A Question About Sugar...

[DreamBliss]

So I just watched this on Amazon Prime (free there for now):
https://youtu.be/1HI_woehm0Q

 

Essentially what this video says is that the sugar in our foods is at the heart of the obesity epidemic. There is a LOT more than that, but that is the gist. 4 grams of sugar is 1 teaspoon. The World Health Organization has these recommendations:

https://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/guidelines/sugars_intake/en/

 

I am not sure if this is the altered version (at the demand of the US government and the food/drink industry.) What I recall is the daily recommended dose is no more than 12 grams, I think.

 

I am willing to test this. Before I tried being a vegetarian, during and after I have drank a LOT of pop. Going vegetarian is supposed to make you loose weight. I lost very little. Since pop is one of the biggest sources of sugar in my diet, followed by deserts, eliminating it for a period of 1 month to start, going to perhaps 3 months, should have some interesting results.

 

So I am intending that, as of June 10th, I am not drinking any more sweetened beverages. This includes pop, Vitamin water, tea, Odwalla, fruit juices, etc. Only things that are unsweetened, having no added sugar, will be drunk. For the record other sources of high concentrations of sugar are ketchup (Haines natural ketchup has 1 teaspoon or 4 grams of sugar PER TABLESPOON) and peanut butter (sugar is used as a filler.)

 

Question for those of you here more food conscious than myself... According to this video, we can eat fruits and the natural sugar in the fruit burns slower (doesn't go directly to our liver) because of its fiber. So if I were to add some unsweetened, vegetarian fiber to my diet for each meal, would that offset any sugar I intake?

 

I may have more to say on this later.

Edited May 29, 2019 by DreamBliss

[Kar3n]

I'm not sure I fully understand your question, but I'll take a stab at it..

 

Refined sugar is likely want the film was referring to. Fruits and vegetables are not considered "sugar" they are complex carbohydrates.

 

Fiber offsets carbs (simple and complex) because it slows digestion to allow sugar to be released into the blood stream over time, but after digestion sugar that is not used to fuel the body will be stored in fat cells.

 

It is my take that fiber only affects natural sugars and not refined. It has to do with how they are broken down by the body.

 

Hope that helps.

[silent thunder]

For me, when I consider that in the entire history of human life to this point, processed foods, particularly factory refined sugar is a very recent addition to our daily diet, it brings me pause.

 

My body which is a direct adaptation and expression of nature, still seems to be adjusting to the intense effects of refined, processed sugar and how to assimilate it when consumed in even small quantities.  Our pancreas has a new work load in its history regarding insulin production and the breakdown of processed sugar in the bloodstream in the quantities found in American foods.

 

Processed foods are a new source of food in terms of how our bodies operate in nature, and it seems to me; our bodies have not yet developed strong assimilation pathways for it, particularly in the quantities it is present in our food, if we do not take great care in looking at what is present in the food we consume.

 

It was staggering to me, when I began really looking, just how many sources of refined sugar are present in seemingly non-sweet foods.

 

Our bodies are decaying every day.  Decay in the gut is what fuels the process of life that i use now to type and think here and to replace the 20 million blood cells created each night while I sleep, and the skin cells being repaired where I banged my knee.  Those cells are replaced solely with the food I consume. 

 

I remember trying to impress upon my toddler son the importance of what we choose to eat.  I built a man out of legos and handed it to him.  As I explained how we eat food each day to replace the pieces of us that decay, I would take a piece off of the lego man and hand it to back to him, and then offer him a lego piece of a different color to replace it with.  Eventually the lego man looked the same shape but was made entirely of different legos. 

 

As we talked,  eventually instead of offering him a lego to replace a missing piece with, I offered him a cheeto and told him to repair the lego man with this...  He stared at me ... appropriately and said "that won't work dad"... "this is your body's response when you give it processed foods instead of natural foods."  I replied.

 

Your body can only replenish itself from what you eat.  Your body is comprised entirely of what you put into it.  Give yourself good legos.

 

To this day from time to time, while grocery shopping with me, as we walk along the end caps he will occasionally look down an aisle and say, 'all bright colors and boxes, no real food down that aisle." 

[joeblast]

This would be a good time to dig up some of taomeow's posts on the subject

[idquest]

16 hours ago, Kar3n said:

I'm not sure I fully understand your question, but I'll take a stab at it..

