The real life horror movie monster wreaking havoc on your insides
There’s a monster lurking inside your home. Slowly destroying you from within while you unknowingly go about your day. That monster is sugar. The product that Willy Wonka centred his entire business model around. This innocently sweet substance is responsible for countless health problems plaguing our society today.
Sugar exists in many different forms. Table sugar (the most recognizable version of sugar) is known as sucrose. Sucrose is a combination of two smaller types of sugar: glucose and fructose. And fructose is where we find most of our problem.
While glucose is used by the entire body, fructose can only be processed in the liver. If the liver doesn’t need as much fructose as you’re putting in, it turns into fat. However, since your body is a super highway of interconnected veins and arteries, these fats don’t stay in the liver. They seep into your bloodstream.
Excess fats in your blood, along with heightened blood sugar, can do a lot of damage. Together, they can block arteries, reduce the amount of fat that your body burns, and lead to resistance against insulin (the hormone responsible for dealing with blood sugar) and leptin (the hormone that tells you when you’re full). This can lead to health issues like hypertension, angina, diabetes, kidney disease, and obesity.
You might think that all these health problems only happen when you eat candy, but nope. Fruits also have fructose, but the thing is that fruits also have fibre and other nutrients. The fibre makes you full so you stop eating, giving your body time in between meals to process the sugar. However, candy and other sugary foods don’t contain any fibre, so your body never feels full and you feel the need to constantly eat those sugary foods.
I know this all sounds bleak, but sugar itself isn’t the problem. We need sugar to help fuel our cells; the problem is that we eat too much of it. According to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian consumes 110 grams of sugar a day. That’s the equivalent of shovelling 26 teaspoons of white sugar straight into your face hole.
On the surface, it may seem unbelievable that the average person consumes that much sugar. But it’s not so unbelievable when you realize that beverages make up a large chunk of this sugar intake, with 35 per cent of adult daily sugar coming from drinks like juice and pop.
And if you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t drink juice or pop, I must not be eating that much sugar,” think again. Sugar is added to almost every packaged food, including sauces, cereal, yogurt — the list goes on. According to a study by Rachel B. Acton at the University of Waterloo, 66 per cent of packaged food contains at least one gram of added sugar per serving.
If all this information has made you want to cut out added sugar, I must warn you that it’s a little more complicated than just choosing foods with no added sugar and only drinking water.
First, after the word got out that sugar isn’t great for you, companies decided to take some liberties with how they refer to added sugars. According to the University of Waterloo research, the word sugar is the most common term used for showing added sugar in ingredients lists on food packaging. However, also listed are terms like fruit juice concentrate, molasses, sucrose (the scientific name for white sugar), and glucose-fructose (another way of saying sucrose).
By breaking down added sugar into these categories, companies hide behind a mask of confusing jargon the average consumer might not understand and may mistake for a healthier version of sugar.
The second reason it’s hard to avoid sugar is because your brain might not let you. Sugar is addictive. When you eat sugar, your brain releases a chemical called dopamine. This rush of dopamine lights up the pathways in your brain responsible for making you feel happy. This euphoria-inducing pathway that dopamine stimulates is similar to the one activated when someone does drugs like cocaine or inhales nicotine.
After a while, your brain starts to build a resistance to dopamine if you eat too much sugar because dopamine is constantly released. When that happens, you need to eat more sugar to keep your brain at the same level of happy. That is how addiction forms. And if you don’t get your sugar fix, you can experience withdrawal systems.
Researchers at John Carroll University showed evidence of these withdrawal systems in rats who were fed a high sugar diet. Once sugar was removed from their diet, the rats started to act anxious, their teeth chattered, their tiny furry bodies shook, and their core body temperatures dropped. These withdrawal symptoms aren’t exclusive to rats; sugar withdrawal side effects have also been documented in humans.
So, next time you’re thinking of having a pop or eating that strawberry yogurt, stop and think about the fate of that sugar in your body. Because to me, the idea of willingly poisoning myself is a lot scarier than any monster that may be hiding under the bed.
Illustration by George Longley