What are the effects of sugar? This will change what you eat
Many people say sugar is energy. They say the worst effect of sugar is eating empty calories that can make you fat. But it’s not energy. It’s a complex substance that affects everything in your body, from the brain to the liver to the colon and everything in between.
Sugar makes you fat and sick. Very sick.
Sugar is not pure energy. Sugar is the union of two substances: glucose (50%) and fructose (50%). Glucose is the fuel of all living cells. It is in all carbohydrates: sugar, fruits, potatoes, tomatoes, bread, etc. When you eat sugar, the glucose in it is distributed throughout the body and your cells use it for energy (by respiration or fermentation). In fact, blood sugar is a reserve of sugar circulating in the blood. Thus consuming glucose is harmless unless you eat much more than your energy needs. In which case it is transformed into fat.
Fructose is different. None of the cells in the human body can metabolize it. Thus it is sent to the liver. The liver is a giant processing plant that transforms all foreign substances into compounds the body can use. This includes poisons, alcohol, drugs. And fructose.
Why is fructose so difficult to metabolize?
We live in a world where we get our food from supermarket shelves and restaurant waiters. But our bodies evolved in a world where we foraged and hunted in wild nature. And in nature fructose is scarce. It is found in fruits. However, an apple has only 11 grams of fructose while a Snickers has 24 grams. And the apple has lots of fiber which slows down digestion and make you feel full. Primitive man also did not have greenhouses, he ate apples only when they were in season and he was lucky to find an apple tree. This meant very few apples overall. The other source of fructose is honey. This was not easy to obtain in the Stone Age. Bees are a strong deterrent when the most advanced technology consists of sharpened rocks.
What are the effects of sugar?
The effects of sugar are, in fact, the effects of fructose. Fructose has multiple ‘fun’ effects:
1. Liver damage
The liver transforms some of the fructose into glycogen. Unless you are doing intensive exercise when you ate it, only a small part of fructose becomes glycogen.
Fructose is one cause for fat in the liver. The other one is alcoholism.
The liver transforms the rest of the fructose into fat. Some of this fat is sent to enlarge existing fat cells and increase your waist size. However, this is not the most troubling part. The troubling part is that the rest of the fat stays in the liver (Sources 1, 2). There should not be fat in the liver because this fat suffocates the liver. The condition is called Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. Sugar causes this (Source 1, 2). This condition often leads to cancer in the liver. The only other cause of fatty liver is severe alcoholism.
31% of American adults and 13% of kids suffer from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. (Sources 1, 2, 3 ). This number has doubled in the past 20 years.
2. Obesity, diabetes and heart disease
Fructose reduces insulin sensitivity. Insulin is a hormone that regulates metabolism. It signals if you ate enough food and tells the body whether to store or use the calories. Reduced insulin sensitivity generates excessive eating. In time the body develops insulin resistance where it does not react to insulin anymore. This is a serious problem that creates diabetes (Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), obesity (Sources: 1, 2, 3) heart disease (Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4) and hypertension (Source: 1, 2 ). People say that you only live once and sugar is one of life’s pleasures. Yet being fat from sugar harms even your brain and thus ability to enjoy life: a recent study showed the brains of obese people are 10 years older than their leaner counterparts (Source).
You might wonder why a substance found in fruits has this harmful effect. There is a rational explanation. In nature, fruits were scarce and very rich in energy. When primitive man found them, it made sense to eat all that he could to build stores of energy for times of hunger. To do this, the body reduced insulin sensitivity so it could eat fruits in excess without feeling full. Now, when there is fructose in every packaged food, this mechanism has become harmful.
Bonus: Ever wonder why so many people wear glasses? Insulin insensitivity increases blood glucose which in time damages eyesight. Primitive man lived just fine without prescription glasses.
3. Indigestion, bloating, IBS
Much of our digestion is done by bacteria in the gut: the microbiome. Modern science shows we are a complex organism, integrated with our microbiome. The makeup of the microbiome affects our health and digestion. It is thought to be a critical factor for Colorectal cancer (CRC) which is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in both men and women.
Around three-quarters of people suffer from fructose intolerance.
Sugar goes to the liver through the gut. Fructose cannot be processed by the human cells (Source). Some the bacteria in the gut can process it through. They eat the fructose and make gas. This gas bloats, exerts pressure and causes gastric reflux and discomfort. The fructose also makes these bacteria multiply (which leads to more gas). This upsets the equilibrium of the microbiome. Some feel the problem immediately. 8 three-quarters of people suffer from fructose intolerance.(Sources 1, 2, 3, 4). Almost everybody suffers on the long term through bloating, diarrhea, flatulence, but even gastric reflux, ulcers, irritable bowel, even Crohn’s and colorectal cancer. Restricting carbohydrates, fructose in particular is shown to reduce such problems for over 80% of patients (Source).
4. Cancer and autoimmune diseases
Colorectal cancer is not the only cancer linked with fructose. When it transforms fructose into fat, the liver excretes waste products called free radicals. These continuously damage human cells until they become cancerous.
