Harmful Effects of white sugar

Added sugar is the single worst ingredient in the modern diet.It can have harmful effects on our body system and contribute to all sorts of diseases.

A) It Contains No Essential Nutrients and is Bad For the Teeth

You’ve probably heard this a million times before… but it’s worth repeating. Added sugars (like sucrose and high fructose corn syrup) contain a whole bunch of calories with NO essential nutrients.

For this reason, they are called “empty” calories  There are no proteins, essential fats, vitamins or minerals in sugar… just pure energy. When people eat up to 10-20% 

b). Added Sugar is High in Fructose, Which Can Overload Your Liver

To understand what is so bad about sugar, you need to understand what it is made of.

Before sugar enters the bloodstream from the digestive tract, it is broken down into two simple sugars… glucose and fructose. 

Glucose is found in every living cell. If we don’t get it from the diet, our bodies produce it. 

Fructose is different. Our bodies do not produce it in any significant amount and there is no physiological need for it.  The thing with fructose is that it can only be metabolized by the liver in any significant amounts.

This is not a problem if we eat a little bit (such as from fruit) or we just finished an exercise session. In this case, the fructose will be turned into glycogen and stored in the liver until we need it

.However, if the liver is full of glycogen (much more common), eating a lot of fructose overloads the liver, forcing it to turn the fructose into fat.When repeatedly eating large amounts of sugar, this process can lead to fatty liver and all sorts of serious problems. Keep in mind that all of this does NOT apply to fruit. It is almost impossible to overeat fructose by eating fruit.

 For people who are inactive and eat a Western diet, large amounts of fructose from added sugars get turned into fat in the liver.  Overloading The Liver With Fructose Can Cause Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Insulin is a very important hormone in the body.It allows glucose (blood sugar) to enter cells from the bloodstream and tells the cells to start burning glucose instead of fat.

Having too much glucose in the blood is highly toxic and one of the reasons for complications of diabetes, like blindness. One feature of the metabolic dysfunction that is caused by the Western diet, is that insulin stops working as it should. The cells become “resistant” to it.

This is also known as insulin resistance, which is believed to be a leading driver of many diseases… including metabolic syndrome, obesity, cardiovascular disease and especially type II diabetes 

Many studies show that sugar consumption is associated with insulin resistance, especially when it is consumed in large amounts

source: authoritynutrition.com