of sugar rapidly. The diet we recommend, rich in complex carbohydrates with fiber, smooths out the hills and gives the pancreas a gentle rolling ride without the quick starts and stops.
Another problem with rapidly absorbed sugars is that they cause us to gain weight. Weight gain fattens us up by packing our cells full of energy stored primarily as fat. It is easy to sit down to breakfast and drink a glass of orange juice but not many of us would sit down at breakfast and eat the three or more oranges that must be squeezed to make that glass of juice. It is easy to slip 2 teaspoons of sugar into our coffee in the morning but not many of us would add the 1/2 cup of raw sugar cane to that coffee that goes into making those 2 teaspoons of sugar. The fiber that is removed when carbohydrates are refined provides our bodies with a much needed sense of fullness that prevents us from overeating and gaining those extra intracellular calories that cause insulin resistance leading to diabetes.
Refined sugars are not all bad. They are an ideal source of calories to take as a sports drink in the middle of a marathon. The problem is we eat those calories as if we are in the midst of a marathon while sitting in front of the TV watching one.