Europe Education

You’ve heard your Mum and your Gran bang on about it for all your days,

Now not all sugar is bad for you, natural sugars are fundamental for part of a healthy diet. This article will touch on the adverse effects of added sugar to your foods, and why you should try and avoid them.

No Essential Nutrients

Added sugars such as sucrose and high fructose corn syrup contain a lot of empty calories with no essential nutrients, proteins, essential fats, vitamins or minerals. This is essentially just pure energy, but it’s not natural and not good for you, people who eat 10-20% of their calories through sugar can develop nutrient deficiencies.

Bad for Your Teeth

Sugar creates bad bacteria in your mouth which can lead to plaque, gum disease and even tooth loss – even with brushing.

The Stepping Stone to Diabetes

Fructose is a harmful sugar left remaining when it gets broken down in the body, this along with glucose are the two simple sugars that make up the sugar we consume. The difference is that our bodies make glucose naturally, whereas fructose is not.

Fructose gets turned into fat in the liver. This can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder (NAFLD) and this has strong association with metabolic diabetes, as eating a lot of sugar can cause resistance in a person’s natural insulin hormone.

Can Give You Cancer

Many scientists believe that having constantly elevated levels of insulin, which is a direct consequence of eating a lot of sugar, is linked to causing cancer. This is because insulin is one of the key hormones that cause this sort of growth.
As well as this, the metabolic problems associated with sugar consumption are known to cause inflammation which is another potential cause of cancer.

Highly Addictive

Sugar causes dopamine to be released into the reward centre of the brain – a similar effect to a person who is abusing hard drugs.

Many different types of junk food can cause an extreme dopamine release; a lot more than we experience with normal foods. This can cause people to get addicted to highly sugary foods.

Contributing Factor to Obesity

Linking back in with sugars addictive properties, it can cause people to lose control over their eating habits and this can cause people gain weight at alarming rates. Studies have shown that the link between sugar consumption and obesity have strong statistical association.

Raises Cholesterol

Heart disease is the number one killer in the world and for many decades now people have blamed saturated fats for the cause of heart disease and raised cholesterol. However, new studies are beginning to show that saturated fat is harmless and that it’s sugar that we should be worried about. This would be due to fructose’s harmful effects on the metabolism.

The term ‘everything in moderation’ is essential when it comes to health, especially around sugar.