In this post, we are going to tell about how sugar is harmful to your body and how can kick sugar from your diet.
Diseases
Cardiovascular disease
When you consume excess sugar, it will stay in your bloodstream. Now your bloodstream, or your arteries, that’s part of your cardiovascular system, so that’s why sugar can actually cause heart disease over time, heart attacks, high cholesterol, plaquing of your arteries, and high blood pressure.
But what happens is, if you consume too much sugar, some of it stays in your sugar, hence the name elevated blood sugar is there’s excess sugar staying in your blood. Now when this happens over time, you have excess sugar in your blood. That sugar, because it’s not supposed to be there for a long period of time, will cause inflammation.
So anything that’s in your bloodstream shouldn’t be there, whether its toxins, bad bacteria, excess sugar, those will cause inflammation. Those start to cause inflammation of the arteries. What happens then, that inflammation, imagine acid eating a hole through something, so it starts to damage the arteries, then your liver actually starts producing cholesterol to go and patch, and repair, the damaged area causing cholesterol to build up over time.
NAFLD { Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease }
Your liver and gall bladder deal with fat. If you consume a lot of sugar, your liver has to continue to produce cholesterol and over time. It can overtax the liver, and really, many forms of sugar your body really see as a toxin. So your liver is responsible for detoxing not just heavy metals, not just environmental pollutants and pesticides, and chemicals, and other things, in part, it’s responsible for dealing with sugar, especially unnatural sugar like high fructose corn syrup, and causes inflammation of your liver.
So non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is really a growing problem, especially in older men, it can be a major issue, but it could be an issue in women, even younger people, to where you start building up this excess fat around the liver that will cause disease in the area and affect its function.
And your liver, is responsible for detoxification, for healing and repair of your arteries, it’s responsible for digestion of fats along with the gall bladder, so it is critical for so many different things. But sugar causes major inflammation of the liver, causing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, or liver disease.
Leaky Gut
Leaky gut syndrome is really the root cause of a lot of diseases today. If you look back, if you go back over 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates said, “All disease begins in the gut.” So if you’re a person right now struggling with an issue such as Hashimoto’s disease or hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, anxiety, depression, children struggling with ADHD, autism, Asperger’s syndrome, or a number of other health-related, skin issues like eczema and psoriasis, malabsorption of certain vitamins and minerals, all of these are related to leaky gut.
Your body, or these microbes that live within your gut, which are really an organ themselves, so you have your gut wall, surrounding and living in your entire gut are a lot of microbes. You’ve got good bacteria like probiotics, you’ve got bad bacteria, you’ve got certain types of fungi and yeast, and different things growing within our system that really should actually help us in digestion and absorption and so many different things. What happens is, if you get too much of a certain type of sugar in your diet, and microbes can feed off many different things.
Well, what happens is, if you consume too much sugar, that’s what yeast and candida, and certain types of microbes love to feed off of. So if you’re getting a lot of sugar in your diet, it will build up lots of yeast and candida, which will then actually cause that whiteness on your tongue. It’ll cause nutrient malabsorption and also will actually even produce poisons themselves that will start eating through your gut lining, causing the leaky gut syndrome, which then can cause a cascade of other diseases, and over time, even autoimmune disease.
Metabolic diseases
Now this can be many things, oftentimes, this is referred to as Syndrome X, prediabetes or diabetes, or other endocrine-related diseases as well, but metabolic diseases especially, we’ll throw diabetes as part of that, or Syndrome X as part of that, can be an issue.
So I think that goes without saying, but diabetes is one of the fastest-growing diseases today, especially in kids. In fact, more people are getting it than ever before and even certain issues related to dementia, Alzheimer’s, has even been called Type 3 diabetes and even been linked to metabolic disease.
So really from protecting your brain, to your pancreas, to all of your organs, you got to get the excess sugar out of the diet.
Certain Cancers
Certain types of cancers can be fed by too much sugar consumption in the body. One of the most popular diets that are growing out there today is the ketogenic diet, now the ketogenic diet is where you get rid of the sugar and your body stops burning sugar for energy. And because you only have about 5% of your diet sugar on that diet and you start eating a lot of fat, and small amounts of protein as well. So really, your diet is almost all fat, some protein, and a very small amount of carbohydrates.
It turns your body into a fat burner, where your body is no longer burning sugar for energy. It’s burning ketone bodies, or fat, for energy. Which overall has been proven to potentially benefit patients with cancer, people with Alzheimer’s disease, people that want to lose weight very quickly, diabetic patients, and a number of other people who are struggling with issues related to that gut-brain connection, or excess body fat there as well. But certain cancers we know feed off of sugar, so one of the greatest things you can do to fight cancer naturally is get rid of the sugar.
