To understand the effects of sugar, I need to explain a little about your hormones first.

How Sugar is Hiding Your 6 Pack!

Insulin is a hormone released by the pancreas when sugar enters the blood stream. It is responsible for removing the sugar from your blood and taking it to the liver, so that the liver can convert the sugar to fat. When insulin is present in the blood stream, fat stops being used as an energy source! If the sugar remains in your bloodstream, it becomes toxic; hence the rotting of fingers and toes in untreated Diabetes patients, which need to be amputated.

When your liver converts the sugar to fat, in most cases it is getting sugar so frequently it does not have enough time to transport the fat to another part of the body and therefore stores it around the liver. This leads to the famous alcoholic’s disease, Fatty Liver Disease or Cirrhosis of the Liver, and Visceral fat that lays around the organs in your abdominal cavity, hence the ‘pot belly’ look. This fat can only be reduced with good nutrition; no amount of exercise will burn visceral fat!

E.g. of foods with Fructose – Fruit, Cereals, Soft Drinks, Fruit Juice Drinks, Alcoholic Beverages, yogurts, almost all processed foods including ham, Bread, Pastries, and much, much more!!

Summary – when you  eat sugar, you trigger insulin, insulin stops you from burning fat! Fat stored in the abdominal cavity cannot be burnt with exercise, so whilst you are still consuming sugar, you will not be able to reduce the ‘pot belly’.

The more sugar you consume, the more insulin you require to remove the sugar from your blood stream as your body becomes ‘insulin resistant’. It’s like a cocaine addict, after a while, they need more cocaine to get the same level of buzz. This is what leads to Diabetes Type II.

Your body can only cope with between  3.3-7gm of sugar in your blood stream at any given time. So if you check the ingredients on the back of any packet and it tells you that it contains more than that, know you are in trouble!

Summary – the more sugar you consume the higher your chances of developing Diabetes Type II

As soon as fructose sugar enters the blood stream it also triggers the Ghrelin hormone which tells our body that it is hungry, rather than the Leptin hormone that tells your body that you are full!!! So the more sugar you consume, the more food you will consume as a result of constantly feeling hungry!

Summary – the more you eat, the more you will want to eat, and therefore gain weight!

Food that is labeled ‘low fat’ or ‘diet’ is usually drowning in sugar to add the flavor that was removed with the fat! So in actual fact it is not low fat after all! In fact you are copping double the fat because a)what you eat will convert to stored fat and b)you will want to eat more because it triggers the Ghrelin hormone and therefore you will consume excess calories that will also increase your stored fat!

Summary – ‘low fat’ or ‘diet food’ is making you fatter!

Sugar triggers the Opioid receptors in the brain, your brain then release Dopermine, which give you that ‘good feel’ feeling. Your body becomes accustomed to sugar and so causes withdrawal symptoms when you stop eating it, similar to a drug addict stopping drugs. Examples of the withdrawal symptoms include shakes, sweats, nausea, irritation, inability to sleep and much, much more! Sugar also has the same biochemical structure as ethanol (alcohol) and therefore effects the body in the same way as alcohol does!

Summary – sugar has the same effect as drugs and alcohol for our brain!

Short Facts:

• Sugar feeds cancer!
• Sugar leads to high cholesterol!
• Sugar has been linked to Heart Disease!
• Baby formula contains sugar so we are creating infant addicts!
• Drinking 1 375ml of soft drink per day, increases your body weight by 7.07kg per year!
• Excess sugar of any sort leads to medical issues!

Terri Batsakis