Sugar is everywhere in our food these days. Unless you’re consciously vigilant about it, you could easily consume upwards of 50g of sugar a day. The issue with this is that this chronic overloading of sugar is incredibly damaging to the body, leading to the development of the terrible diseases of the modern era: diabetes, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and cancer just to name a few. The trend of increasing obesity has only gotten worse over the past few decades with no signs of slowing down. It’s imperative that we get serious about this epidemic that has contributed to more deaths than did covid in the same time frame. Now, that’s not to say that Americans haven’t been diligently following the doctor’s advice from cutting out fat and exercising more, in fact, Americans have been trying very hard to do exactly as the doctors ordered. But, the reality is that that advice never addressed the actual culprit: the unprecedented amount of sugar we consume.
You still hear it these days: Oh, but our brains need sugar to survive! This technically isn’t wrong, but we truly have no essential need for any consumption of dietary sugars. Our livers, if working correctly, should be able to supply all the sugar the brain could possibly need through a process called gluconeogenesis, where sugar is made within the body.
The other misconception many people have is: I don’t eat any sweets at all! I don’t have this problem! But as you can see from the graphics, all carbs count as sugar, regardless of its sweetness on the tongue. When we eat refined carbs, our body immediately breaks down the simple starches into glucose. At the end, your body can’t tell apart if the glucose you ate came from something sweet like a donut or savory from a bagel, it’s still all glucose in the end. It usually comes as a great surprise that a bowl of rice is equivalent to 20+g of sugar while something conventionally sweet tasting like a muffin is only ~10g of sugar. People generally look at nutrition labels, only noticing added sugars. Actually, we have to look at total carbohydrates – that’s the important one. In addition, the daily allowance of carbs for an adult should be no more than 25g for women, 36g for men (the median in America right now is 94g), giving us a benchmark for how much we are overeating. Being aware of this “hidden” sugar is a must in order to actually reverse course on this terrible condition that has impacted the developed world.
Over 600,000 items in American food supply, 74% have added sugars. This was precisely because of the whole fat scare starting back in 1951 with the lipid hypothesis by Ancel Keys. Because we decided to remove fats from foods across the board, sugars had to be added in to make up for the loss in flavor.
TL;DR
We are eating too much sugar – much of the time, we don’t even realize that we are eating so much because it’s hidden in all the manufactured foods found in the grocery store. Understand where the sugar is coming from by looking at food labels and limit the daily intake down to ideally 20g or less. Why this matters will be discussed in the next article, Insulin.
Other resources:
–Sugar: The Bitter Truth by Dr. Robert Lustig
-Food Industry’s Secret Weapon (WHY Sugar is addictive & in 80% of Food)
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