Depression
There are this gut-brain connection and two things to consider with excess sugar consumption. One is that affects your hormones. When you get insulin spikes, so insulin is a hormone that really helps support your blood sugar, but what happens is, you have something in your body called insulin receptor sites. And if you consume too much sugar, you literally start to burn those receptor sites out to where now sugar stays in your bloodstream, and you have more of these spikes in blood sugar levels.
Well, one of the things that can be linked to depression clinically, and there are studies on this, is fatigue. If somebody is chronically fatigued or just gets tired, or you’re experiencing that crash, you can get moody, irritable, have a little anxiety, depression. That’s very common when you experience those glucose or sugar, spikes there in the body.
Added sugar aliases
Corn syrup
There’s high-fructose corn syrup, the other thing is just sugar in general. I think that’s obvious, but if something says sugar or cane sugar, staying away from that as well in most cases.
Nectar
Nectar, that can be different types of honey, the issue today is most honey is not real honey. In fact, 77% of honey you buy in the store has no pollen, no nutrients, it’s been highly pasteurized, so now it’s going to have an even harder effect on your blood sugar levels.
Malt syrup
Malt syrup, molasses, I’d even add some other things to here, brown rice sugar is another thing a lot of people will do is a lot of these syrups. Not just that, maple syrup, there’s another example, so different types of syrups, you’ll see here as well.
Coconut sugar and people may say, “Well, isn’t coconut sugar healthier or maple syrup?” Yes, they absolutely are, but you want to be careful with all sugar in general.
Overcome Sugar Addiction
Eat clean protein
Eat clean protein on a daily basis. This could be wild-caught fish, grass-fed beef, organic chicken and turkey, organic eggs, bone broth, or a protein powder that comes from bone broth. Those are some of the best foods to kick a sugar addiction, protein is going to help balance things out.
Indulge in fats
As we talked about, wild-caught salmon, olive oil, different types of nuts and seeds you can snack on, load up on the healthy fats every single day. Coconut milk products, coconut oil, indulge in healthy fats is key to kicking that sugar addiction.
Up your fiber
Fiber as well will help with balancing out the good bacteria within your colon, which can help fight sugar addiction. So again, more high-fiber foods, some of my favorites are berries, like raspberries, are very high in fiber. Green-leafy vegetables are high, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage, and cauliflower.
Avocados are actually not only high in healthy fat but also really high in fiber. So think, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, and fruit, or berries specifically, those are going to be your highest fiber foods to get on a daily basis.
Eat sour foods
Embrace the power of sour, whether its lemons, limes, grapefruits are great. Green apples, apple cider vinegar on your food, sauerkraut, doing anything that’s that sour in nature reduces sweet and sugar cravings.
And I would recommend this, if you want to get rid of sugar addiction, you want to eat a lot of sour and bitter foods, so sour and bitter help reduce those cravings for those sweet foods that so many people have here on a regular basis.
Switch to stevia
That’s green-leaf stevia, doing that in small amounts on a daily basis. Now I want to mention this, I don’t recommend doing stevia in high doses, like every meal, all day long, because your body is expecting something sweet. But doing it subtly, on occasion, I think stevia’s fine and good.
Consume manuka honey
Just about a loaded teaspoon at a time, and that’s the thing here, sweeteners are meant to be used sparingly, as it says in Proverbs in the Bible. Doing some sweeteners, like raw honey, really one of the most natural sweeteners out there, is fine in moderation for most people. Getting fruit is similar to honey, really, in terms of what you’re getting, or even using dates as a natural sweetener, dates can be a good sweetener.
So again, a little sweetness once a day or twice a day is fine, you just don’t want to go overboard. For most of us, we have so many carbs and so much sugar, that we are overloading the body, causing chronic inflammation that can lead to fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, leaky gut, depression, cancer, arthritis and chronic pain syndromes, and so many other chronic health conditions out there today.
Some Important References:
Is Sugar Bad for You? Here’s How It Destroys Your Body – by – Dr.Axe
Slideshow: The Truth About Sugar Addiction – by – WebMD
A Simple 3-Step Plan to Stop Sugar Cravings – by – Healthline
7 Scientifically proven steps to overcome sugar addiction – by – Makeyourworkout
Fact or fiction – is sugar addictive? – by – The Conversation
