Is a No Sugar Diet really in all of our Futures?

Sugar: The Bitter Truth - that's the name of the video that's turned into a viral hit on YouTube; it's been on for a year and a half now, and it's gained about 1 million views so far. This isn't "Charlie bit me" or anything entertaining like that. It's a lecture by a professor that goes on for a full hour and a half about the intricacies of the chemistry of sugar and the human body. A million views is pretty respectable if you think about it. The scientist who speaks on the video, is a medical expert on childhood obesity and he has a rather startling idea to promote - it's that sugar is a kind of slow poison - kind of like alcohol or tobacco. And a no sugar diet is to be preferred for a life free of diabetes or obesity.

Sugar is poison? Isn't that being a little dramatic? The professor uses the word poison a dozen times in the video; no, he doesn't believe he's exaggerating. Now there's just one thing left to find out - is he really on to something? While there are critics who believe that the professor is sadly mistaken, the New York Times in an article published recently certainly does find his views convincing. Might doctors really recommend a no-sugar diet for the world one day the way they recommend a no-tobacco lifestyle?

The thing is, the most sugar we're supposed to safely include in our diets each day is what you would find in half a can of regular soda - which would be a teaspoon of sugar or some other source of sweetness like high fructose corn syrup. Americans actually eat 75 pounds of sugar every year. The problem with sugar the way we eat it is that it hits our liver really quickly in a way that sends the liver into a kind of emergency mode. When it's hit with such high levels of sweetness as sugar is capable of without warning, the liver responds by trying to metabolize the sugar to turn it into fat that it stores right there within the organ. This state new makes us insulin resistant. And that leads to diabetes. That's the theory.

To call sugar a poison doesn't really mean that it damages your body after a single dose. It does damage your body after a couple of years of consumption. And that's what other toxic habits we have are capable of too. Alcohol and tobacco won't destroy your system in a few days. Over a period of time though, they certainly are capable of doing that. Researchers need to do far more work on the subject before they can actually recommended a no sugar diet; at this time though, this research includes the possibility that sugar causes cancer as well. Experts have been wondering for quite a while now what it is about the Western lifestyle that could have made cancer such a prevalent disease. It never used to be this prevalent 150 years ago. If medical research succeeds in finding positive proof of how sugar actually causes all these diseases, that should cause quite a revolution in the way we come to see our food.