Читать книгу Goodbye Sugar - HOMEMADE LOVING'S - Страница 5

Sugar belongs to the carbohydrates and thus to the three macronutrients besides protein and fat. People cannot live completely without carbohydrates, because otherwise they lack fuel for vital functions. However, there are good and less good carbohydrates, which become good or bad mainly because they are not consumed in today's diet as nature originally intended for us.

Sugar belongs to the short-chain carbohydrates. These provide a quickly available energy boost, because the body does not need long to decompose them into their individual parts. In this form they can be used as fuels and energy suppliers. This begins already in the mouth, because in the saliva enzymes are present, which accomplish the first splitting processes. Such carbohydrates are contained in foods containing sugar, but also in completely natural delicacies. Fructose, for example, is an underestimated supplier of such carbohydrates.

In nature, of course, this form also has its right to exist. A life in the wild was exhausting for our ancestors - for example when they had to flee from hungry predators or fight against them. For this purpose there is quickly available energy in the food, because so we can quickly replenish our empty reserves.

At least as important are the long-chain carbohydrates. The body already has to expend relevant amounts of energy in order to be able to utilize them at all. This means that they supply the body with less energy than they actually contain. That sounds suboptimal at first, because who wants to risk slipping into the energy minus?

This may have been legitimate in the Stone Age. Nowadays our diet has changed, but the sugar metabolism has not. In the past it was rather difficult to get the short-chain carbohydrates, while the long-chain variant was often available. Fruits were our main source of sugar. Stone Age people would have been more than happy with a handful of gummi bears, because what we take for granted today did not exist in nature at that time. Today, on the other hand, we must ensure that we use wholemeal products or eat vegetables instead of fruit so that we do not have a surplus of readily available sugar - and thus an energy surplus that leads directly to the production of new fat cells and thus to obesity.

So sugar isn't bad across the board. Like any poison, it's the dose that matters. Your body can't survive long without carbohydrate energy. But with too much sugar you inevitably gain weight, and that is the problem with our current diet.