Sugar consumption in America is totally out of control. In 1997 Americans devoured 7.3 billion pounds of candy, spent 23.1 billion dollars on candy and gum, and ate an average of 6 regular size candy bars per week. This costs $54 billion annually to the dental industry.
In 1915 the average sugar consumption was 15-20 pounds per person annually, today the average person consumes their body weight in sugar each year, in addition to over 20 pounds of corn syrup. When you consider how many people there are who don’t eat sugar it means that there are some people who are eating more than their body weight in sugar each year, that’s a lot of toxic sweet stuff.
The human body is not designed for such large amounts of sugars, vital organs are damaged as the body tries to compensate for the empty calories. Sugar has no fiber, minerals, protein, fat, or enzymes, your body must borrow from healthy cells to metabolize the incomplete food, borrowing calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium from other parts of the body, this can cause osteoporosis, tooth decay, and gum disease. It also makes the blood thick and sticky, which makes it harder for our bodies to absorb the nutrients it needs. Also so much sugar use increases the risk for diabetes, gallstones, and obesity, which have become an epidemic.
Dr. David Reuben stated, “White refined sugar is not food, it is a pure chemical extracted from plant sources, purer, in fact, than cocaine, which it resembles in many ways.” He went on to explain how 64 food elements are lost during the refining process of sugar.
The human body is designed to handle 2-4 teaspoons of sugar a day without problems, when one soda contains the equivalent of 11 teaspoons of sugar it is easy to see how are bodies simply cannot cope with the overwhelming amounts we put into it.
In the 1970’s so much research was found with the toxic effects of sugar that the food industry quickly jumped on the corn syrup bandwagon, which was cheaper, more accessible, and touted as being more natural, in fact, sugar and corn syrup are very close in composition, and they are both toxic. Robert Lustig, leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California – San Francisco states that sugar is a toxin, or poison, and calls corn syrup “the most demonized additive known to man.”
Sugar consumption has been linked also to heart disease, hypertension, and many common cancers. Many doctors state they should be in the same category as cigarettes and alcohol, legal substances that are killing us.
Cutting down on sugar is hard, and today I do have a headache, but the alternatives are so much worse. When I do add sugar back into my diet it will be armed with the knowledge of how much my body can handle, and how well I did without it. This is the only body I get, I would like to keep using it a while longer.
Sources: http://rense.com/general45/sguar.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
