Sugar as a Source of Disease

Cryptogon

Here’s an excerpt from an email to my sister:

As for us being weird by American standards: We’re weird by NZ standards too. For example, we go to almost no birthday parties for other children because people are drinking Pepsi and eating baked atrocities with sprinkles on top. MSG sausages, etc.

One of Owen’s friends had her birthday party and Becky decided to try to go.

We did ok until the cake came out (it was bright green with some sort of candy dots on top) and Becky just grabbed everything and we fled like Mexicans on the freeway signs in San Diego.

One of our other friends (also homeschooling) was there with her children and they eat like we do. She also immediately packed up and took off when she saw that cake.

haha

Besides avoiding refined sugar, the fact that we don’t eat bread or pasta is too much to try to explain to people. It’s easier to just stay home.

Via: Medical Xpress:

Is sugar making us sick? A team of scientists at the University of California in San Francisco believes so, and they’re doing something about it. They launched an initiative to bring information on food and drink and added sugar to the public by reviewing more than 8,000 scientific papers that show a strong link between the consumption of added sugar and chronic diseases.

The common belief until now was that sugar just makes us fat, but it’s become clear through research that it’s making us sick. For example, there’s the rise in fatty-liver disease, the emergence of Type 2 diabetes as an epidemic in children and the dramatic increase in metabolic disorders.

…

Added sugars, Schmidt said, are sugars that don’t occur naturally in foods.They are found in 74 percent of all packaged foods, have 61 names and often are difficult to decipher on food labels. Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires food companies to list ingredients on packaging, the suggested daily values of natural and added sugars can’t be found.

The FDA is considering a proposal to require food manufacturers to list information on sugars in the same way they do for fats, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates and protein. But because so much added sugar is dumped into so many products, one average American breakfast of cereal would likely exceed a reasonable daily limit.

“SugarScience shows that a calorie is not a calorie but rather that the source of a calorie determines how it’s metabolized,” said pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, a member of the SugarScience team and the author of “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease.” Lustig said that more than half of the U.S. population is sick with metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors for chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and liver disease that are directly related to the excessive consumption of added sugars in the Western diet.

More: SugarScience

 

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