The most common source of nutritional stress

Hello everyone, I'm Ryo Kutani, a nutrition therapist, and today's topic is: the most common source of nutritional stress - refined sugar,

Now to the topic:

What causes nutritional stress?

Brendon Brazier's book, Healthy Living, states that nutrition is "the result of the unhealthy properties of food." ”

Let's start with the obvious.

Refined sugar. It couldn't be more obvious.

Sugar is a substance that is "poisonous" to the body. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a poison is "a substance that kills, harms, or damages an organism by chemical action." ”

It turns out that you are such sugar.

We need sugar, yes, but we can easily get the sugar we need from fruits, vegetables, dairy products. This is enough to meet our need for glucose as an energy source.

The bad stuff is what nutritionists call "added sugars," which are refined sugars. Like its evil cousin, high-fructose corn syrup, this is 100% unwanted by our cells.

Robert Lustig, Ph.D., is a pediatric hormonal disorder specialist, childhood obesity specialist, and faculty at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. He sounded the alarm about sugar – and he probably did more than anyone else in that regard.

"Artificially added sweeteners can be a health hazard, so there is a reason to control sugar in the same way that we control alcohol," he wrote. The harm of sugar isn't just that it makes us fat, he says, "It has nothing to do with calories." It is poison in itself. ”

Eating sugar can lead to cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, depression, and of course, obesity.

Sugar puts a strain on the liver, which must process it to convert it into body fat. If the fat is too high, our liver will also have too much fat, which weakens the liver's ability to do other important jobs, such as detoxification.

Sugar acidifies our tissues, and acidification itself is a cause of disease. Sugar can cause a spike in harmful insulin secretions, overburdening the pancreas, which is dangerous.

Sugar also boosts the production of serotonin, a pleasant chemical in the brain. This partly explains why we love sugar so much, and eating sugar can make us emotionally high. But if we eat too much sugar, we break down, causing brain fatigue, which can lead us to want to eat more sugar.

From lollipops to sliced bread, high-fructose corn syrup is everywhere, and it does much more than just cause obesity. Duke University Medical Center studied more than 400 adults and found that nearly 80 percent experienced abnormal liver activity after consuming a product containing high fructose corn syrup.

"We found that in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, increased intake of high-fructose corn syrup caused scarring or fibrosis of the liver," said the study leader. "About 30 percent of Americans have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which has become a serious public health problem.

Sugar causes fluctuations in our major systems throughout the body, increases stress, and promotes the release of cortisol hormone. A small amount of cortisol hormone is beneficial, but too high in the long term is harmful, such as when we are under stress for a long time, and this is exactly what happens after we incorporate sugar into our daily diet. Chronic stress equals chronic inflammation, which equates to getting sick all the time. That's right, that's the danger of sugar.

Too much cortisol can cause high blood pressure and suppress thyroid function. It acidifies our tissues, increases the accumulation of belly fat, and lowers our immunity.

A deadly cycle is formed: a weakened immune system increases the risk of disease in the body; Disease leads to malnutrition, which further impairs immunity; Chronically high levels of cortisol can lead to cravings for sugar, salt, and fat, and when we satisfy these cravings, we exacerbate nutritional stress and another harmful cycle begins.

The predecessor of sugar or sucrose is a plant. Sugarcane is a tall grass, but sugar has been stripped of dietary fiber, protein, vitamins, minerals, lipids, and antioxidants. Sugar used to be part of a complex structure, but then it was separated, crystallized, and turned into a pure sweetness, a pure "poison".

Also, the more calories we get from sugar, the fewer calories we get from healthy foods. As a result, it causes double the damage to the human body.

Worst of all, it's so hard to get rid of sugar these days. Food manufacturers always find a way to put it in everything, even those that don't seem to have anything to do with it. These companies know how to monetize our sugar addiction. Every health professional will tell us that processed foods should be avoided, and this is an important reason.

Well, now that we know that sugar is bad for us, what do we do? Change our way of life and get rid of everything that is sweet? Unfortunately, we don't.

Usually we just replace sugar with chemical sweeteners. In the case of diet soda, people who drink this drink, think they have made a healthier choice, but they are wrong. On the one hand, sugar-free drinks encourage us to constantly seek sweetness, which inevitably brings us back to sugar.

In fact, one study found that when our body gets sweetness but no calories come with it, it feels cheated. It wants to get the high calorie rewards of real sugar, and that will motivate us to drink more of these things.

In addition, when you drink a drink that contains artificial sweeteners, you are ingesting toxic substances. Studies have shown that one of the most common artificial sweeteners called "aspartame" can actually alter people's minds – what scientists call "extoxins."

In tests on laboratory mice, aspartame was found to cause brain damage. Doesn't sound like a healthy choice, does it? Our cells don't treat it as food or anything useful, so it's a hostile invader to the cells that has to be filtered, neutralized, and then excreted. If the cells are overworked, the toxins may end up in the fat we have accumulated, and even when those fat cells die, the toxins remain there.

Now you can imagine that when we ingest the colors, flavors, preservatives, and all the other non-food ingredients in any packaged or processed food, this happens again and again, multiple times a day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

plus herbicides, fungicides and pesticides in agricultural products grown in the general way; Hormones and antibiotics in livestock raised in the general way, as well as petrochemicals and other harmful substances that seep into our food from plastic and metal containers.

Every day, we are adding more toxins to various systems in our body. What we feed ourselves is actually harming our nutritional status, and we are doing the exact opposite of absorbing nutrients. These substances even undo the benefits of a healthy diet.

That's nutritional stress.

If we don't drink a soft drink, but open a coconut and drink the juice inside, our body will recognize all the nutrients and all the incredible goodies in every drop of coconut water and absorb these substances and use them for our benefit. In particular, the coconut water tastes really good.

Of course, in any of the vending machines we see in a day, we can't find coconuts. There is also not a single coconut in the freezer of the convenience store, and opening the coconut to drink coconut water is a bit more laborious than opening a can of drink.

In this case, it seems better to drink water instead of sugar.

Well, this health knowledge will be shared here for the time being

Empty Valley Aliang will carry out health knowledge popularization classes online every day, welcome to learn, during which questions will be answered, hoping to solve your health problems.

Many people came here, perhaps through the four words "Empty Valley A Liang", found me on the Internet, and said very excitedly: The result of searching for the four words "Empty Valley A Liang" on the whole network turned out to be you. I am very excited and can't wait to raise my health problems, and Kutani Ah Liang is also very happy to answer your questions. It's just a health problem, and you need to take the first responsibility for your own health and take the initiative to learn for a long time.

I'm Ryo Kutani, a nutritionist who can solve problems