Sugar Isn’t Great For You
Here at SoPure Stevia, you’ve probably realized from reading our previous blogs that we don’t particularly like sugar. That isn’t to say that we dislike all forms of sugar, just the excessive amounts of processed sugar that seem to be present in nearly every food or beverage product sold. You see, dear reader, your body is not equipped to handle this much sugar. Our ancestors, if they were lucky, would consume sugar only through the consumption of fruits and other naturally occurring substances that contained sugar. In today’s world, however, sugar is everywhere. While we can harp on for hours about how bad sugar is for you, instead we are going to list out some specific reason that you should either quit or significantly reduce the amount of sugar that you consume on a daily basis. Continue reading below to learn more.
Sugar Causes More Harm Than Just Empty Calories
While you will hear plenty of people talk about how bad sugar is from a caloric standpoint, in reality sugar is bad for multiple reasons. Below, we have listed a few of the ways that sugar is wrecking your health.
- Sugar Provides Too Much Fructose: The main reason that added sugar is so bad for you, is that it adds a large amount of extra fructose to your system that shouldn’t be there. Sugar, basically, is made up of half fructose and half glucose. While glucose is necessary for many vital functions in your body, fructose is not essential to our bodies in any way. The only organ of the body that metabolizes fructose is the liver. When the liver is constantly having to metabolize fructose, the majority of the substance is turned into fat. As we all know, large deposits of fat in the human body are never a good thing and can lead to a plethora of health issues themselves.
- Sugar Has no Nutritional Value: Sugar, unlike most of the other substances that we put into our body, contains no vitamins or nutrients. Quite literally, sugar is simply an empty calorie that we force into our body on a daily basis. If this wasn’t bad enough, the most common high-sugar foods such as pastries, cookies, sodas, and candy themselves contain very little nutritional value. The continued consumption of these “foods” can actually cause individuals to become nutrient deficient if they do not augment their diet to include more natural substances that contain essential vitamins and minerals.
- Fatty Liver: In our first bullet, we pointed out that sugar adds a lot of fat to the human body and can only be metabolized by the liver. However, it can get worse, much worse. Our livers naturally run low on glucose. This has never really been an issue since the foods that we historically eat replenish the supply but, in recent decades, a troubling medical condition has started to crop up. Fatty Liver Disease is a result of the liver trying to use fructose to replenish its glucose stores. When this process occurs, the fructose is turned into fat which clings to the liver, decreasing the overall efficiency of the liver. Fatty Liver Disease was previously thought to only affect those who consume frequent, large amounts of alcohol, however, with the excessive amounts of fructose being consumed across the country, more and more physicians are seeing Fatty Liver Disease in people who do not abuse alcohol.
Join us again next time as we continue to cover some of the ways that excessive amounts of sugar are potentially wrecking your health. At SoPure Stevia, we realize that cutting all excess sugar out of your diet is most likely an unattainable goal. Sugar is ubiquitous across a wide range of food products and styles, however, you can take some steps in decreasing the amount of sugar that you consume. Replacing sugar with stevia in your own recipes and beverages is a great way to take control of the amount of sugar that you consume. Stevia is an all natural sugar substitute that contains even more sweetening power than sugar without any of the harmful effects of fructose. If you would like to learn more about our stevia products, please visit our website today.