The Secret to Reducing Sugar’s Impact on Your Body

04 Dec The Secret to Reducing Sugar’s Impact on Your Body

Sugar can cause all sorts of problems in your body such as nutritional stress, increased cortisol, adrenal fatigue, diabetes, hormonal issues, fat storage and a whole host of cascading, detrimental effects. Not good! Table sugar (sucrose), high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or other concentrated sweeteners on their own all can cause some of the above issues. However, did you know that if the sweeteners are combined with whole foods—and even whole fruits or whole powders of whole foods—that the spike of insulin slows down dramatically and even lowers the dreaded sugar crash as well? How frickn’ great is that?

That does not mean that you go out and use all the added sugar you want. That would be silly. However, what it does mean is that you can have your sweetness sensibly—and experience less harmful effects on your body—when you consciously combine the sugar with other things such as berries or additional phytonutrient foods (kale, spinach, broccoli, flax seeds, etc.). Even though adding more fruit with your added sugars increases the total sugar content, science has proven that it still has less impact on your body than if you just took the sugar in on its own.

What does that mean for you? First, it is still best to avoid added sugars, especially when they are in sodas, coffees, teas, and things that don’t have other nutrients, fiber, or even fat support to help control the insulin spike. Also, PLEASE avoid chemically created sweeteners (i.e. Equal, NutraSweet, Splenda, Sweet’N Low, etc.) all together since they create a lot of problems in the body way beyond just insulin spikes from the chemicals or xenobiotics, which are foreign chemical substances that are not normally naturally produced by or expected to be present within the human body. These cause unknown side effects that are exponentially more toxic and damaging on the body. (I will get into that on a later blog post.) Therefore, if you are adding sweeteners make sure they have phyto-rich plants and/or fruits with them to help regulate your body’s systems and maintain better balance.

So when you make your smoothie don’t just use protein powder that is sweetened—instead make sure you add fruits, especially berries (strawberries, blueberries, etc.) with it. Or choose smoothies or shakes that have other nutrient-dense food with them. Even though we use some sweeteners in the Shakeology formulas, we use an advanced sweetening system that has more than 50 other whole food powders and several thousand phytonutrients that help to regulate the body. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

My friend, Dr. Gregor who is doing the great unbiased research at NutritionFacts.org has the research articles and the video to back this up. Check it out.

“Your health is yours to create and health is created from the daily choices over time!”

Please let me know your thoughts by commenting below.

Darin