I believe that refined sugar is one of the main reasons why we see so many obese people around the place. It is also the cause of a modern disease which no-one really used to get: DIABETES! Not to mention the fact that sugar is very addictive.
Here’s a few articles about sugar……
From Global Healing Centre:
Refined Sugar – The Sweetest Poison of All – By William Dufty
Why Sugar Is Toxic To The Body
In 1957, Dr. William Coda Martin tried to answer the question: When is a food a food and when is it a poison? His working definition of “poison” was: “Medically: Any substance applied to the body, ingested or developed within the body, which causes or may cause disease. Physically: Any substance which inhibits the activity of a catalyst which is a minor substance, chemical or enzyme that activates a reaction.” The dictionary gives an even broader definition for “poison”: “to exert a harmful influence on, or to pervert”.
Dr. Martin classified refined sugar as a poison because it has been depleted of its life forces, vitamins and minerals. “What is left consists of pure, refined carbohydrates. The body cannot utilize this refined starch and carbohydrate unless the depleted proteins, vitamins and minerals are present. Nature supplies these elements in each plant in quantities sufficient to metabolize the carbohydrate in that particular plant. There is no excess for other added carbohydrates. Incomplete carbohydrate metabolism results in the formation of ‘toxic metabolite’ such as pyruvic acid and abnormal sugars containing five carbon atoms. Pyruvic acid accumulates in the brain and nervous system and the abnormal sugars in the red blood cells. These toxic metabolites interfere with the respiration of the cells. They cannot get sufficient oxygen to survive and function normally. In time, some of the cells die. This interferes with the function of a part of the body and is the beginning of degenerative disease.”
Refined sugar is lethal when ingested by humans because it provides only that which nutritionists describe as “empty” or “naked” calories. It lacks the natural minerals which are present in the sugar beet or cane.
In addition, sugar is worse than nothing because it drains and leaches the body of precious vitamins and minerals through the demand its digestion, detoxification and elimination makes upon one’s entire system. So essential is balance to our bodies that we have many ways to provide against the sudden shock of a heavy intake of sugar. Minerals such as sodium (from salt), potassium and magnesium (from vegetables), and calcium (from the bones) are mobilized and used in chemical transmutation; neutral acids are produced which attempt to return the acid-alkaline balance factor of the blood to a more normal state.
Sugar taken every day produces a continuously overacid condition, and more and more minerals are required from deep in the body in the attempt to rectify the imbalance. Finally, in order to protect the blood, so much calcium is taken from the bones and teeth that decay and general weakening begin. Excess sugar eventually affects every organ in the body. Initially, it is stored in the liver in the form of glucose (glycogen). Since the liver’s capacity is limited, a daily intake of refined sugar (above the required amount of natural sugar) soon makes the liver expand like a balloon. When the liver is filled to its maximum capacity, the excess glycogen is returned to the blood in the form of fatty acids. These are taken to every part of the body and stored in the most inactive areas: the belly, the buttocks, the breasts and the thighs.
When these comparatively harmless places are completely filled, fatty acids are then distributed among active organs, such as the heart and kidneys. These begin to slow down; finally their tissues degenerate and turn to fat. The whole body is affected by their reduced ability, and abnormal blood pressure is created. The parasympathetic nervous system is affected; and organs governed by it, such as the small brain, become inactive or paralyzed. (Normal brain function is rarely thought of as being as biologic as digestion.) The circulatory and lymphatic systems are invaded, and the quality of the red corpuscles starts to change. An overabundance of white cells occurs, and the creation of tissue becomes slower. Our body’s tolerance and immunizing power becomes more limited, so we cannot respond properly to extreme attacks, whether they be cold, heat, mosquitoes or microbes.
Excessive sugar has a strong mal-effect on the functioning of the brain. The key to orderly brain function is glutamic acid, a vital compound found in many vegetables. The B vitamins play a major role in dividing glutamic acid into antagonistic-complementary compounds which produce a “proceed” or “control” response in the brain. B vitamins are also manufactured by symbiotic bacteria which live in our intestines. When refined sugar is taken daily, these bacteria wither and die, and our stock of B vitamins gets very low. Too much sugar makes one sleepy; our ability to calculate and remember is lost.
