For example, most fruits have around 10-20g of sugar per cup of fruit. How is this sugar any different than if I were to eat a granola bar with 10g of added sugar? Or have a drink with added sugar? The USDA says to limit added sugar consumption, but says nothing about limiting regular sugar consumption. Is added sugar chemically any different from sugar found in natural foods?
In: Chemistry
Sugar is good for you. Your body uses it to make energy. Your body knows sugar is good for it, so it makes sure your brain thinks sugar is good by making it tasty.
When you eat fruit, your brain is told by your body that this is good, you should eat as much as you can, since you might not have sugar again later.
There is a lot of sugar in fruit, compared to other foods. Because of that, we are drawn to fruit, knowing that we get that happy feeling when we taste the sugar. Fruit also has lots of nutrients, as are most tasty natural foods.
A long time ago, we figured out how to separate sugar from sugary food (in most cases, sugar cane). We started making a lot of sugar so it was easier to get it without having to collect and store fruit.
When people started making food with sugar, we started adding it to other things to make them tastier. We added a little bit, and it was great. After a while, we got used to having sugar in all our food, instead of just the fruit we only got once in a while. We got used to the taste of sugar, and became less sensitive to it.
So they started adding more. And more. And more. Every time we got used to how much sugar was in our food, they added more to make it special again.
Now, there is so much sugar in our food that it’s unhealthy. It’s too easy to get too much sugar, one of the most important nutrients our bodies need. The food is made to be as tasty as possible, without any of the other nutrients that we need. A few bites of food is like eating enough strawberries to make you feel full.
There’s too much sugar for your body to use, but your body hates throwing things away. It still treats all the sugar you get like it might not get it later, and could never throw away something so important for life. So, it stores it. It takes that sugar and bundles it up and stores it as fat. It will only use that fat if it has to.
Eventually, the sugar collection becomes a sugar hoarding problem. Your body never imagined it’d ever have so much extra sugar that there’d be this much fat stored. It isn’t prepared to throw it out. The fat starts piling up. It builds up around your organs and weighs you down so much that your body has to work much harder just to keep your heart beating.
If you had only eaten fruit, you’d never be able to eat enough to have health problems. You’d get nutrients as you went, and you’d fill up before it was too much sugar. Maybe if you only ate fruit, but even then your weight wouldn’t reach a dangerous level.
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