Sugar leads to cancer
The body has special scrubber cells in the bloodstream to catch and neutralize free radicals. However, average modern sugar consumption generates more free radicals than the scrubbers can handle (Sources 1, 2, 3). Thus sugar leads to cancer. Another modern food, vegetable oil, also creates free radicals.
5. Rotten teeth
Fossil analysis shows cavities were practically nonexistent for primitive man. The colonial British Empire was the first society to introduce widespread consumption of sugar. The British then became known for their rotten teeth.
Cavity formation starts with plaque. Plaque forms on the teeth. It has bacteria. Specific bacteria in the plaque, such as Streptococcus mutans, secrete acid when they eat certain carbohydrates. This acid eats away at the tooth walls and slowly creates the cavity. The favorite food of such bacteria is dextran. Dextran appears in the mouth from sugar decomposition (Sources: 1, 2, 3)
Bonus: sugar makes food stick to teeth so it produces even more plaque.
The conclusion is simple: fructose from sugar makes you an unattractive fatty with rotten teeth and cancer.
History Post Script: How humans started eating fructose
Queen Elizabeth the 1st was the first British monarch with easy access to large quantities of sugar. She took to eating it in quantities as big as her empire.
At court, sugar produced elaborate dishes. Chefs made sweets, made from sugar paste (a mix of egg, sugar, and gelatin), look like savory foods such as bacon, walnuts, and eggs. ‘Leach’ (or leech) was another popular dish. Leach was just milk, sugar and rosewater. However, possibly two of the most popular of these treats were march-pane and gingerbread. March-pane, like modern marzipan, was made of almond and sugar paste and could be molded into a variety of shapes and elaborately decorated.
What was the effect of all this sugar? A German traveler, Paul Hentzner, paints a descriptive picture: “[Elizabeth I is] in the sixty-fifth year of her age… her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled; eyes small, yet black and pleasant; nose a little hooked; lips narrow and her teeth black (a fault the English seem to suffer from because of their great use of sugar); she wore false hair and that red …”
Why Humans Rock at Physics but Suck at Psychology and Medicine
A story of Galapagos birds and silicon chips
Physics has changed human life a million times over. It regularly produces breakthroughs that seem science fiction: controlled star explosions, putting a lab on a comet, gravitational waves and things too complicated to understand. It’s amazing how scientists can unravel the mysteries of the universe.
One would expect the human body and mind, which we all are familiar with, would pose little challenge. Yet psychology is going through a replication crisis: less than 40% of tested research findings prove true. Then in medicine there is a marked lack of progress: the war on cancer is being lost despite incredibly large investments, medical error might be third leading cause of death. If you look at nutrition, it just a mess, with leading scientific research contradicting the official paradigm.
But why?
We intuitively understand more about our minds and bodies than about quarks and bosons. Why can’t we develop this into a reliable science? And what does it have to do with Galapagos?
There are 5 unavoidable causes for our incompetence is understanding ourselves:
Galileo studied gravitational acceleration by dropping stones from the Tower of Pisa. In the 1940s the U.S. studied syphilis by infecting prisoners and individuals with mental illnesses with syphilis. Both are experiments, one in physics, the other in medicine.
The gold standard of science is the experiment: a procedure undertaken to validate or refute a hypothesis. What Galileo did is admirable, while what the U.S. did is despicable. The inherent limitation of medicine and psychology: experiments can harm human beings. Because of this it is too costly to run most experiments for medicine and psychology. No potential finding is valuable enough to cost human lives.
So medicine and psychology turned to observational studies. Scientists look at groups of people considered to differ in one specific variable (the independent variable). Then they measure various outcomes for these groups. The differences in outcomes between groups are attributed to the independent variable. Observational studies produce uncertain findings. They constitute the reason for much of the uncertainty in human understanding.
But there are more basic limitations than the research design. They have a lot to do with the Galapagos and Darwin’s insights there.
“All our knowledge begins with the senses” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Despite the complex and abstract nature of modern physics, it is rooted in sensory perceptions. Our sensory organs evolved to be great at perceiving the outside world. It was a basic requirement for survival. Physics is creating a model of the world out of what our senses tell us.
When we turn our senses inward, the results are murky. You don’t know how fast your heart is beating. You cannot feel the health of your organs. You cannot even sense if you have foreign bodies inside (like parasites). Likewise we don’t perceive the processes in our minds, we can’t look at synapses or smell which areas of our brain are active. We can only feel the effects of our internal processes.
Why are we in the dark about our own inside? Nothing about us is random. Ever forget to do anything? Maybe an email, or a chore? What if you forgot to breathe? Or did not send the right antibodies to fight an infection?
We think of our conscious mind as our ultimate tool. But it cannot be trusted with the critical workings of our body. So they are automated. They are handled by an unconscious nervous system that does everything without our input.
