Refined Sugar: The Corporate Carbohydrate Part 3

Healthy Sugar

Natural unrefined raw sugar is not the assassin its bizarro counterpart bleached white refined sugar is. In fact it’s a source of minerals including Phosphorus, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, and Potassium. Because the body can extract healthy contents in natural unrefined sugar, it can go through a healthy digestive process, and avoid corrupting the body’s organs and weakening the immune system.

Continuously adding sugar or sweeteners to your food is a bad idea, but there is a time and place for a little extra sugar. When you are faced with that appropriate time, make sure to use unrefined raw sugar. Honey in its purist form is also a healthier sugar source than refined white sugar.

Just because raw sugar is darker, doesn’t mean traditional brown sugar is raw or healthy. Brown sugar is the same as white refined sugar, just with a truckload of molasses in it. Sorry to disappoint.

Glucose, the Brain Sugar

Glucose is the energy source for our most important organ, the brain. Although the brain is far from our largest muscle or organ, it consumes roughly 20% of our total energy. It is vital that we give our brain the kind of energy it needs to function, as our every thought and movement depends on it.

The brain depends on the bloodstream to keep a constant supply of glucose, as it is the fuel that keeps the brain constantly working. The best source of glucose for the brain is found in complex carbohydrates including fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains.

Complex carbohydrates provide time released circulation of glucose to the brain. However, refined sugar does the exact opposite, leading to countless problems in our cognitive thinking ability and emotional state. Refined sugar actually deprives the brain of the glucose that it uses for healthy functioning. It impairs the brains ability to concentrate, problem solve, remember, learn (any cognitive skill), as mental activity requires a great deal of energy. This is a problem facing our youth, as nutritional options provided to them at home and away often cause behavioral and emotional disturbances, not to mention sugar addictions they will fight for the rest of their lives. On a side note, it would be interesting to see how much money is being put in nutritional health education for children and adults with ADD and ADHD vs. the amount of money spent on pharmaceutical medications for these conditions.

Sugar in Fruits

Fruit is the best way to get the natural sugar your body craves and benefits from. The options and flavors of the world’s fruits are astounding, and many of them are already packed with the vitamins and nutrients our bodies need to keep the immune system running effectively.
Because fruit is a food and not a liquid, the body will take more time to extract the vitamins and nutrients needed, keeping it from entering the blood stream too quickly as it often does with juice. Whole fruits are also a natural source of fiber. The fiber allows for a longer digestive process, and keeps the insulin from removing the sugar from the fruits to quickly.

Sugar in Juice

Though fruit juice has the vitamins and nutrients of a fruit, it lacks the fiber whole fruits provide. Since juice comes in liquid form, the sugar enters into our bloodstreams much faster. Unless our blood sugar is low, this isn’t such a great thing. The fiber found in fruit “blunts” or slows down the affect of insulin, thus allowing our bodies more time to appropriately utilize the glucose. With fruit juices the body has to secrete more insulin to bring blood sugar levels back to normal, and if you remember the job of insulin, the excess sugar is often stored as fat.

It’s a bad idea to drink a lot of juice with a meal heavy in refined carbohydrates (the refined carbohydrates are bad enough in the first place), because in the end the body will have to produce far too much insulin to remove the sugar, only to have to store it as fat.

Mixing any sugar based liquid (wine, fruit juice, soda) with foods high in fat (red meat, cheese, exc.) isn’t wise. It’s easier for fat to enter the bloodstream with the sugar before it goes through it’s natural digestive process. This can lead to increased risk of artery clogging, higher cholesterol levels, and hypertension (high blood pressure).

The healthiest time for fruit juice is after a good rigorous workout when blood sugar is low and needs to be replenished. This will help the body to restore its energy levels. Unless your blood sugar is really low, I would recommend eating some fruit to get the added fiber.

More Hidden Sugar

The funny thing about sugar is all the ways corporations have to hide it. William Duftey, author of “The Sugar Blues” writes, “The use of the word carbohydrate to describe sugar is deliberately misleading,” and I agree. Refined white sugar is not a carbohydrate, it’s a man made poison that’s cheap, can keep a long unnatural shelf life, and makes addicts out of unsuspecting consumers.

Sugar is added to a limitless list of foods including spaghetti sauce, salad dressings, ice cream, soups, cereals, ketchup, and almost all processed foods. It’s a cheap way for food corporations to get us to enjoy their product, and ultimately become physically dependent on the content of the products.

Sugar is even put in certain brands of cigarettes and cigars. What I find more ridiculous, is that companies don’t have to provide the use of sugar with their smoking products. This is obviously a sinister trick employed to addict youngsters who might not have otherwise liked a harsher tasting natural cigarette. After a certain point it doesn’t matter if they like the taste or not, their already addicted.

Why Sugar’s a drug

In the online dictionary by Farlex, one of the definitions for drug is, “a chemical substance, such as a narcotic or hallucinogen that affects the central nervous system, causing changes in behavior and often addiction.” Hmmm, doesn’t this sound a little to much like refined sugar?

Refined sugar and flour stimulate the transmission of neurotransmitters in the brain including dopamine (associated with the brains pleasure system), serotonin (associated with regulation of mood), and norepinephrine (associated with the body’s stress response). The body and the brain eventually become dependent on sugar to help get the fix needed to continue the transmission of these neurotransmitters. Without the sugar, the body will go through withdrawals effecting things like mood, energy, sleep, etc. Refined sugar sends our bodies through emotional and psychological highs and lows. Oddly enough most people end up trying to fight back with more refined sugar. Just as drugs warp the body and brain, so does refined sugar.

What about Artificial Sweeteners?

There is only one word to describe artificial sweeteners, dangerous. I could list several to avoid, but that would be as if I were promoting the others in some morbid way. Artificial sweeteners typically come out to rave reviews, to only find that after a few years on the market they can cause cancer, develop tumors, destroy the immune system, cause dizziness, and even bring about hallucinations. Just thinking about artificial sweeteners frustrates me to no end.

An artificial sweetener is simply a group of synthetic chemicals meant to fool our taste buds into thinking its sugar. How on God’s green earth, does anyone think that this could possibly be non-poisonous to our body’s? Artificial sweeteners are simply another destructive way for corporate food companies to get rich off addicting their consumers to yet another manufactured toxin.

Where to Go from Here

Lets be honest, cutting sugar completely out of your diet is about as realistic as seeing a flock of pigs flying across the sky. Just like we can have a healthy relationship with fat, we can have a healthy relationship with sugar. Here’s what we need to do to build that relationship.

• Increase our complex carbohydrate intake (Fruits, vegetables, legumes (beans), whole wheat pasta, brown rice, whole grain bread)
• Frequently eat low-fat healthy organic proteins (poultry, fish, beans, unsalted nuts)
• Eat healthy fats (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated)
• Drink water throughout the day to help circulate vitamins and nutrients from healthy foods
• Avoid as many processed foods as possible
• Stay active in a variety of ways (walking, jogging, circuit training, etc.)
• Know the content of your food before you eat it

Only through our health can we live truly free. By remaining un-educated about what we put in our bodies, we take away the freedom of our people by asking them to be responsible for us when we become unnecessarily sick. This is one of the great tests of our time. My belief is that hundreds of years from now, history will look back at this as a time when humanity struggled with sickness because of overconsumption of addictive foods. They will speak in classrooms of the few who became rich, and the many that became sick.

One day a nutritionally sound humanity will step beyond this barrier. The goal for each of us today, is to be the men and women that will lead America to a free and healthy future. As Americans we have the freedom of choice, its time we start making the right ones.