Sugar: Metabolic Poison

Sugar is a carbohydrate food. Because it is a carbohydrate, its has the same number of calories as all other carbohydrates. To those who count calories, the 3.75 calories per gram of sugar would be equal to the 3.75 calories per gram found in the carbohydrate contained in beans. However, substituting the sugar in a normal diet for beans causes weight loss without the need to go on a diet. So what’s so special about sugar? Why does cutting sugar intake cause weight loss?

Glucose Is The Good Guy

Sugar is made up of one fructose molecule and one glucose molecule. Glucose is fairly benign, and eating glucose containing foods is a great way to fuel the body. Your brain and skeletal muscles in particular like glucose and use up huge amounts of it every day. Even in sleep the liver must supply the brain with glucose to keep it ticking over through the night. Starches are chains of glucose, so we get glucose from the complex carbohydrates we eat.

Fructose Is The Bad Guy

Think of fructose as the evil half brother of glucose. Fructose is a metabolic poison. Only the liver can process fructose, your brain and skeletal muscles can’t deal with it. As a result high intakes of fructose oversupply the liver with energy. Faced with deluge of fructose heading its way, the liver diverts the fructose to produce fatty acids. These fatty acids build up in the liver where they cause the development of fatty liver disease.

Do I Want Fatty Liver Disease?

In a word no. Fatty liver causes all sorts of metabolic abnormalities that make it difficult to process other nutrients correctly. Blood sugar levels rise, hunger signals go awry and cholesterol goes through the roof. But even worse, you start to put on fat around your organs and waist. This belly fat is a sure sign that you have developed metabolic syndrome. Also called syndrome X, belly fat is a sign of insulin resistance, which means you have a one way ticket to diabetesville.

So What Is The Solution?

If you want to get rid of the belly fat you need to reverse the damage to your liver. This can only be done by reducing sugar intake. Cutting calories but maintaining an intake of sugar won't work because the metabolic damage will remain and you won't be able to efficiently process energy. Because sugar is present in the gimmicky low fat foods sold in supermarkets, you must ditch these metabolic poisons if you want your body to efficiently to burn fat.

But Fructose Is In Fruit, Right?

Absolutely, fructose is right there in fruit. And guess what. If you over eat fruit you'll get fat. However, nature in her wisdom put lots of fibre in most natural sources of fructose. The fibre slows the digestion of the fructose and this prevents the fructose overloading the liver. This means the liver can more easily deal with the fructose in fruit. Only one source of fructose in nature is fibre free. That is honey. And while it may not contain fibre, it is protected by ferocious bees.

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