The side effects of sugar consumption
2023-05-05 11:15:12
The white crystalline substance we know of as sugar is an unnatural substance produced by industrial processes (mostly from sugar cane or sugar beets) by refining it down to pure sucrose, after stripping away all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, enzymes and other beneficial nutrients.
What is left is a concentrated unnatural substance which the human body is not able to handle, at least not in anywhere near the quantities that is now ingested in todays accepted lifestyle. Sugar is addictive. The average American now consumes approximately 115 lbs. of sugar per year. This is per man, woman and child.
The biggest reason sugar does more damage than any other poison, drug or narcotic is twofold:
(a) It is considered a food and ingested in such massive quantities, and
(b) The damaging effects begin early, from the day a baby is born and is fed sugar in its formula. Even mothers milk is contaminated with it if the mother eats sugar, and
(c) Practically 95% of people are addicted to it to some degree or other.
Sugar is eaten to excess
It has been said that the criteria as to whether a substance (any substance) is harmful or medically beneficial is the quantity in which it is used in the human body. To point to a dramatic illustration: we all know that the venom of a rattlesnake, a cobra, water moccasin, coral, and other venomous snakes is deadly to the human system. There are some snakes whose bite is so deadly it can cause death within a matter of seconds. Nevertheless, even snake venom, deadly as it is, has been used for therapeutic, medical purposes when used in minute quantities.
History of sugar
Whereas sugar had been around in minute quantities for several thousand years, it was practically unknown and formed an insignificant part of the average diet in the Classical civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome. The Greeks (who had a word for nearly everything!) did not even have a word for it. Even in medieval Europe it was practically unknown and then only a rare delicacy in the royal courts.
During the last major Crusade that ended in 1204 some of the Christian Crusaders were introduced to sugar freely used by the Saracens. The Moors when invading and colonizing the southern part of Spain grew sugar cane on Spanish soil and refined sugar. When Spain drove out the Moors, it inherited some of the cane plantations. It was during this time that Christendom took its first big bite of the forbidden fruit and liked it.
Sugar is addictive
A second reason that sugar is so harmful is that like heroin it is addictive, and being delectable and seductive to the taste, it is also habit forming. Starting with sugar in the babys formula, people not only develop a strong taste for sugar but an insatiable craving for it so that they never seem to get enough of this poison.
Sugar is an unnatural chemical
Why is sugar so devastating to our health? One reason is it is pure chemical and (like heroin) through refining has been stripped of all the natural food nutrition that it originally had in the plant itself.
Heroin and sugar are arrived at by very similar processes of refinement. In producing heroin, the opium is first extracted from the poppy: The opium is then refined into morphine. The chemists then went to work on morphine and further refined it into heroin, proclaiming they had discovered a wonderful new pain-killer that was non-addictive. So they said.
Similarly, sugar is first pressed as a juice from the cane (or beet) and refined into molasses. Then it is refined into brown sugar, and finally into strange white crystals C12H22O, that are an alien chemical to the human system.