India Herbs

Publication: New Straits Times

Author: Rajen M

Date: January 29, 2007 

SUGAR is an important fuel. It converts to energy. However, sugar is also very toxic. It causes cells all over the body to shrink and crinkle due a process called osmosis.

In the long term, this leads to tissue damage and death as any doctor treating end-stage diabetes will tell you.

In fact, sugar is so toxic and damaging that it cannot even be stored in the body.

Small amounts of excess sugar get converted to glycogen (an animal starch) and is stored in the liver.

All the other excess needs are burnt as energy or converted to fats — triglycerides, cholesterols and, of course, the ugly stored fat that sits around your hips or hangs from the chin.

If you consume a lot of sugar, you have to either exercise a lot to burn it off or get ready to be sick.

Tight Range

Understandably, your blood sugar is managed in a very tight range.

When this fine control goes out of whack, you end up with Type 2 diabetes (which used to be called maturity onset diabetes).

Nature has provided very well over millions of years of our evolution. You actually need very little sugar.

Fat and protein readily get converted to sugar if there is a need.

In fact, in caveman times, pure sugar — in any form — was never consumed. The only sweet stuff in the diet then were fruits and, very rarely, honey.

Fruit sugar — fructose — does not convert to blood sugar instantly, unlike pure table sugar. In takes more than half an hour and many chemical reactions.

Diabetic Advisory

With this background, why in the world would the American Diabetic Association (ADA) executives want you to believe that a steady daily intake of sugar is not potentially harmful to your health?

Could it be because one of ADA’s primary corporate sponsors is a large chocolate maker?

The last 2006 issue of the journal Diabetes (published by ADA) contains research with “evidence” that an intake of 200 grammes of sugar daily has no effect on insulin sensitivity. Eating sugar causes insulin to rise.

For some perspective, consider that a single typical “chocolate egg” contains 25 grammes. That is 2½ teaspoons of sugar.

Let us take a closer look at the study conducted at the Royal Victoria Hospital and Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

In the introduction to the study, the Belfast team offers this observation: “Current guidelines for the healthy population advise restriction in sucrose intake.”

So far, so good. Read on. It gets laughable.

The study involved two diets with the same amounts of vitamins, fibre and calories.

There were different amounts of sugar: 200 grammes per day of sucrose in one diet versus 80 grammes on the other.

Thirteen healthy subjects with an average age of 33 were divided into two groups. They consumed one of the two diets for six weeks.

After a four-week rest and washout period, the groups switched diets for an additional six weeks.

The results seem amazing at first glance. There was no weight variation in either group.

There were no changes in glycemic profiles or in artery elasticity. There was no impact on insulin sensitivity.

But hang on! “Six weeks” and “healthy, average age of 33″? Are we being taken for a ride?

The subjects followed the sugar-loaded diet for just 1½ months. Six weeks!

That’s absurd! Insulin insensitivity (the state that leads to diabetes) typically develops over a period of years.

Healthy people in their early 30s don’t develop insulin insensitivity in just 42 days. And you do not need an experiment to prove that.

Amazingly, the researchers actually lead their study by acknowledging that the “long-term impact” of a high sucrose diet had not been established.

If that is the case, why would they even bother with such an observation in a short-term study?

Talk about ridiculous science. Should we be eating milk chocolate based in this?

Glycemic Index

Steven Hunter, lead researcher for the Belfast team, told Food Navigator USA: “Sugar has traditionally been linked to the development of diabetes. “These findings challenge that thinking.”

I am reminded of a quote by Richard Kahn (chief scientific and medical officer for the ADA) in 2005, speaking to an interviewer for the Corporate Crime Reporter:

“There is not a shred of evidence that sugar per se has anything to do with getting diabetes.”

Which cave has he been living in all these years?

Has he even heard about the whole new and increasingly scientifically validated body of knowledge called the “glycemic index” and “glycemic load”?

Apparently, in the upside-down ADA world, consuming sugar is just fine. And, even if it’s not, at least it’s good for business.

Here is my dare to the ADA and the Irish University teams: Try the same protocols on 13 diabetics. To paraphrase, an old saying, “the proof of the sugar’s safety should be in the eating”.

The Issue

1. An American Diabetic Association (ADA) study shockingly concludes that eating table sugar does not cause diabetes.

2. The subjects are just 13 healthy volunteers with an average age of 33.

3. The sweeping conclusions blatantly ignore the mountains of data that strongly point to sugar (and other refined carbohydrates) as leading to diabetes.

4. The ADA is challenged to do a similar study with diabetics.

How insulin got its name

IN 1910, Sir Edward Albert Sharplet-Schafer suggested people with diabetes were deficient in a single chemical that was normally produced by the pancreas.

He proposed calling this substance “insulin”. The term is derived from the Latin insula, meaning island, in reference to the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that produce insulin.

 

Trackback URI | Comments RSS