I Appreciate opinions and facts.

Robin

One is complex carbohydrates that must be broken down and slowly released into the blood levels. The other is a fast-spiking.....then low spiking blood sugar agent. White sugar and simple carbs cause the body to release inordinate amounts of insulin....eventually causing insulin resistance....or Type II diabetes.

-These are just my opinions...but I think they are correct! LOL.

-David Mason

Table sugar is sucrose.

Sucrose is a disaccharide (two-sugar) made of alternating units of glucose + fructose

Sucrose is broken down into glucose and fructose before it is absorbed.

Wild fruits are mostly hexose (mostly glucose + some fructose and very little sucrose).

Cultivated fruit is high in sucrose.

Sucrose is sweeter than glucose.

Cultivated fruit is sweeter than wild fruit.

Cultivated fruit tends to have less protein, less fat (especially essential fatty acids), and less fiber than wild fruit.

What is really important regarding sugar is molecular transport, absorption, and insulin production.

With fruit, there is fiber to slow these processes down (unless you juice, which is tacit to throwing away the best part!).

With table sugar, there is no fiber so there can be problems when people overindulge.

If you wish for your diet to most closely resemble the wild primate diet of predominantly wild fruits, you can achieve it by adding some leaves and nuts/seeds to your cultivated fruit diet. How much leafy content is debatable. Probably somewhere between 5-`10% is a good aim. It's a lot more than what it sounds like because leaves have very few calories.

The first makes me feel mmm, the second makes me feel ughh.

Gosia


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So it's not the white sugar itself that causes problems, it's that it is released so much of it into the bloodstream all at once?

It's not only how fast it gets into your bloodstream and processed (and the fact that you can dump so much of it into your bloodstream so quickly). It is also the lack of fiber as previously mentioned.

But there is one more very important thing about white sugar: no vitamins, no minerals, and no protective phytochemicals. It is energy and will allow your body to do useful work, but it is just plain calories, basically empty calories with no micronutrients or beneficial plant compounds like antioxidants etc.

Brown is not significantly better, there are only very small traces of such nutrients in it.

I don't think that maple syrup, agave nectar, etc. are much better, either. With such sweeteners, the sugar substrate varies and the GI index also varies because GI measures glucose, not fructose, but the end results may be similar in that they are allowing for a rapid dumping without micronutrients into the bloodstream. Also fructose has issues of its own, such as a higher propensity to form glycotoxins compared to glucose.

It's really best to avoid overt fiberless processed sweeteners on the whole. A little bit for a special occasion, ok, but try to stick with real fruit most of the time.

Okey. I think I get the picture. What comes to me is that when you load your body with so much pure energy and it creates a "high" there'll also be a "low" and this unbalance creates health problems. Also, the less you use the energy that have been given to you, the more likely it is to lay on fat.

I'll start buying wild fruit when they start selling it. I still think domestic fruit is the best thing available compared to everything else in the supermarket.

In general, eating whole fresh ripe produce is a health food, and eating foods that have been refined and reduced just to 1 nutrient (in sugar it's simple carbohydrates, in oil it's fat) is unhealthy and addictive and results in empty calories.

So that means fruit juices are bad too because the fiber has been removed and it's no better then drinking a glass of maple syrup.

Maple syrup and other sweeteners are not refined. They don't have fiber but are usually only consumed mixed up with foods and dishes that do have fiber, not consumed on their own. They also have nutrients and minerals in them.

White sugar however even if mixed with fiber foods has had all of it's nutrients and minerals stripped from it. So in order to process it the body has to actually use it's own supply of minerals and nutrients. So eating refined white sugar like refined white flour actually depletes the body of nutrition and causes defficiencies. Fruit, whole fruit doesn't do that. It is full of not only fiber but nutrition and bio-factors and anti-oxidants. You can still overdo it though, but in moderation it's good. Nothing like refined white sugar on the body.

Now if you are going to have sugar better to have something not refined or stripped like unrefined evaporated cane juice crystals.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/27/2006 01:51AM by nik.

Can anyone reccomend me a book about sugar or digestion?