10 Reasons Why Sugar is Bad For You

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1. Added Sugar Contains No Essential Nutrients and is Bad For Your Teeth You've probably heard this a million times before... but it's worth repeating.


Added sugars (like sucrose and high fructose corn syrup) contain a whole bunch of calories with NO essential nutrients. For this reason, they are called "empty" calories. There are no proteins, essential fats, vitamins or minerals in sugar... just pure energy. When people eat up to 10-20% of calories as sugar (or more), this can become a major problem and contribute to nutrient deficiencies. Sugar is also very bad for the teeth, because it provides easily digestible energy for the bad bacteria in the mouth.



In order to understand what is so bad about sugar, then you need to understand what it is made of. Before sugar enters the bloodstream from the digestive tract, it is broken down into two simple sugars... glucose and fructose.

- Glucose is found in every living cell on the planet. If we don't get it from the diet, our bodies produce it.











Insulin is a very important hormone in the body. It allows glucose (blood sugar) to enter cells from the bloodstream and tells the cells to start burning glucose instead of fat. Having too much glucose in the blood is very harmful and one of the reasons for complications of diabetes, like blindness.

One feature of the metabolic dysfunction that is caused by the Western diet, is that insulin stops working as it should. The cells become "resistant" to it. This is also known as insulin resistance, which is believed to be a leading driver of many diseases... including metabolic syndrome, obesity, cardiovascular disease and especially type II diabetes.



5. The Insulin Resistance Can Progress to Type II Diabetes


Eventually, as insulin resistance becomes progressively worse, the pancreas can't keep up with the demand of producing enough insulin to keep blood sugar levels down. At this point, blood sugar levels skyrocket and a diagnosis of type II diabetes is made.



6. Sugar Can Give You Cancer






Not all calories are created equal. Different foods can have different effects on our brains and the hormones that control food intake. Studies show that fructose doesn't have the same kind of effect on satiety as glucose. In one study, people drank either a fructose-sweetened drink or a glucose-sweetened drink.

Afterwards, the fructose drinkers had much less activity in the satiety centers of the brain and felt hungrier. There is also a study where fructose didn't lower the hunger hormone ghrelin nearly as much as glucose did. Over time, because the calories from sugar aren't as fulfilling, this can translate into an increased calorie intake.



Sugar can be addictive for a lot of people. Like abusive drugs, sugar causes a release of dopamine in the reward center of the brain. The problem with sugar and many junk foods is that they can cause massive dopamine release... much more than we were ever exposed to from foods found in nature.

For this reason, people who have a susceptibility to addiction can become strongly addicted to sugar and other junk foods. The "everything in moderation" message may be a bad idea for people who are addicted to junk food... because the only thing that works for true addiction is abstinence.



The way sugar affects hormones and the brain is a recipe for fat gain disaster. It leads to decreased satiety... and can get people addicted so that they lose control over their consumption. Not surprisingly, people who consume the most sugar are by far the most likely to become overweight or obese. This applies to all age groups.

Many studies have examined the link between sugar consumption and obesity and found a strong statistical association. The link is especially strong in children, where each daily serving of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with a whopping 60% increased risk of obesity. One of the most important things you can do if you need to lose weight is to significantly cut back on sugar consumption.


10. It Ain't The Fat... It's Sugar That Raises Your Cholesterol and Gives You Heart Disease

For many decades, people have blamed saturated fat for heart disease... which is the #1 killer in the world. However... new studies are showing that saturated fat is harmless.

The evidence is mounting that sugar, NOT fat, may be one of the leading drivers of heart disease via the harmful effects of fructose on metabolism. Studies show that large amounts of fructose can raise triglycerides, small, dense LDL and oxidized LDL (very, very bad), raise blood glucose and insulin levels and increase abdominal obesity -- in as little as 10 weeks.

These are all major risk factors for heart disease. Not surprisingly, many observational studies find a strong statistical association between sugar consumption and the risk of heart disease.


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