If we don’t consciously control these inner workings, then we do not need to know what is going on. Our senses do not tell us much about our own body. Except for low-res signals to prompt us to take specific actions (e.g. pain to not walk into walls or touch barbed wire).
Without sensory input, we have to rely on indirect evidence of our own body’s processes. The first physics discovery might have been the intuitive understanding of gravity: objects fall. This is a repeatable, generalizable fact, e.g. all things fall, all the time, in any place on Earth. The first psychological discovery might have been that people get scared if you shout at them. But some people get more scared, some less, and others attack you. And all of them behave differently at different times. This does not fulfill any of the requirements for scientific fact.
Plus, even without the sensory handicap, the human body is harder to study because of:
“The first thing one learns about complex systems is that they are not a sum of body parts: a system is a collection of interactions, not an addition of individual responses.” Nassim Taleb
In the physical world, if a stone falls besides you, you are mostly unaffected. As is most of the rest of the Earth. All events are correlated, but often the interaction effects are small. Scientist can study specific effects in isolation to the rest of the universe.
In the human body, things are different. If you eat a bad egg, everything in your body is affected. Even your mood and thinking. The interaction effects are large and widespread.
And it’s not just temporary events: bacteria in your gut influence your emotions and behaviour, health correlates with happiness and your mind can cause illness. This means it’s impossible to study any one event or one variable in complete isolation. Anything and everything interacts and affects the whole system.
We don’t have the sensory organs to see these interaction effects. So we try to use math to model them. But our mathematical methods are quite bad at understanding interaction effects in general.
In physics scientists use math to describe the world. Math is precise, clear, objective. It’s really hard to misunderstand math without showing you are an idiot. But because math is hard, and math for interconnected systems is especially hard, psychologists and physicians use words instead. Words are much less useful than math. It’s really, really easy to misunderstand words. Often it even makes you look smart.
So:
Physics = testable — easily observable — math (clear)
Human body= not testable — hard to observe — words (unclear)
Already looks hard. But it gets worse, the unclear words compound our:
“Yet weren’t all human beings simply human beings no matter what name you applied to them[?]” Mind-reading robot Giskard, Robots and Empire, Isaac Asimov
When the rock falls, I see it fall. And you see it fall. We agree that the rock fell. Even when we use imprecise words.
When I eat a watermelon, I feel things (feelings, sensations, thoughts). When you eat the same watermelon, you feel different things. We also feel different things when someone shouts at us.
Each of us has a big complex baggage of experiences that shapes our perceptions, emotions and thoughts. When studying the human body and mind, we bring all this baggage with us. When I research depression, I cannot help but think of my own experiences of being depressed.
These biases cloud our judgements. I use poorly designed words to express my biased judgement. Your own biases then make you decode those words into something different than what I intended to express. Yet we might throw words at each other that make us believe we are in agreement.
Maybe we need to design an A.I. that is free of all these biases so it can understand us for us.
Did you see the connection with silicon chips yet? Hint: do our brains resemble computers?
An A.I. would also benefit from not going through our biggest obstacle: evolution
“Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.” Charles Darwin
Evolution is the root cause. We did not evolve to develop perfect medicine to live forever. We did not evolve to make ourselves happy and fulfilled. We evolved to survive and pass our DNA to offspring. That is it.
We did not need an understanding of ourselves for this purpose. It might actually be detrimental. It’s hard to deal with the fact that there is no meaning to life beyond living.
But it’s even more insidious. We tend to think of ourselves as brilliant minds trapped in flawed bodies. A popular metaphor is to think of the brain (and body) as hardware, and the mind as software running on top of this hardware. This is a bad metaphor. It confuses and obfuscates.
A better metaphor is to think of the brain+mind as our Operating System and accompanying hardware. The brain and mind are interconnected. They have a continuous two-way relationship. They have evolved along a very long period of time to fulfill the survival function.
On top of this O.S., we have the applications and files. The software. These are all the ideas, thoughts, models, emotions, concepts that we acquire and integrate in our own lifetime. They make up our individuality, our growth and our self.
Files and applications can be added or erased. But we cannot change the O.S. (we don’t have admin). We cannot see the code behind it or go beyond it, to the BIOS. We have to work with what we have. Trying to create complex abstract theories without taking into account the specifics of the O.S. is akin to playing the latest videogame at high-res on Windows 3.1. It will crash and freeze.
What I’m saying with my metaphor poorly constructed out of imprecise words is that the only clear fact about the human body and mind is it evolved for survival. If we can build a new model of ourselves, starting from that, then we might learn to improve our lives. We cannot have the science of physics, but we can have clarity.
I am creating Avantgarde Savage: a radical new model to create a Better Life for everyone.
We live in a world where most of us are unhappy, in meaningless jobs, lost, complacently unhealthy, lonely and alone. All because we do not understand ourselves.
Avantgarde Savage is born from a multitude of sciences about human mind and brain and body. Based on how Homo Sapiens evolved in nature, we uncover how we can make our lives in the modern world better.
