Friday, December 13, 2013

Best And Worst Sugars

Everyone loves to eat sweet things because sweets impart tremendous pleasure and satisfaction. After all, sweet is one of the five basic taste sensations, the others being bitter, salty, sour, and umami.

Sadly, all sweet things contain some forms of sugar, and consuming excessive sugar has been blamed for nearly every known disease in mankind. Saying sugar is bad for you is the ultimate understatement. The far-reaching problems sugar can cause are well documented in numerous medical journals throughout the world.

Having said this, does it mean that if you want to be healthy, you need to deprive yourself of the sweet sensation for the rest of your life? It doesn't sound any fun at all, does it?

Whether a sugar is good or bad depends entirely on its composition. Learn about the different effects of glucose and fructose on your body, as well as the worst sugars that you should absolutely avoid. Lastly, believe it or not, there are four sweeteners that are natural, versatile, and even have some benefits to the human body.

Why Is Excess Glucose Bad For You?

If you eat a food that is very high in glucose (such as waffles, puffed rice cakes, corn flakes, or baguette), it is broken down almost immediately and a flood of sugar is released into your blood stream. Since too much sugar is toxic to the body, the pancreas quickly secretes a huge amount of insulin to restore blood sugar equilibrium by taking the excess out of the blood stream into your muscles. But since your muscles can only store so much sugar, the surplus is stored as fat. As a consequence, if you do this frequent enough, you will, without doubt, gain weight. What's worse, chronic high insulin contributes to many degenerative diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

To avoid all these ill effects, you want to choose waffeleisen test that don't break down to sugar right away. The Glycemic Index (GI) measures the effects of a food on blood sugar levels. The higher the index, the faster the conversion to sugar. For reference, glucose has a GI of 100. If you always choose foods with a GI of 55 or less, your blood sugar and insulin levels will stay in a healthy zone.

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