Processed sugar and all its substitutes such as agave, stevia, aspartame, also organic raw honey are linked to metabolic syndome. Metabolic syndrome is examplified as a set of syndromes including high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, high blood sugar levels and abdominal fat. Well-known conditions to increase the risk of developing diabetes and heart diseases! Therefore, for each of us it will be wise to consider reducing sugar intake, at one point, including the healthy ones. I will explain why we should reduce healthy sugar intake and also its full unattainability in the following lines of my article.
We can easily say that sugar addiction is a behavioral addiction. Pychiatric terminology does not take it as an addiction. Having said that sugar withdrawal mimics conditions common to anxiety and depression such as fatigue, irritability, sadness, bloating, headaches. That is why it is non-neglectable from mental health standpoint.
Sugar addiction is not simply associated with consumming too much sweat. The matter of fact is that many food of our diet routine or conventional, mainstream, typical foods of our daily lives have added sugar to make them more tasteful. For instance yoğurt, salad dressings and almost anything fat free have added sugar. Just about the presence of sugar in those foods may cause you to develop sugar addiction even you do not eat big sweets.
Now two queastions may come to minds: How to understand the sugar addiction and how to break the sugar cycle?
If you crave foods even when you are not hungry and if you have a short term energy boost that quickly loses out after you eat, the sugar addiction may be considered.
And so how to break through the cycle and to retrain the taste buds to prefer savory foods?
Slowly and stubbornely eliminating table sugar and reducing all sugar substitutes such as corn syrup, agave nectar, brown rice syrup, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, evaporated cane juice, sucrose, malt syrup and lactose from your diet is the path. Sugar is sugar and raw organic honey is also sugar and does not reduce sugar intake. And as I’ve just mentioned above all kind of sugar are associated with metabolic syndrome and does not deadstart or reset your taste buds, keep you addicted to sugar and crave desserts.
But we should keep realistic and the fact is that remaining zero sugar is unattainable as you’ll still get fructose from fruits and glucose from carbonhydrate breakdown of vegetables and grains.
So realistically what can be done is to reduce, at least, added sugar sources, to keep sticked to our discipline, to our motivation about health benefits of less sugar life, to read information on each and every product tag.
Here, the music to our ears is that once we get accustomed to only consume natural sugar from fruits and vegetables it will be difficult for us to take and digest sugar from processed foods. Our sharpness about our food choices will be our effortless routines or patterns.
References
Shearer, J., & Swithers, S. E. (2016). Artificial sweeteners and metabolic dysregulation: lessons learned from agriculture and the laboratory. Reviews in endocrine and metabolic disorders, 17, 179-186.
Westwater, M. L., Fletcher, P. C., & Ziauddeen, H. (2016). Sugar addiction: the state of the science. European journal of nutrition, 55(2), 55-69.