Obesity

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• Binge Eating and Side Effects – Sugar can trigger binge eating which can cause indigestion, depression, mood swings, headache or migraine, fatigue or chronic tiredness, worsened PMS symptoms, anxiety, irritability, stress and panic attacks.
• Gut Lining – Sugar can penetrate the gut lining more readily than anything else and cause havoc with your body. It creates an imbalance of the flora that lives in the digestive tract which compromises the immune system.
• Ageing and Skin – Rapid rise in blood sugar, mainly due to sugar-rich foods, leads to inflammation, which is the basis of ageing. Also, this causes sugar to attach itself to collagen which makes the skin stiff and inflexible. Losing this elastic resilience of the skin produces deep wrinkles and makes one look old. Furthermore, the refined sugar has no nutritional value and the body needs to raise its own mineral reserves – including important skin nutrients such as chromium and zinc – to digest it. Dietary sugars have been observed to mess with the symmetry of the skin cells, which leads to increased folding, causing wrinkles and general ageing of the skin.
• Decreased Athletic Performance – High levels of sugar significantly increase blood serum saturated fatty acids, which depresses the oxygen transport system. This delays the delivery of oxygen to the muscle cells and consequently reduces athletic performance.
• Hyperactivity – Excessive intake of sugar or sweet foods, giving immediate boost to the energy level, can cause hyperactivity in about 50% of children. No wonder, children like colas which have abundant supply of sugars in them!
• Other Implications – To scare you even more, excessive sugar consumption has been implicated in gallstones, arthritis, circulatory diseases including asthma, haemorrhoids, varicose veins and even contributing to Alzheimer’s disease.

 

How Much Sugar to Eat?

198.   A wide range of moderate sugar intake is compatible with a balanced diet and sugar must be seen as less important source of carbohydrates. However, there is no need to eat sugar to obtain all the glucose the brain and muscles need. Complex carbohydrate wholegrain foods such as whole meal bread / chapattis, brown rice, legumes, pulses and potatoes will achieve this, while also providing protein, vitamins, minerals, enzymes and dietary fibre. Nutritious alternatives to surgery snacks include fresh and dried fruits, vegetables like carrot and low-fat dairy products. Honey, although another, but healthy sugar can be sometimes used as an alternative to refined sugar.