Sugar is Your Thin Friend Trying to Keep You Cheating your Body out of Health
What is Sugar? Sugar or sucrose is made from cane sugar or sugar beets. The difference is in where the crop is grown. Typical table sugar in America is sugar beet unless the packaging specifies that it is cane sugar.
Both processed forms of sugar have the same components. Sugar is made up of approximately half glucose and half fructose. The body processes both cane and beet sugar in the same way.
Sugar Seduces You into Being With Her Every Chance You Get.
What happens when you eat sugar? Sugar goes into your mouth and like all foods starts to be processed by enzymes in the saliva. It moves down into your digestive tract and is processed further into glucose and fructose that get absorbed in the small intestine.
The difference from many other foods is that because it gets broken down so quickly, it is often absorbed early in the small intestine. This can impact your body’s hormone signals around satisfaction and fullness.
Sugar Has a Split Personality
After the sugar is absorbed it takes two paths. This is sugar’s split personality. Because of the different components of sugar, there are two paths.
The glucose is absorbed into the bloodstream and the pancreas creates insulin to take it to the cells that need it. That is how the muscle cells and brain are refilled with the energy they need. After that, the insulin takes the extra sugar and has it converted into fat added to hips and thighs for storage and use later.
Fructose does not have a similarly complex process. The body sees it more like a toxin and sends it to the liver. The liver will try to remove it with other toxins but often processes it into fat on the liver and surrounding organs. This often results in fatty liver and can add the fat around other organs which often results in disease if organ fat remains for long periods of time.
Your Super Hero Liver
The liver is also trying to process other toxins from the environment that have entered our bodies through the skin and other mucus membranes including the gut if it is leaky. When it is overloaded it can’t process the fructose out of the body. The liver turns the fructose into fat instead and throws a couple of other toxins in with the fat to protect the body from the toxins that it can’t remove because of the overwhelm of toxins it is processing.
Yeah for our body protecting you from toxins. The preferred way to deal with toxins is to remove them from the body but when the liver is overwhelmed it can’t do that.
Fruit has a Commander for its Sugar.
What about sugar in fruit? Yes, fruit has sugar in it and contains both glucose and fructose so you get the same effect once the sugar components are absorbed. There is about 5-10% fructose by weight in common fruits like grapes, apples, and blueberries and up to 50% by weight in dried fruits.
The components are not absorbed as quickly in the very beginning of the small intestine because the fruit fiber is there to push it along further into the intestine. This also allows it to be processed by a larger variety of bacteria in the intestine and sometimes pushed out with the fiber.
Most Whole Foods have a Commander to Keep Sugar in Line
What about other carbohydrates? You get a similar fiber effect with vegetables and whole grains as with fruit. The problem is that most grains especially in processed foods are not whole grains.
Even when it says whole grain they are not grinding and using the whole grain to create the food, they are often just taking the fiber component and adding it in later in the process.
Why? Because the oils in a whole grain once milled start to get rancid within about 48 hours, so they have to separate out all the components of the grain first before they use them so the oils are removed.
Our Body has an Army to Protect Us
Why do we like gut bacteria? Bacteria in our intestine are our friends. There are 100,000 times the number of bacteria in our bodies as cells in our body. They help us to process our foods and signal to our body what is coming in for the cells.
Bacteria in our intestine can help us and can harm us. Which bacteria grow most in our intestine is often determined by what food we are feeding it.
The more glucose and fructose we eat and absorb the more those sugar-loving bacteria grow and signal the body to process the sugar into fat.
I Don’t Want to Know the Science Stuff About the Sugar Hussy Just the Key Points.
There are two key points I want you to know.
First, both the pathways from glucose and fructose can create fat in the body but the more dangerous fat happens with fructose.
Second, fiber with fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is your friend. Fiber helps you to absorb sugar components more slowly giving the body more time to process and remove toxins and the liver to be less overwhelmed.
What Next
Continue with the Sugar Series. The next post will tell you about high fructose corn syrup.
Now that you know fructose is the sugar part that is worse for your health, let’s talk about where it is found and how to stop having so much of it.
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