The nutrition series continues with another post, this time about the relation between the ever increasing numbers on your scale and sugar.
If you want to know more about why I'm doing this series and about the challenge, you should check out this post here.
Last post I tried to lay the groundwork on which to explain how sugar can lead to diabetes by inducing insulin resistance. But there is another step that paves the way to diabetes and other serious diseases.
I'm talking about obesity, the silent and socially stigmatizing killer that is affecting a huge number of people world wide.
Before I get started dissecting this chubby menace you might want to check out the previous articles written in this series.
What is sugar?
How is sugar metabolised ?
How sugar is damaging your health (part 1)
How sugar is damaging your health (part 2)
Obesity
First of all what is obesity? Maybe someone reading this will say: "I may have a large belly but I'm not that fat right?"
Obesity is a state in which the body has accumulated so much fat that it starts to adversely affect your health. An easy method to determine if your love handles have grown so much that you might be considered obese is to determine your body mass index or BMI. There are a lot of calculators on the internet that can help you determine it.
The BMI is, to put it simply, how much you weigh divided by how tall you are. If your BMI is >30kg/m2 then you are considered obese. This index tells you how much mass does your body have, but it does not factor in if that is mostly muscle mass, bone mass, fat or whatever. So it's far from perfect as a measuring tool, rather it is used as a rough guide.
So if you've calculated your BMI and thinking all hope is lost, you may just have a lot of muscle or may be "big boned" :D ( but let's face it the first option is very unlikely and the second one, well...even more unlikely :P)
Ok, so who cares if you're a bit on the fluffy side right? YOU should be the one who cares because this is the first step on the road leading to a whole range of serious medical conditions.
As you can see in the image above, the list is not short at all and some of those condition can be life threatening or lead to serious impairment.
What has sugar got to do with all this? Let's first look and some empirical data.
Obesity rates have increased with sugar consumption over the past decades. I find it hard to believe that the amount of sugar consumed in the last few years has dropped but let's assume that the data is correct. Even if the correlation is not definitive, it does point the finger at sugar to some degree.
So maybe the research can shed some light here. As I talked about very briefly in the last post about sugar, the white stuff can cause high insulin levels and insulin resistance. How? Well, insulin is there to get glucose into the cells and when you have a lot of it in your bloodstream because all that sugar you eat didn't come with any fiber to mitigate its absorption, the pancreas secretes a lot of insulin to get the job done. The thing is that insulin also makes the cells transform all that excess glucose into fat and promotes fat storage in general. It easy to see how you get fat through this mechanism.
And we must not forget that sugar has fructose in it as well ,which, in excess, is metabolised into fats and leads to fatty liver disease which in turn will further promote fat deposition through liver insulin resistance.
Ok, so your head must be spinning about now. But don't worry I'll get to the solutions to these problems further in the series.
Until then I'll leave with a video and two articles that explain in detail what I tried to summarize in today's post:
Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?
U.S. Adult Consumption of Added Sugars Increased by More Than 30% Over Three Decades
My name is Adrian a.k.a "The nearsighted traveler". I'm a running enthusiast who loves to spend time enjoying nature. I write mostly about running, the places I explore and the interesting stuff I learn here on steemit.
If you are new to this platform you might want to check out these posts:
5 Easy Rules for Navigating The Steem Ecosystem
The 6th Easy Rule for Navigating the Steem Ecosystem
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