Sugar

One of the most unavoidable foods in our diets is sugar. It's found in most fruits and is a usually an ingredient used to enhance flavor to many of our favorite dishes and or treats. In fact, most often it is commonly associated as the main ingredient in most of our treats whether it be cake, pie, candy or even the healthy alternative being fruit. But how much is enough or too much?

There are many side effects of consuming too much sugar in the short and long term. In the short term you're capable of experiencing symptoms of hyper/hypoglycemia such as shakiness, nervousness, sweating, dizziness or light-headedness, restlessness, confusion, decreased verbal ability, and anxiety. In the long term there is Tooth decay, gum disease, obesity, diabetes and heart disease, a weakened immune system, stress, accelerated aging and reduced cognition. Moderation plays a healthy part in avoiding these type of symptoms and is surely to be a topic for this blog in the very near future.

One of my best rules for consuming moderate amounts of sugar is to try and avoid table sugar or refined white table sugar. The best way to do this is to only ingest fruits as your primary source of sugar. Refined sugars are easy to overdose because they are high doses in small quantity, where fruits tend to contain small doses of sugar in large quantities thus making it hard for you to reach that overdose level because you are too full from consumption. But once again, moderation is key. The holiday treat is unavoidable unless you have superhuman power to resist.

Another important aspect as well as a personal one for me consuming less sugar is the fact that cancer tends to thrive off of sugar. Since I am a cancer survivor, one of the test needed to monitor my remission is called a PET scan. This test consists of injecting a radioactive substance into the bloodstream and passing the body through MRI/CAT scan type of device. This radioactive substance attracts sugar and sugar attracts cancer causing the scan to identify cancer cells if they are present. Keep in mind ingesting sugar is not to be mistaken as a cause of cancer. The fact is, cancer tends to bind and feed on sugar in laboratory tests.

So stop eating sugar? Of course not. Monitor and reduce consumption perhaps. But having knowledge of the many by-products caused by too much sugar is helpful towards reducing your excessive intake of this wonderful ingredient we all love so much.