 

Refined sugar is likely want the film was referring to. Fruits and vegetables are not considered "sugar" they are complex carbohydrates.

 

Fiber offsets carbs (simple and complex) because it slows digestion to allow sugar to be released into the blood stream over time, but after digestion sugar that is not used to fuel the body will be stored in fat cells.

 

It is my take that fiber only affects natural sugars and not refined. It has to do with how they are broken down by the body.

 

Hope that helps.

 

I don't agree that fruits are not sugar. This is my opinion based on my personal meal consumption statistics over several decades.

 

I have some medical condition which results in some inflammation when I consume more than certain amount of 'sugary' food. This condition certainly responds to the processed sugars. But in the same fashion it responds to the sugary fruits especially such as mango, nectarine and peaches (from greenhouse). With this, I have my own benchmarks for myself as to how much 'sugary' food (including fruits) I can eat so that my condition does not flare up.

 

On a slightly side note, modern and highly (genetically)modified fruits have nothing to do with the fruits even from 50 years ago. This could be the reason. Everybody makes their own judgement, but when an apple is a size of a small watermelon and a nectarine contains more fructose that a bucket of peaches from 100 year old, I'm not sure we can call those chemical  implements  fruits any more.

[joeblast]

^nuance such as that was why I mentioned a forum search , I know she wrote a bunch about it, but while I'll point over there, I cant quite be arsed to pick the shovel up for ye

[rideforever]

Yeah sugar is massive.  But the truth is hidden as per normal.

 

- Sugar is addictive, over the years food manufacturers and supermarkets noticed that processed food with sugar in it sold more.   And so they put more sugar in it, and put sugar in other foods as well.   And it sold more.   Today 80% of supermarket processed food has sugar in it.  Why ?  Because it sells more.   But of course eating huge amounts of sugar is not normal, but we are forced to.

 

- Soil degradation.  Because of intensive farmer (pummelling the soil to make profit sometimes have 2 harvests a year instead of 1), the soils have lost minerals and become weak, and they make bad crops.   The wheat that grows on this soil is not healthy.   So farmers pour in chemicals to make it grow.   Some minerals like phosphorous are degenerated by 70% over 40 years.   

Because of this the food doesn't taste like much ... it tastes bland, because the crops taste bland because the soil is bland.

And to make the food taste okay ... they pour sugar into the food, otherwise it wouldn't taste good.

 

- Low fat.  Low fat yogurts for instance have huge amounts of sugar in them and will make you ill.   A lot of health food has sugar, sometimes 3 types of sugar in the same packet ... like high glucose frustrose corn syrup, agave syrup, dextrose ... they have different words but is all bad.

 

- Best sugar comes from vegetables.

- Fibre.   You don't need fibre.   Just eat normally.

- Fat.  Is quite good for you don't fear it.

 

Basically cook everything yourself, don't buy junk, and live like people used to do in the past.

Today everyone from supermarkets to doctors to the Government are more or less your enemy.

 

- Experiments on mice : if you have mice in a cage and you give the two feed bottles one with sugar and one without, the mice always drink from the sugar bottle.

If you up the ante, and electrocute the mice when they drink from the sugar bottle .... they still drink from the sugar bottle and accept being electrocuted each time.

That is how addictive sugar is; and that is why they make so much profit from it.

 

Boom.

[DreamBliss]

Thank you, everyone, for your replies.

 

I am limited, monetarily, in what I can eat, and that will likely soon get even worse. I was hoping that if I found some sort of fiber thing - like maybe a powder I could add to water - it would help my body to assimilate the sugar from what I eat slower. The same way that the sugar in a fruit is digested more slowly because of the fiber in it - at least according to that video. But it seems as if refined sugar can't process with fiber or something?

 

I am trying to get things that have no sugar added, and when I want some sweetness, use a little stevia powder. But it looks like I should just try, somehow, to wean myself away from the need for all sweets. I'm just not sure I can do that. I was hoping just getting rid of the sugary drinks would be enough.

[thelerner]

Its my understanding that fiber eaten at the same meal tends to slow down the sugar hit, so that it enters the blood stream slower, so the pancreas and other organs can take there time shuffling it where it belongs instead of being overloaded.  Fruit has alot of sugar, but its fiber naturally slows the release and its not as fast acting sugar as some.

[joeblast]

cookies get funny when you add too much sugar.  too much of any ingredient, really

 

Edited June 4, 2019 by joeblast