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.
