Art of Diet

Sweet Treat

Christmas is coming, you will spend time with your family and friends eating, drinking, playing games and watching films. During these you consume lot of sweets.  Here are some facts about sweets. Sugar is a sweet tasting energy dense carbohydrate.  Simple sugars are contain small molecules; glucose, fructose and galactose, linked together forming a chain. The sugar, which is used by food manufacturers are sucrose (fructose and glucose linked together) or high fructose content corn syrup.  The sugar is not just a source of excess of calories it is a poison for your body.

Fructose, one of the building blocks of sugar, does not play an essential role in human metabolism.  Fructose is converted to energy but the process produces very reactive oxygen radicals reacting in our body causing ageing. The fructose is not regulated by the insulin, which spurs the production of leptin. Leptin is a hormone, which lets the body to know when it is full. Fructose does not affect leptin production. The fructose goes directly into your liver and turns on a factory of fat production in your liver called lipogenesis.

Corn syrup is made from the starch of corn, maze, which contains varying amounts of maltose and about 50% of it are obligosaccharides- almost as simple as sugar, but have a few more molecules attached to them. They are a little more complex, but not enough to be called a starch. Maltose consists of two glucose molecules linked, so the corn syrup is also known as glucose syrup.

You must make a difference between corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup. When the corn syrup is manufactured by converting a large proportion of glucose content into fructose high-fructose corn syrup is produced. This is sweeter due to the higher levels of fructose molecules (65%). This elevated fructose level explains that why the high-fructose corn syrup is so much worse for you than refined sugar. In sucrose or refined sugar a glucose and a fructose molecules are linked together, so its fructose content is 50%. Beside the ginormous load of pure fructose found in high-fructose corn syrup it contains other chemical toxins. 

The more simple a carbohydrate, the quicker your body absorbs it, causing your "blood sugars" to rise up very quickly, but then drop just as fast. This will make you feel hungry pretty quickly after you’ve eaten something with a high sugar content. Ideally, we want to consume more of the complex carbohydrates, giving us blood sugar levels that don't fluctuate as much throughout the day.  Foods high in fat and sugar are “hyperpalatable foods “ increase the dopamine level as much as addictive drugs.

Our body does not require any added sugar the complex form of carbohydrates in starchy foods supply all the glucose our metabolisms need.