Sugar: Harmful to humans & animals
Shipwrecked sailors who ate and drank nothing but sugar and rum for nine days surely went through some of this trauma; the tales they had to tell created a big public relations problem for the sugar pushers. This incident occurred when a vessel carrying a cargo of sugar was shipwrecked in 1793. The five surviving sailors were finally rescued after being marooned for nine days. They were in a wasted condition due to starvation, having consumed nothing but sugar and rum. The eminent French physiologist F. Magendie was inspired by that incident to conduct a series of experiments with animals, the results of which he published in 1816. In the experiments, he fed dogs a diet of sugar or olive oil and water. All the dogs wasted and died.3
The shipwrecked sailors and the French physiologist’s experimental dogs proved the same point. As a steady diet, sugar is worse than nothing. Plain water can keep you alive for quite some time. Sugar and water can kill you. Humans [and animals] are “unable to subsist on a diet of sugar”.4 The dead dogs in Professor Magendie’s laboratory alerted the sugar industry to the hazards of free scientific inquiry. From that day to this, the sugar industry has invested millions of dollars in behind-the-scenes, subsidized science. The best scientific names that money could buy have been hired, in the hope that they could one day come up with something at least pseudoscientific in the way of glad tidings about sugar.
It has been proved, however, that (1) sugar is a major factor in dental decay; (2) sugar in a person’s diet does cause overweight; (3) removal of sugar from diets has cured symptoms of crippling, worldwide diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart illnesses. Sir Frederick Banting, the codiscoverer of insulin, noticed in 1929 in Panama that, among sugar plantation owners who ate large amounts of their refined stuff, diabetes was common. Among native cane-cutters, who only got to chew the raw cane, he saw no diabetes. However, the story of the public relations attempts on the part of the sugar manufacturers began in Britain in 1808 when the Committee of West India reported to the House of Commons that a prize of twenty-five guineas had been offered to anyone who could come up with the most “satisfactory” experiments to prove that unrefined sugar was good for feeding and fattening oxen, cows, hogs and sheep.5
Food for animals is often seasonal, always expensive. Sugar, by then, was dirt cheap. People weren’t eating it fast enough. Naturally, the attempt to feed livestock with sugar and molasses in England in 1808 was a disaster. When the Committee on West India made its fourth report to the House of Commons, one Member of Parliament, John Curwin, reported that he had tried to feed sugar and molasses to calves without success. He suggested that perhaps someone should try again by sneaking sugar and molasses into skimmed milk. Had anything come of that, you can be sure the West Indian sugar merchants would have spread the news around the world. After this singular lack of success in pushing sugar in cow pastures, the West Indian sugar merchants gave up.
With undaunted zeal for increasing the market demand for the most important agricultural product of the West Indies, the Committee of West India was reduced to a tactic that has served the sugar pushers for almost 200 years: irrelevant and transparently silly testimonials from faraway, inaccessible people with some kind of “scientific” credentials. While preparing his epochal volume, A History of Nutrition, published in 1957, Professor E. V. McCollum (Johns Hopkins university), sometimes called America’s foremost nutritionist and certainly a pioneer in the field, reviewed approximately 200,000 published scientific papers, recording experiments with food, their properties, their utilization and their effects on animals and men. The material covered the period from the mid-18th century to 1940. From this great repository of scientific inquiry, McCollum selected those experiments which he regarded as significant “to relate the story of progress in discovering human error in this segment of science [of nutrition]”.
Professor McCollum failed to record a single controlled scientific experiment with sugar between 1816 and 1940. unhappily, we must remind ourselves that scientists today, and always, accomplish little without a sponsor. The protocols of modern science have compounded the costs of scientific inquiry. We have no right to be surprised when we read the introduction to McCollum’s A History of Nutrition and find that “The author and publishers are indebted to The Nutrition Foundation, Inc., for a grant provided to meet a portion of the cost of publication of this book”. What, you might ask, is The Nutrition Foundation, Inc.? The author and the publishers don’t tell you. It happens to be a front organization for the leading sugar-pushing conglomerates in the food business, including the American Sugar Refining Company, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Curtis Candy Co., General Foods, General Mills, Nestlé Co., Pet Milk Co. and Sunshine Biscuits-about 45 such companies in all. Perhaps the most significant thing about McCollum’s 1957 history was what he left out: a monumental earlier work described by an eminent Harvard professor as “one of those epochal pieces of research which makes every other investigator desirous of kicking himself because he never thought of doing the same thing”.
