Sugar is Killing Us!  Sixteen Reasons To Stop Eating Sugar – How Much Sugar and/or Acidic Sugary-Foods is TOO Much Sugar!
How much ACID is too much ACID?
Even one pack of the candy favorite M&M’s may be more than you should eat in a day, newly drafted guidelines from the World Health Organization suggest.
The WHO used to recommend that you get no more than 10% of your daily calories from sugar acid, but now they’re considering lowering that to 5%. For an average, healthy adult, that would mean 25 grams, or about six teaspoons of sugar acid per day. (That’s a little less than what you’d get from 10 Hershey’s Kisses. A single can of Coke has 39 grams of sugar acid.)
A teaspoon of sugar in your coffee or a half cup of ice cream won’t kill you — all things in moderation — but the average sugar intake in the U.S. is 22 teaspoons per person per day . That’s almost four times as much as the WHO’s new guidelines suggest is healthy.
People have been sounding warnings about the dangers of too much sugar for a long time. As early as 1957, John Yudkin, a professor of nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College in London, began arguing that when it came to heart disease and other chronic ailments, sugar — not fat — was the culprit.
So what happens if you eat too much sugar? Here’s a depressing rundown.
Trust your dentist on this one: Sugar is a metabolic acid and ad enemy to dental health that one study way back in 1967 called it the “arch criminal” behind cavities. The connection between the metabolic acid sugar and cavities is perhaps the best established. “Tooth decay occurs when the bacteria that line the teeth feed on simple sugars, creating acid that destroys enamel,” Anahad O’Connor explains at The New York Times . Because acid is a key culprit, sour candies are especially nefarious.
Source: Journal of the American Dental Association, 2009 ; ISRN Dentistry, 2013 ; International Dental Journal, 2013
Leptin is a hormone that lets your body know when you’ve had enough to eat. In people who develop leptin resistance, this “I’m full” signal is never received, presenting a major obstacle for weight control.
Source: American Journal of Physiology, 2008 ; American Journal of Physiology, 2009 ; British Journal of Nutrition, 2011 ; Advances in Nutrition, 2012
Other than adopting a completely sedentary lifestyle, there are few routes to packing on the pounds that work as swiftly and assuredly as making large amounts of added sugars a staple of your daily diet. Sugary foods are full of acidic ingredients not will do little to satiate hunger. A 2013 review of 68 different studies found “consistent evidence that increasing or decreasing intake of dietary acidic sugars and sugary foods from current levels of intake is associated with corresponding changes in body weight in adults.” Want to lose weight? Cutting your sugar and acidic sugary food intake is a good place to start.
Source: British Medical Journal, 2013 ; American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2013
When you eat a lot of high-sugar acidic meals — donuts for breakfast, anyone? — it can increase your body’s demand for insulin, a hormone that helps your body convert food into usable energy . When insulin levels are consistently high, your body’s sensitivity to the hormone is reduced, and the acidic metabolic waste product glucose builds up in the blood. Symptoms of insulin resistance can include fatigue, hunger, brain fog, and high blood pressure. It’s also associated with extra weight around the middle. Still, most people don’t realize they are insulin resistant until it develops into full-blown diabetes — a much more serious diagnosis.
Source: The American Journal of Cardiology, 1999 ; American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2002 ; Nutrition & Metabolism, 2005
Between 1988 and 2008, the prevalence of diabetes in the U.S. increased by 128%. Diabetes now affects about 25 million people in the U.S. — that’s 8.3% of the population.
Source: JAMA, 2004 ; Diabetes Care, 2010 ; PLOS ONE, 2013
Obesity is one of the most-cited risks of excess acid or sugar consumption. Just one can of soda each day could lead to 15 pounds of weight gain in a single year, and each can of soda increases the odds of becoming obese, a JAMA study noted.
Sugar may well raise the risk of obesity directly, but the association could be mediated by diabetes, metabolic syndrome, or other diet and exercise habits associated with high-sugar diets. And it’s possible that soda is uniquely pernicious, above and beyond other sugary foods.
