Sugar is wrong for the body, but the habit is difficult to
break. If you’re among those having problems with cutting back on the sweet
stuff, this is an extra motivation to help you out: Recent researches has
confirmed that people who reduced their intake of sugar had better health is
just two weeks.
For the scientific review, which was published in The
Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, scientists analyzed previous
research on sugar intake, weight, and health, and
found a link between eating a lot of sugar (especially fructose) and an
increased risk of weight gain. They also discovered that having overweight
patients lower their intake of fructose — high-fructose corn syrup in
particular— helped lower a person’s risk of developing obesity, fatty
liver disease, and type 2 diabetes.
Fructose is the catalyst that boosts the conversion of sugar
to fat, the scientists highlighted that it can lead to many health
complications. As a result, they recommend that doctors counsel patients who
have excess weight to cut down on sugar intake, rather than just exercise.
High fructose corn syrup (fructose corn syrup because it
converts to fat up to 18.9 times faster than glucose) — which is found in 75
percent of packaged foods and drinks — flips on the metabolic pathways that
converts it to fat, where it’s stored in the body, causing weight gain,
the researchers said. It also tricks the brain into thinking that the body is
starving and makes people less inclined to exercise.
On the positive side, people in the review who cut out high
fructose corn syrup became healthier without dieting or counting calories.
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When people eat too much sugar, it causes a spike in insulin
levels, Gina Keatley,
a certified dietitian nutritionist practicing in New York City, tells Yahoo
Beauty. “Insulin helps the body to process and store energy for current
and future use,” she explains. “But after decades of these spikes, cells all
over the body become nonreactive to the insulin, which can cause high blood sugar,
kidney failure, and diabetes.”
A high sugar intake also promotes chronic inflammation
inside the body, which is linked to many diseases, including heart disease and
cancer, Beth
Warren — a registered dietitian, founder of Beth
Warren Nutrition, and author of Living a Real Life With Real Food — tells
Yahoo Beauty. It can even impact your central nervous system — specifically
your brain’s ability to control your appetite — Deena
Adimoolam, M.D., assistant professor of medicine, endocrinology,
diabetes, and bone disease at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai,
tells Yahoo Beauty.
Unfortunately, you probably already eat too much sugar.
Julie Upton, registered dietitian and co-founder of the nutrition website Appetite for Health, tells
Yahoo Beauty that most Americans eat two to three times as much added sugar than
the American Heart Association recommends, which is no
more than six teaspoons a day for women and nine teaspoons a day for men.
While high fructose corn syrup in particular was flagged,
Keatley says your body can’t really tell the difference between fructose, table
sugar, and even honey. “If you’re looking to cut back, it can be from all
sources,” she says.
If you know you eat too much sugar, there are a few things
you can do to scale back. Adimoolam recommends avoiding processed foods
whenever possible (they tend to be sugar traps) and choosing foods with natural
forms of sugar, such as fruit, whenever you can.
A sugar substitute is a food additive that provides a sweet
taste like that of sugar while containing significantly less food energy. Some
sugar substitutes are produced by nature, and others produced synthetically.
Bananas, dates, prunes, or applesauce can be used as sweeteners in baked goods.
It also might help to slowly cut back on the amount of sugar
you add to things like coffee to give your taste buds time to catch up, Warren
suggests. Keatley agrees. “Slow and steady looks to be best for people,” she
says.
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