All chronic disease these days has its roots in sugar consumption. The human race in the developed world has a sugar addiction and is dependent on sugar.
Sugar is not just added sugar as we know it, adding sugar to your tea or coffee or to desserts, sugar is any substance with a high glycaemic index, any substance that can disturb the insulin balance in your body.
High glycaemic foods are carbohydrates that are digested, absorbed and turned into sugar quickly and therefore raise your blood sugar levels equally quickly. So any sugar or food or any substance out of which the body can make sugar, directly affects your insulin balance.
There are many ways that sugar is disguised, and most of the manufactured foods sold in supermarkets are loaded with sugar. It therefore follows that the more processed foods that you eat the more your insulin balance is disturbed.
We have been programmed to think that the killer for obesity is fat consumption and so everything is labelled ‘low’ or ‘no’ fat, but instead the product is full of sugar! Sugar is now used not only as a sweetener but also as a filler to build volume into the food product. High fructose corn syrup, a major ingredient, is an extremely sweet filler, widely used and deadly to insulin balance.
Syndrome X is a chronic disease, discovered by Dr Reaven M.D. and according to him the number one predictor of heart disease. It is a quiet disease that interferes with the ability of insulin to move glucose into certain cells for later use.
Insulin resistance is where you are resistant to your own insulin, and is at the heart of Syndrome X and this means that greater amounts of insulin are required to move the glucose. Unfortunately excess insulin is the first in a series of events to trigger damage to the lining of the coronary arteries, which eventually precipitates a heart attack.
So, more carbohydrates and sugar equals more glucose, which equals more insulin, which in turn equals a formula for disaster. For every 30 percent elevation in insulin levels, there is a 70 percent increase in the risk of heart disease over a five-year period. This is why simply lowering your cholesterol to prevent heart disease will not solve the problem!
Dr Raeven outlines a list of heart disease risk factors for people with Syndrome X, these include:
• Impaired glucose tolerance
• High insulin levels
• Elevated triglycerides (blood fats)
• Low HDL ‘good’ cholesterol
• Slow clearance of fat from the blood
• Smaller, denser LDL ‘bad’ cholesterol particles
• Increased propensity of the blood to form clots
• Decreased ability to dissolve blood clots
• Elevated blood pressure
Lifestyle factors that worsen Syndrome X:
• Obesity
• Lack of physical activity
• The wrong diet
• Cigarette smoking.
• High intake of sugar/carbohydrates
The additional independent risk factor is higher than normal LDL, ‘bad’ cholesterol.
Notice that the list includes the rate at which fat clears from the blood and not the amount of fat in the blood. It also considers the formation and clearance of blood clots, and the physical characteristics of LDL cholesterol, not just the amount. The most important lifestyle factor mentioned, is high consumption of sugar or carbohydrates.
So, heart attacks are two to three times more likely to happen after a high-carbohydrate meal and are not after a high-fat meal. Why is this? Because the immediate effect of raising blood sugar from sugar consumption or a high carbohydrate meal is a rise in insulin. This causes arterial spasm and constriction of the arteries, triggering heart attacks.
It is a good idea to substitute stevia/truvia for sugar as it is perfectly natural and does not affect your insulin levels. Too much sugar leads to an overproduction of insulin which is the basis of the chronic disease of ageing and syndrome X.
Ignorance of sugar leads to more and more degenerative disease including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.
Sugar is our addiction and it starts with babies! Let’s stop it in its tracks now!