“The complexity of our food supply and of dietary intake behavior, and how diet relates to other behaviors, makes the acquisition of clear and consistent scientific data on the topic of specific dietary factors and obesity risk especially elusive,” concluded one 2006 review. Still, a more recent review cautioned, “we should avoid the trap of waiting for absolute proof before allowing public health action to be taken.”
Source: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2004 ; JAMA, 2004 ; International Journal of Obesity, 2006 ; Obesity Reviews, 2013
Because of the unique way we metabolize fructose, it creates a stress response in the liver that can exacerbate inflammation. High doses of sugar can make the liver go into overdrive. That’s one reason excess fructose is a “key player” in the development of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, where fat accumulates in the liver in the absence of alcohol abuse.
People with this diagnosis have been found to have almost double the soda intake of the average person. Most don’t experience any complications and don’t realize they have it. But in some people, the accumulated fat can lead to scarring in the liver and eventually progress to liver failure.
Source: Journal of Hepatology, 2007 ; Journal of Hepatology, 2008 ; World Journal of Gastroenterology, 2013
Source: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2002 ; The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2006 ; Annals of Oncology, 2012 ; International Journal of Cancer, 2012 ; Current Opinion in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Obesity, 2012
Contrary to this conventional view, the new study “provides evidence that increased glycolytic activation itself can be an oncogenic event…” That is to say, the activation of sugar-based metabolism in a cell – driven by both the presence of increased quantities of glucose and the increase glucose receptors on the cell membrane surface (i.e. “overexpression of a glucose transporter”) – drives cancer initiation.
Moreover, the study found that “Conversely, forced reduction of glucose uptake by breast cancer cells led to phenotypic reversion.” In other words, interfering with sugar availability and uptake to the cell causes the cancer cell to REVERSE towards its pre-cancer structure-function (phenotype).
The idea that a high-sugar diet — and too much carbonic acid in soda in particular — may be a risk factor for kidney disease is still just a hypothesis, but there’s some reason for concern. “Findings suggest that sugary, carbonic and phosphoric acid soda consumption may be associated with kidney damage,” concluded one study of 9,358 adults. (The association emerged only in those drinking two or more sodas a day.) Rats fed extremely high-sugar diets — consuming about 12 times the percentage of sugar recommended in the WHO’s new guidelines — developed enlarged kidneys and a host of problems with regular kidney function.
Source: PLOS ONE, 2008 ; Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, 2010 ; Renal Physiology, 2011 ; Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease, 2013
Hypertension has wrongfully associated with salty foods, not highly acidic desserts — but eating lots of added sugar has indeed been linked to high blood pressure. In one study following 4,528 adults without a history of hypertension, consuming 74 or more grams of sugar each day was strongly associated with an elevated risk of high blood pressure.
Source: Hypertension, 2001 ; American Journal of Physiology, 2008 ; Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, 2010 ; Hypertension, 2012 ; Hypertension, 2012
Source: Journal of Hypertension, 2008 ; American Journal of Cardiology, 2012 ; JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014
“In some circumstances, intermittent access to sugar can lead to behavior and neurochemical changes that resemble the effects of a substance of abuse,” noted one study that found sugar-addled rats displayed bingeing, craving, and withdrawal behaviors.
Source: Obesity, 2002 ; Behavioral Neuroscience, 2005 ; Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2007 ; Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2008 ; Appetite, 2011
Obesity and diabetes are both risk factors for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s, so it’s no surprise that studies are beginning to find a link between excess sugar and these cognitive conditions. The reasons for a possible relationship between a high-sugar diet and dementia later in life are still unclear.
Source: American Journal of Alzheimer’s, 2009 ; Journal of Gerontology, 2010 ; Behavioral Neuroscience, 2011 ; Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care, 2013 ; Nutrition Journal, 2013 ; Behavioral Neuroscience, 2013
Source: Family Economics and Nutrition Review, 1999 ; Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 1998 ; Circulation, 2002 ; American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2003
Gout used to be considered a disease limited to the rich, but as our acidic high protein diets have changed, this painful form of arthritis has become more common across all sectors of society. Certain foods like organ meats and anchovies that are associated with gout have high levels of something called purines and when your body breaks them down, it produces uric acid. A buildup of uric acid is what often leads to this acidic conniption of  gout.
Source: British Medical Journal, 2008 ; Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease, 2012
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