Reducing sugar consumption should guide public policy and our personal decisions – but we first need to understand what it does to our bodies. Here’s the best/shortest explanation I can muster:
Our body is made up of 37 billion interconnected cells, and each one is a self-contained energy factory. The preferred fuel for cells is glucose, a simple sugar primarily derived from the starches, carbohydrates, and processed sugars we eat. When glucose enters our bloodstream from food, our body releases a hormone called insulin, which enables that glucose to enter each cell. Mitochondria are the “engine” inside the cell, converting the glucose to create the energy (ATP) that allows our cells and bodies to run. ATP is the currency our life runs on, and its production is under siege due to the damage our modern lifestyles are inflicting on our mitochondria.
In a healthy state, this conversion of glucose to ATP works well, and we have adequate energy to function. “Working well” means that glucose is taken up appropriately by the cell through membrane channels so it can get to the mitochondria which see to it that the cell is structurally sound and has all the cofactors it needs to do its job.
But our modern diets and lifestyles have hijacked our cells’ ability to perform this fundamental activity and collectively damaged the mitochondria’s ability to create energy. We have completely changed our food source from predominantly natural foods to mostly processed foods in the past 150 years. Processed foods are almost exclusively derived from corn, wheat, and sugar – all of which convert to simple sugars like glucose in the body. When cells are bombarded with more glucose than they can handle, they attempt to block its entry, which causes the body to produce excess insulin to continue driving glucose into the cell. High insulin levels have a secondary effect of promoting the storage of that excess glucose as fat inside the cell, which serves to clog up cells with fats and makes insulin signaling even less effective (thus, in a vicious cycle, drives higher insulin levels, and promotes more fat storage).
Additionally, the excess fructose we are consuming due to the emergence of concentrated high fructose corn syrup in the 1970s employs a glucose-independent mechanism to compound the dysfunction of the cell’s energy-producing capabilities. Fructose (which is also found in fruit) actually shuts down our body’s hunger signals — because for most of history, if humans found a patch of fruit, they would benefit from eating as much as they could, which would then store up excess energy (fat) that could be burned during time with little food. But now we are in a constant fed state, and food is chemically weaponized to contain this additive that shuts off our hunger queues.
Again, this is not a marginal issue. We all know that Americans eat too much sugar – we now consume more than 100 times more sugar than we did 150 years ago!
Medical figures are constantly trying to tell us how “complicated” and “multifaceted” our health issues are. Healthcare is the largest and fastest-growing industry in the United States, so it benefits this ecosystem to disempower/confuse patients as much as possible and position prescription pads and scalpels as the only credible solutions. But there is one blaring, universal fact that keeps coming up as I have immersed myself in these issues over the past two years: preventing and reversing chronic disease, which comprises 90% of medical costs and leads to 80% of deaths, actually isn’t that complicated.
The unprecedented amounts of excess sugar are leading to unprecedented cellular dysfunction. Organs (skin, heart, brain, liver) are nothing more than groups of cells. Unsurprisingly, cellular dysfunction leads to organ dysfunction. And organ dysfunction is a disease.
Modern medicine, which breaks disease into silos and prescribes a different pill for a different solution, is like an auto mechanic giving a car a new paint job after it has crashed. Our diet – primarily added sugar – is destroying our bodies’ ability to make energy. Our engines are broken on a systemic scale. Until we address that – no other fix will work. I’m very optimistic we’ll get to a better place, but it will only come from patients taking matters into their own hands…
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Calley Means 