Sugar: Your Frienemy

image via CBS News

Sugar is like those mean girls in junior high and high school; they're sweet and seemingly harmless, then one day you learn how hurtful they can be.  You think sugar is your friend - she makes everything you eat sweeter and more fun.  Then you make the mistake of crossing her and suddenly she makes it her personal mission to destroy you.  There's that day when your eyes are opened and you suddenly realize sugar is not your friend.  My day came April 13, 2011.  That was the day I learned what a bitch sugar has been to me and to my fellow Americans.  And we let her.  For years.

Last Wednesday the New York Times published an article by Gary Taubes titled, Is Sugar Toxic?  I read and reread it.  I sent it to friends.  I talked about it to co-workers.  It's like a light bulb suddenly went off in my head.  All the pieces fit together, like that moment in Usual Suspects when Kujan discovers he'd had  Keyser Söze in front of him the entire time.

Then I watched the video lecture by Robert Lustig referenced in the Taubes article titled, Sugar: The Bitter Truth.  Sugar isn't just about empty calories leading to malnutrition and a calorie excess (though it's that too), it's about sugar actually actively poisoning your body.  Here's how Lustig and Taubes broke it down for me: sugar comes with an evil ring leader and a side-kick.  Fructose is your true adversary.  Glucose, the other component of sugar, is just along for the ride.  While glucose is metabolized by every cell in your body, fructose is sent straight to your liver (your poison processing center) where, if it's over-inundated, it basically goes into survival mode and the excess poison (fructose, this case) is turned into fat.  Visceral fat, actually - the stuff that clings around your organs and clogs your arteries.

100 years ago we didn't eat nearly the amount of sugar we do today, and it's no wonder our nation has seen a spike in heart disease, cancer, obesity, and diabetes.

image via Perfect Health Diet

Today we eat over 45 lbs of sugar a year.

image via NYT

This is in addition to four gallons of high-fructose corn syrup.

image via NYT

Want to know something else interesting?  The difference between the harmful effects of HFCS and regular table sugar is negligible.  It's true.  Sugar is 50% fructose, 50% glucose.  HFCS is 55% fructose, 45% glucose.  This does not mean that HFCS isn't as terrible for you as you thought.  This means that sugar is worse for you than you ever imagined.  Gives me chills.  How 'bout you?  I, for one, am feeling sick just thinking about how I've been unwittingly slowly killing myself for years.

Before having learned the breakdown of exactly how sugar destroys your system at a cellular level, I knew it wasn't great and was looking for ways to cut back, mostly for vanity reasons: I want to be thinner, I want to have nicer skin, blah blah blah.

A friend suggested agave nectar as an alternative to refined sugar, the philosophy being it comes from the agave plant and is a natural substitute.  So I bought some, and I loved it.  I was replacing any call for sugar with agave nectar.  I even went out and bought it in bulk.  I imagined the plant being tapped much the way we tap maple trees to get maple syrup.  I felt good about making the change to get away from sugar.

Then I got educated.  After reading up on sugar I thought, "hey, I wonder what the molecular makeup of agave nectar is."  So I did a little research.  There are no hard numbers, but I did come across a lot of product-sponsored websites praising the stuff, and several health-centered (non-commercially-motivated) websites debunking what the perceived health benefits are.  The most thorough article I found was written by Kristen of Food Renegade.  (Her blog is fantastic, btw.  So glad I stumbled upon it.)  What I discovered in this research is not only is agave nectar 70-90% fructose (depending on which product website is reporting), but it's also highly processed.  Basically it's what we thought HFCS was to sugar - it's much much worse.  Just great.  Now I have a giant jug of a veritable poison sitting at home.

So to conclude this rather depressing post on a lighter note, I'm going to take this new information and use it as a tool of empowerment to further research nutrition.  Being active is a huge part of staying healthy, but holding control of how we fuel ourselves is key as well.  I'm not saying I will never eat sugar again, but I will be making better-informed decisions about my food and be more aware of what's going into it than I ever have before.