Why is it that we can drink sugary drinks all day long, but feel sick after eating too much sugar at once?
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Just because we *can* drink sugary drinks all day doesn’t mean we **should**. Each 12 oz can of soda has about 1/4 cups of sugar. Try pouring out that much sugar and think about how you would feel about eating it.
Eating things high in sugar makes us feel sick because sugary foods are often not just full of sugar. They are often full of fat like cakes and cookies which add additional calories. Eating too many calories at once can make us feel sick as we try to digest too many calories at once.
There are different kinds of sugar which your body processes differently. Plain old “sugar” is sucrose, which your body reacts to pretty quickly. If you overindulge, your body will dump a bunch of insulin into your bloodstream pretty quickly, which gives you a sort of “sugar crash”. Meanwhile, most sugary drinks these days have very roughly a mix of 50% glucose and 50% fructose. The glucose is processed about as quickly as sucrose, but the fructose is processed slower, leading to an overall slower reaction.
A lot of it is about what you’re used to.
I used to drink about 2 liters of soda a day. Somehow I lost the taste for it and hadn’t had any soda for years. When I drank half a can of coke after not having had any for a few years I thought I was going to throw up.
I can’t drink more than one 20oz soda every 12 hours or it makes me sick. Conversely I can eat a whole pie if I want and I’ll be really full but otherwise fine.
Everyone can handle different amounts of different sugars and there’s a bunch of kinds.
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