If you love cookies, pies, and ice cream, this post might not be all that pleasant to read. Regardless, I still have to break it to you: sugar is bad news. According to highly esteemed UC San Francisco researcher Robert Lustig, sugar can be very bad for us. Just how bad? We're talking toxic. According to Lustig's and other researchers' work, on a purely calorie for calories basis, there are no other foods that make us fatter quicker than sugar. Indeed, this simple carbohydrate has been so refined that it has little nutritional value except for the huge amount of energy it contains. Read the list below to see what sugar is pure, white, and deadly.
Empty Calories
In its natural form, sugar is quite healthy actually. Why? It is wrapped in a lot of fiber. You really have to expend a lot of effort just to get at the sugar that is naturally present in nature. To take the example of sugar cane, you have to eat a lot of fiber to get to the sugar in the cane. Natural sugar cane is essentially a sweet stick. Now, thanks to technology, we get the sugar and none of the fiber. As a result, we get empty calories that just make us fat.
Body stores sugar energy into fat
Your body burns sugar for energy. That's the good news. If you have a normal metabolic rate and you don't eat too much sugar, your metabolism will burn off the sugar in your system for energy. The problem is when you start eating too much sugar in popular forms like high-fructose corn syrup.
Fructose builds up in the blood and your body's normal messaging system of burning fructose and telling your brain to stop consuming food is short-circuited. As a result, you keep eating and sugar levels continue to build in your blood. Given its calorie-packed constitution, sugar boosts the amount of energy you consume. While some of this energy is burned off and others are passed through as waste, a large chunk is converted by your body into stored energy. In other words, it gets turned into fat. It is no wonder there is a huge obesity explosion in the United States.
Sugar is everywhere
While cane sugar tends to be relatively expensive, high-fructose corn syrup is abundant due to America's high corn yields. This has led to a flood of cheap fructose sweeteners in the market and many products are packed with high-fructose corn syrup. Due to this abundance, Americans' collective calorie intake keep spiking up.
