High Fructose Corn Syrup, Sugar and Your Health – Sugar, an Unhealthy Necessity

All By Itself, Sugar Can Do You In.

If you enjoy experiencing bigger and better health problems, get, and keep, plenty of sugar in your diet. Eventually it will kill you. It’s not that sugar is all bad. We need it. We need enough to feed the cells in our body. But sugar, in the quantities most of us are consuming these days, lurks in the background as we experience its hedonistic pleasures, quietly chipping away at our vulnerable immune system and opening the door to arthritis, asthma, high blood pressure, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis. Among other, equally serious illnesses.

It’s important to bear in mind the source of the sugar. Fruit has a lot of it. Vegetables have their share of it. Getting too much sugar from fruits and vegetables is a very remote possibility. But these days we’re being inundated with a source of sugar in a form that did not exist forty years ago. This stuff is everywhere! A hundred years ago, the average daily consumption of sugar was a bit less than one-quarter pound a day. Quite a leap up from 1700, when the average person only consumed about 4 pounds all year. Today we’re consuming double that, an average of a half pound of sugar every day! And for this we can thank the premiere discovery of the 70’s. That’s when the Japanese learned how to make high fructose corn syrup. And we’re effectively being forced to consume it whether we want it or not.

Look at the label on just about any processed food item you can pick up in your local market. Anyone doing so will be hard pressed to find a label that fails to list high fructose corn syrup among its ingredients. In the quantities we’re almost compelled to ingest it, this stuff is sheer poison! High Fructose Corn Syrup turns off the body’s regulating system that tells an individual to stop eating. The stuff makes us hungry, even when we’re not! HFCS It raises our uric acid levels, contributing to gout, heart disease, obesity, and hypertension. It’s cheap, it’s sweeter than table sugar, and it’s addictive, making it a marketer’s dream ingredient.

Ever wonder about the epidemic of childhood hypertension? Just about every soda you can think of is absolutely loaded with HFCS. The majority of Americans, and almost all kids, drink a lot of soda. The recommended amount of fructose to be consumed daily is 25 grams. That much fructose can be beneficial. The average can of soda contains 70 grams. How much do your kids drink? Never mind the “Lite” label. Look at the ingredients.

Fructose increases LDL cholesterol levels (the “bad” kind), and lowers HDL levels (the “good” kind). Fructose, in the quantities consumed today, has a multitude of toxic effects, including fatty liver disease, a condition usually associated with excessive alcohol consumption. Now, if you’re not convinced of all this, get off the stuff for about three months and see how much better you feel. Or would you rather indulge and continue to suffer?