WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE EAT SUGAR?

Good evening, it is May 31^st, 2022 and 5:30 pm here in India. I am Dr. Aneeta Madhok, Coaching Psychologist and Integrative Nutrition Health Coach. Welcome to my weekly blog on Integrative health.

I am an Integrative Nutrition Health coach qualified from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in the US. By profession, I am a Coaching Psychologist and I went through a self-healing health transformation a few years ago. I coach people to lead healthy and vibrant lives, with a special focus on diabetes and obesity. Because I am a psychologist, for Health Coaching I focus on the mind-body, Heart and Soul of my clients. Each client is on his or her own journey and the coaching helps achieve many milestones along the say.

Today I will share with you what really happens inside your body when you consume sugar? Nowadays, sugar is such a controversial topic and sometimes it is hard to take a stand on the matter and stick with it.

Sugar, honey, has been eulogised in mythology ancient literature and modern art and expression. It inspires love, poetry and songs across the world. In every religion, sweet things are offered as food to the gods. It is a part of the religious rituals all over the world. All this makes it very difficult for anybody to really understand what sugar really does to the body and very hard to accept that it is the number one cause of heart attacks, strokes, some cancers, dementia, and of course, type 2 diabetes. Sugar is the only part of food that we consume on a daily basis that is addictive, really addictive not just because we like the taste of it but even the biological impact of sugar is addictive. One of the most important ideas that has driven research in nutrition over the last twenty to thirty years, is that Sugar is the basic reason for obesity, which leads to a host of lifestyle illnesses and ailments. A trivial fact is that research says that if you had a high sugar consumption, you have three times the risk of a heart attack. There are more and more cases of young children with obesity and pre-diabetes.

Sugar is the underlying cause of obesity and overweight. Sugar makes you sick and fat, both.

We live in an environment that everywhere you go, you are confronted with sugary delicious and toxic food. It’s everywhere! If you are obese or diabetic, it is hard not to consume sugar. 50% of food in schools is fast food, loaded with sugar. When you walk home everywhere the corner convenience stores have sugary treats displayed prominently. Food companies deliberately, intentionally create foods that are addictive which keeps their customers coming back to them. They have taste institutes where they hire craving experts who specialise in finding the bliss point of foods.

The average adult human body contains about 5 litres of blood. A healthy non-diabetic person will have a fasting blood sugar level of 80mg per decalitre. This amounts to approximately 4 grams of sugar which is less than one teaspoon in your blood for a healthy human. When you consume even one inch piece of jaggery, it gets absorbed in your blood immediately and spikes the sugar levels even in a healthy non-diabetic person. This is dangerous for the body, so it produces a lot of hormones like insulin, adrenalin and cortisol to push that sugar into your body cells, to keep the blood level normal. On a continuous diet of sugar, the hormones will keep on pushing that sugar into your cells, and after a point, it cannot stay as sugar in your cells, so it gets converted into fat. Still further along the road, the insulin receptors on the cells get blocked and insulin resistance sets in. This means that no more sugar is getting pushed into the cells and it stays in the blood where your haemoglobin gets glycosylated, you get diabetes and the high blood sugar levels damage your organs and diabetes complications start setting in. Not only that, your pancreas gets tired of producing more insulin, and might pack up, and then you get insulin dependent diabetes.

That plus there is addictive quality of sugar. New research shows that when we consume sugar, it has the same bio-chemical effect on the brain as opium or heroin. There are opiate receptors in our brain and when we consume sugar, these get activated. This affects the “Rewards centre” of our brain, and we all know that when there is a reward for us, we can do anything, even if it is harmful to us.

This means that, yes, sugar is the number one enemy of the body. jaggery, dates and honey are not acceptable forms of sugar because all of these actually have the same toxic impact on the body as refined sugar does. According to me, about one to two teaspoons of sugar in any form, honey, jaggery, dates, per day is the most that ANYBODY should consume. But according to National Health Service of the UK, the recommended limit is about 30grams or 7tablespoons. In an economic times article a couple of years ago, the per capita consumption of sugar in India is 19 kilograms per year. Can you imagine that each person on the average in our country consumes more than one and a half kilograms of sugar a month?

No wonder we are in the middle of a diabetes epidemic all over the country and in richer cities, an obesity epidemic too!

I have already discussed at length about how insulin resistance builds up and leads to not only type 2 diabetes, but also to PCOS, Cardiovascular disease, and liver disease, some cancers, Alzheimer’s, asthma, and a host of other lifestyle disorders. In relationships I often advise clients that if any relationship is toxic to you, there is no reason why you need to stay in that relationship, whether it is a friend in school, or a boss at work, or an office colleague or even your spouse. Similarly, when there is food that is toxic to you, there is no reason to consume it. Why love something that does not love you back, whether it is another human being or any food item. Why love sugar if it doesn’t love you back!

Socially we have to fit in, so we do have to sweeten our coffee and tea and have desserts. Two great natural products exist to help you with these things and one is stevia and the other is monk fruit. Other artificial sweeteners also exist, but these need to be minimised as they have many side effects. The rest of the time, use naturally occurring sweet foods like sweet potato, apples, and other low glycemic fruits and vegetables. Once you get your mind and body de-addicted from sugar, you will enjoy the real sweetness of life and food in its natural form.

In one research that was done on rats, they fed the rats regularly with sugar. After a point the rats were so addicted to sugar that they refused to eat regular food and only wanted sugar. When they were taken off the addiction, they suffered withdrawal symptoms like any drug addicted human being!

There are so many alternatives. Sweet vegetables and fruits, and so many naturally occurring food items that are sweet. There are many who have tried the experiment of completely limiting the sugar intake and found so many health benefits. Once you get de-addicted, life becomes sweeter. You can actually savour the real sweetness which comes from real things in life which grow on plants, and are not manufactured in plants.

Its only when you de-addict yourself that you can discover how sweet life really is!

Life is soooo sweet!

Aneeta Madhok, PhD

May 31^st, 2022