Added Sugar – It’s in Everything!
If you want to read a life-changing book, read “Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It,” by John Yudkin. Actually, the book will change the way that you look at sugar. And what happened to Yudkin during the 1970s, will change the way that you look at the politics of food. Yudkin asserted that sugar was the culprit and cause of Coronary Heart Disease. However, others believed that saturated fats were the leading cause. Yudkin lost the debate, and as H. Lustig, M.D. wrote in the introduction of Yudkin’s new edition,
“The Pharisees of this nutritional holy war declared Keys (proponent of the saturated fats theory) the victor, Yudkin a heretic and a zealot, threw the now discredited Yudkin under the proverbial bus, and relegated his pivotal work to the dustbin of history, as this book went out of print and virtually disappeared from the scene. The propaganda of “low-fat” as the treatment for heart disease was perpetuated for the next thirty years.
I reread this book. I was moved again.
Thankfully, the scientific community has had an epiphany: Sugar is killing us.
Nutritionists and researchers have taken a closer look at sugar. Let’s look at their current findings:
- The higher the intake of added sugar, the higher the risk for heart disease. If you’re getting 20% of calories from added sugar, you have almost a 40% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
- The higher the intake of added sugar, increases the likelihood of developing a fatty liver. This of course contributes to diabetes.
- Consuming too much added sugar can raise blood pressure.
- Consuming too much added sugar increases chronic inflammation. Drinking one can of soft drink daily can increase inflammatory markers, insulin resistance, and LDL cholesterol.
- Eating too much sugar can cause weight gain, which increases your risk of Type 2 Diabetes.
We can stop there. I think you see the point. Consuming too much added sugar is not good. Read Yudkin’s book. Think about your consumption of sugar. If you include the sugar that is added to your food with your consumption of table sugar, you are most likely eating over 100 lbs. of sugar a year. That’s 20 times what our recent ancestors ate.
No wonder we’re such a mess.
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