It has been hotly debated in the scientific and fitness community about which is worse; salt sugar or fat? They have each been blamed for a variety of things from cancer to acne. The simple truth is that our body requires all three of these components but in small amounts.
How Our Body Uses Sugar
How our body uses sugar depends on the type of sugar we are consuming. The first type is glucose which is a simple carbohydrate and used as instant energy by the body. Glucose is the primary source of energy for your cells and it’s important because it signals your pancreas to produce insulin which tells the brain that you’ve eaten enough.
Our body metabolizes the other types of sugars differently. Fructose and sucrose are actually metabolized in the liver and most of it ends up as bad cholesterol otherwise knows as very low-density lipoproteins. The brain doesn’t recognize when it’s being fed sucrose, so the hunger and thirst mechanisms do not shut off automatically like they do with glucose. Only super high-level athletes will have any benefit from fructose as it replaces their energy stores quicker.
What About Excess Sugar?
As mentioned before consuming glucose produces insulin, so what happens when there is too much glucose? The extra glucose will go to your liver until your insulin levels drop enough and then it is released into the body to fuel us during a fast.
This can raise your bad cholesterol which can lead to heart disease. Not all excess glucose is released by the liver and is in fact converted into fat, but not the kind of fat we associate with our belly. It is the fatty liver disease type of fat which is dangerous. Another negative consequence of having too much sugar in your bloodstream is that you will have poorer circulation.
How Does This Contribute to Weight Gain?
It turns out that the process of your body regulating sugar doesn’t actually cause you to gain weight directly. However, if you are eating that much sugar the chances are you aren’t eating much of nutritional value and ingesting too many calories, which will cause the pounds to pile on. When we have poor nutrition, our body signals us to keep eating because it needs to protein and vitamins and this can cause people to overeat, thus contributing to the accumulation of fat.
How About Diabetes?
It is a common misconception that diabetes makes you gain weight, but gaining weight can increase your chances of getting diabetes due to insulin resistance. The misconception that sugar gives you diabetes comes from a combination of truths put together in a bit of a skewed way. This would be that insulin regulates sugar and diabetes is an insulin problem, and that sugar contributes to obesity and obesity causes diabetes. This doesn’t mean sugar is fine and healthy, but we do need some of it and can control the type we have.
How to Cut Back on Sugar
We do need sugar, but we don’t need a lot of it. Here are some tips on how to cut down your sugar consumption:
- Drink water! Cut out all the sugary sodas as they are full of fructose. No need for those empty calories. If you need the fizz, try a club soda and not diet pops.
- Avoid processed foods. They generally add more sugar to make up for the low-fat items.
- Eat fruit. Even though it contains fructose, the healthy fibre will fill you up.
- Cook your own meals. Then you can control how much sugar is in it whereas restaurants add sugar, salt, and fat liberally to make things taste better.
- Don’t allow sugary foods inside your house. It’s best not to have the temptation.
- Exercise. This will keep your metabolism going strong which helps to regulate sugar.
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