In the 1930s, a research dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, Dr. Weston A. Price, traveled all over the world-from the lands of the Eskimos to the South Sea Islands, from Africa to New Zealand. His Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects,6 which is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, was first published in 1939. Dr. Price took the whole world as his laboratory. His devastating conclusion, recorded in horrifying detail in area after area, was simple. People who live under so-called backward primitive conditions had excellent teeth and wonderful general health. They ate natural, unrefined food from their own locale. As soon as refined, sugared foods were imported as a result of contact with “civilization,” physical degeneration began in a way that was definitely observable within a single generation. Any credibility the sugar pushers have is based on our ignorance of works like that of Dr. Price.
Sugar manufacturers keep trying, hoping and contributing generous research grants to colleges and universities; but the research laboratories never come up with anything solid the manufacturers can use. Invariably, the research results are bad news. “Let us go to the ignorant savage, consider his way of eating and be wise,” Harvard professor Ernest Hooten said in Apes, Men, and Morons.7 “Let us cease pretending that toothbrushes and toothpaste are any more important than shoe brushes and shoe polish. It is store food that has given us store teeth.” When the researchers bite the hands that feed them, and the news gets out, it’s embarrassing all around. In 1958, Time magazine reported that a Harvard biochemist and his assistants had worked with myriads of mice for more than ten years, bankrolled by the Sugar Research Foundation, Inc. to the tune of $57,000, to find out how sugar causes dental cavities and how to prevent this. It took them ten years to discover that there was no way to prevent sugar causing dental decay. When the researchers reported their findings in the Dental Association Journal, their source of money dried up. The Sugar Research Foundation withdrew its support. The more that the scientists disappointed them, the more the sugar pushers had to rely on the ad men.
Is Sugar Poison?
From Natural Therapy Pages:
David Gillespie has carved a niche for himself as Australia’s most visible no-sugar guru – a self described ‘recovering sugarholic’, he attributes his approach to losing a significant amount of weight (some 40 kg) and transforming his life. In his battle with the bulge David dispensed with more conventional approaches such as dieting and exercise regimes – instead choosing to go entirely sugar free. His views are dismissed by some as the work of an amateur, but this did not stop his first book, ‘Sweet Poison‘ from becoming a bestseller and he has just released his second work, ‘The Sweet Poison Quit Plan’. ntpages caught up with David recently to find out more about his radical approach.
As someone with no formal background or training in health or nutrition, how much opposition do you encounter to your work?
“Some dieticians and nutritionists are less positive about my work, but I suspect that many have not read my books. I have had a lot more positive feedback from medical practitioners.”
What science is behind your sugar exclusion approach?
“The stimulus for my interest in the subject was a study published in the 1950s, which linked our consumption of sugar with growing obesity levels. I was battling a weight problem myself at the time and this really struck a chord when I came across it. All my work is based on the latest scientific research and I have yet to have anyone identify anything factually incorrect with it.”
Where do you obtain all your data on obesity?
“The US is the only country with reliable historical data on obesity, so many of the statistics I quote are sourced from there.”
You were addicted to sugar?
“Absolutely, no question about it – sugar is extremely addictive and I was very overweight because of it.”
You are not a fan of diets per se?
“No, studies indicate that people do lose weight initially when dieting, but that they put it back on – and more – later. Instead, I say eat anything you want as long as it is not sweet.”
What about the nutritionist’s mantra – all things in moderation?
“Everybody’s definition of moderation is different which is where the problem arises. It is also very difficult to consume an addictive substance in moderation – try doing it with cigarettes.”
You don’t really distinguish between natural and processed sugars?
“At the end of the day sugar or sucrose is comprised of two elements: glucose and fructose. Fructose is what makes food taste sweet. This is true for a processed food such as chocolate or a natural source such as honey and ultimately the body reacts to it in the same way.”
