Healthy Bites

3/ Sugar: stripping away the sweet coating…

Procrastination has had me twiddling my thumbs, trying to tackle the topic of sugar. Ok, maybe less procrastination, and more trying to get past what seems like a daunting amount of information to distill into a concise morsel that suits the style of this newsletter.. So bear with me: this might be a longer than usual read.

The last few years have certainly shown us the face of complete and utter polarization. The assorted “ministries of truth” insist that it’s their way or the highway, and all dissenters are de-platformed, cancelled, and otherwise relegated to the “fringe minority”… Don’t worry - we are not nearly so “fringe” , and are moving ever away from being a minority. However, this black and white view is never a sane approach. When someone asks about whether sugar is good or bad, the response needs to be more nuanced.

Let’s start with an ugly historical truth. The entire business of sugar was built on slave labour. England’s sugar and shipping industry came into being by enslaving people from Africa, shipping them off to plantations, and creating a lucrative new market. Initially it was only the wealthy aristocrats who had their teeth turn black from the sugar-induced decay, but supply & demand being what it was, sugar soon became more available to the public. Aside from rotting teeth, it’s difficult to ascertain what other health impacts sugar had back in those days.

If we look to the 1920’s-1970’s, North America was certainly consuming sugar in the form of sweets, ice cream and just spooned straight into beverages, but if you observe what the populations looked like, people were generally quite fit and trim. So what changed?

Ancel Keys promoted his “dietary fat=heart attack” theory in the late 1950’s, and sentenced generations of people to slow death via T2D and other metabolic disorders. Reducing or eliminating fat from foods meant replacing that loss of flavour & calories with something else - usually sugar. As most packaged foods started following the “low fat” trend, their sugar content kept rising. Thereby not only bombarding our bodies with higher & higher amounts of sugar, but also conditioning our tastebuds to desire sweeter & sweeter flavours. The constant barrage of sugar into our systems led to the development of insulin resistance, obesity and T2D. In addition to these diseases, many researchers take the position that most cancers are also a result of metabolic dysfunction. And because our tastebuds had been conditioned for sweeter tastes, pretty soon every packaged food was stuffed with sugar. The advent of high fructose corn syrup made it easier for manufacturers to sweeten their products, and fructose (in the form of HFCS) promotes an even more dangerous metabolic cascade.

So is sugar bad for you? If you are obese or T2D, you should probably avoid it completely. If you are a highly conditioned power lifter, then consuming something with a bit of sugar after a workout is likely going to refill glycogen in your muscles, rather than contribute to metabolic disease. But sitting in a movie theatre, chugging that supersized cola isn’t doing your body any favours, regardless of your health status.

What about fructose from fruits? It depends. You can get a huge bang for your nutritional buck by consuming half a cup of berries: blueberries, strawberries - full of antioxidants and delicious. Keep them organic because they absorb pesticides very easily (see EWG.org for the “dirty dozen”). Grapes, on the other hand, are just nature’s candy. Juicing removes all the beneficial fibre and you might as well be drinking sugar water. Just eat the orange! The tarter varieties of apples are healthier too!

What about honey? Raw, unpasteurized honey has been shown to have some amazing health benefits, including topical applications for wound healing! There is truth to the old adage of having honey when you are sick. Just don’t put it into a very hot beverage - you will destroy all the good stuff. Nonetheless, honey will act exactly like other sugars on your metabolism, so if you struggle with insulin resistance, avoid it.

Consider cycling carbs and/or fasting, so that your body can regain the metabolic flexibility that we evolved to possess. There’s a reason we can get “love handles”: we have the ability to store energy in the form of body fat, for when the lean times come. The problem with our society is that it’s all feast and no fasting. Those love handles never leave because the incessant consumption of sugar leaves us with no metabolic flexibility: our bodies forget how to burn body fat for fuel.

Jason Fung has a great reference, “The Complete Guide to Fasting”. Depending on just how much metabolic dysfunction you have developed over decades of misguided nutritional advice, you might need to embark on an aggressive style of fasting to regain your metabolic flexibility. The whole “keto” style of eating is simply a fasting-mimicking nutritional plan: high fat and extremely low carb diets rarely spike insulin and can help you regain the more flexible metabolism you evolved to have.

So the final word on sugar: the dose makes the poison! If you are a lean, fit, insulin-sensitive individual, enjoy some fruits and sweets in moderation. If you are obese or T2D, then refrain from most sweets & fruits (with the possible exception of small amounts of berries) until you can reclaim insulin sensitivity and normal body weight.