Sugar:  Sweet Poison

The title tells the story: The worst danger in our diet is NOT fat. It's sugar, no matter what they tell you on television.

The major types of foods are proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, but our focus is a subset of the carbohydrates, the refined simple carbohydrates (as opposed to the complex).

There would be little problem eating sugar cane or sugar beets, as a non-concentrated juice straight from the plant. All the nutrients required for the utilization of the juice are self-contained. If you chew the stalk, you even get natural fiber. This seems to be a law of nature:

A real food contains within itself the nutrients required for its use by the body.

The point here is that refined sugar (the white stuff man has messed with) no longer qualifies as 'food.' Vitamins, minerals, enzymes and fiber for properly using food as fuel do not accompany totally pure, concentrated sugar. The body must handle refined 'food' by drawing from body stores already in existence (assuming you have some).

Long term diets of these 'naked' calories continually stress the body by sapping it of these internal stores of nutrients. Eventually, deficiency states, whether subtle or obvious, arise.

Sorry, sugar-lovers, there's more. This sweet calorie is not just naked, it's also concentrated. Besides the nutrients being removed, the water and soluble fiber are missing. This is also true when fruit is converted to fruit juice, and gets even worse once refined to pure fructose, or fruit sugar.

William Dufty, in his book, Sugar Blues, found that 5 ounces of refined sugar requires 2 1/2 pounds of sugar beets! That much sugar is nothing for most people to eat in 10 minutes. Try it with the beets. Nature builds in its own controls, while we're given an industrial-strength concentrate that has little to do with the original sweet stuff.

Once sugar enters the system, blood sugar rises. Then our pancreas squirts a little insulin into the bloodstream, sending the sugar to muscle and brain cells. However, if you don't happen to be moving or thinking enough, sugar is converted and stored as FAT! You can cut your fat grams to ZERO, but if you eat too much refined carbohydrate, YOU GET FAT. (The low-fat advertisers didn't tell you that? Hmmm.)

If our sugar is unnaturally concentrated, the pancreas can get weird. Fast-shifting blood sugar can make you feel bad, craving another sugar 'fix' and starting a 'roller-coaster' effect that traps carbohydrate addicts. This 'reactive hypoglycemia' is not a disease, it's a symptom ... it just leads to disease, and it's a real time bomb.

The problem is that natural, unrefined sugar is now almost impossible to get. To really avoid the stresses and degenerative diseases I believe are caused by sugar, abstinence is the best way -- but just like with sex, it's tough to pull off.

The best switch, assuming you can't quit sweets, is to convert to unrefined simple carbohydrates- the fruits. Try to eat whole fresh fruit. Beware of fruit juice, since you can drink more fruit than you can eat.

If you just can't give up the sweet taste completely and you need something to add to foods, there are options. Visit a health food store and beware of artificial. The herb stevia is good if you can find it.

A few days off sugar, especially for someone who eats tons of it, can make you feel much better. Also, the harder it is to quit, the better you may ultimately feel, if you can pull it off. Hang on, if that happens, because you are in withdrawal, and you are almost guaranteed some degree of improvement.