Sugar: Sweet Poison
From Be Free Tech:
Sugar is a basic element found in starchy food. Sugar cane contains 14% trace elements, minerals and vitamins, plus chlorophyll. The sugar we purchase in the supermarket for personal consumption is heated up in chalk-milk, so that calcium and protein are extracted.
It initially becomes an alkaloid, thus destroying all vitamin content. In the second phase, the sugar is mixed with acid chalk, carbonic gas, sulphur dioxide and finally, with natrium bicarbonate.
This mixture is cooked and cooled off several times, and thereafter crystallized and centrifugalized.
This dead mass is then treated with strontium hydroxide. Subsequently, it arrives at the refinery where it is passed over chalk carbon acid to clean it.
Dark coloring is removed by adding sulphuric acid and then it is filtered with bone charcoal. Finally, it is colored with Indathrenblue, or the highly toxic Ultramarine.
This product”s chemical composition is C12 H22 O11, which you can buy in shops as “pure cane” sugar, sugar cubes, candy, etc.
All of its life-giving and protective forces have been destroyed, and this product called sugar has an atomic density of 98.4 to 99.5 %.
Such density falls under the category of poison. This industrial sugar irritates the mucous membranes, tissues, glands, blood vessels and intestinal tracts of the persons who eat it. White sugar also paralyzes the intestinal peristaltic functions and leads to immune system failure. White sugar also destroys brain cells and elevates the internal temperature of the body.
Tooth tissue has a tissue pressure of 7 Atmospheres. Industrial sugar increases this osmotic pressure to 34 Atmospheres.
Tooth enamel is the hardest substance in human beings, together with bones. We have found teeth that have been on the earth for 100,000 years and still intact despite heat and cold, rain, snow, bacteria, etc. However, white sugar is capable of destroying tooth enamel within hours, penetrating the structure of the tooth-tissue like a nail and breaking it down.
What Nature could not do since the beginning of time, mankind has achieved in no time at all. He is the only being that destroys the nutrient value of his food before consumption.
Sugar Is a Poison, Says UCSF Obesity Expert
From UCSF:
The rise of obesity is usually blamed on too much eating and not enough exercising, but Robert Lustig, MD, a UCSF pediatric neuroendocrinologist, asks us to look beyond the obvious. Yes, more Americans are overweight today than 30 years ago. Kids are still getting heavier, compared with prior generations of kids. That leads some UCSF researchers to warn that heart disease and other health problems will grow in future decades. But behaviors that some might refer to as gluttony and sloth are merely consequences of the true cause of the epidemic, Lustig says. Food was just as abundant before obesity’s ascendance. The problem is the increase in sugar consumption. Sugar both drives fat storage and makes the brain think it is hungry, setting up a “vicious cycle,” according to Lustig.
More specifically, it is fructose that is harmful, according to Lustig. Fructose is a component of the two most popular sugars. One is table sugar — sucrose. The other is high-fructose corn syrup. High-fructose corn syrup has become ubiquitous in soft drinks and many other processed foods. Lustig presented his case against fructose in a recent UCSF Mini Medical School course on diet and nutrition, part of a series sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Audience members may have been surprised to hear such unequivocally strong statements from a researcher. Lustig framed the obesity epidemic as a societal issue that pits the food-selling agenda of federal agencies and profit-seeking behavior of major corporations against public health needs. Lustig quit working in the lab a decade ago. Now he spends more time with pediatric patients. He is on the front lines of the world’s weight woes, treating kids who already are obese, a condition that sets the stage for health problems that begin long before these children become adults. Lustig still conducts clinical research. He evaluates dietary lifestyle, as well as pharmacologic interventions that might hold the pounds at bay. He tracks down associations between diet, lifestyle and health outcomes in an effort to identify biological mechanisms that will explain them.
Interesting stuff and important to know about. I’m no health puritan or anything like that, but one thing I’ve never really done is consume much refined sugar. The fact that I don’t have any sweet-tooth whatsoever, makes limiting my sugar intake rather easy. Alcohol is my poison of choice….. Oh well, you’ve got to enjoy something I suppose! Sugar is probably (hopefully) worse anyway…..
– BDL1983