Top 2 Reasons to Limit Your Sugar Intake

Everybody likes to eat sugary foods, but very few think about how much sugar they are consuming.

Along with naturally occurring sugars in foods like fruit and milk, sugar is added to many other food products. It’s in soda, candy, frozen yogurt, cakes, cookies, milk products such as ice cream, and so on.

As there seems to be no end to the amount of sugar in every product, people end up eating more sugar than what is recommended for a healthy diet.

Sugary foods and drinks tend to contain empty calories and usually in excess. Refined sugar has no vitamins, no minerals, no fiber, no protein and no other essential nutrients that are important for your health.

Every organ in your body is affected by sugar, from your brain to your endocrine, digestive, cardiovascular and immune systems. Excess sugar damages your health from head to toe.

Here are the top 2 reasons to limit your sugar intake.

1. Leads to Weight Gain

With so many sugary treats and beverages, people (especially children) are at a higher risk for obesity.

A 2001 study published in The Lancet reports that high intake of sugar-sweetened drinks is associated with obesity in children.

A 2006 study published in the International Journal of Obesity also confirmed the possible role of sugar-sweetened beverages in increasing the risk of obesity.

The empty calories in sugar inhibit your cells from burning fat as well as drives your insulin levels up and messes with your metabolism. All these factors are responsible for weight gain.

A sugary diet causes your body to produce lipoprotein lipase, a type of enzyme that encourages your body to store food in fat cells.

Sugar is also capable of suppressing satiety and increasing ghrelin, the hunger hormone. This means you end up eating more, mostly carbohydrate-rich foods that lead to fat accumulation in the belly. Belly fat in turn increases the risk for heart disease and diabetes.

2. Raises Your Risk for Type 2 Diabetes

Excess sugar is a known cause of insulin resistance and elevated insulin in the blood, which are key contributing factors in Type 2 diabetes that now afflicts about 300 million people worldwide. When you eat more sugar, it leads to a buildup of fatty deposits around the liver. Overtime, it affects the functioning of the pancreas, which in turn leads to insulin resistance.

When the body becomes resistant to insulin, the beta cells in the pancreas eventually become damaged and lose the ability to produce sufficient insulin.

Again, a 2010 study published in Diabetes Care confirms that intake of sugar-sweetened beverages is linked to development of metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes.

Another study published in 2013 in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, concluded that sugar intake is a prominent determinant of diabetes prevalence rates worldwide. This conclusion is based on data from 350,000 people in eight European countries.

A recent 2016 study concluded that a high-fructose diet induced dyslipidemia and hepatic and adipose tissue insulin resistance.