Understanding the Tangible Health Impact of Sugar

The Sweet Poison

Sugar is the main cause of most of the diseases and can be very harmful to your body. People nowadays are coming to the realisation that if you eat too much sugar it can breakdown your liver and make you obese. Sugar is not the only cause of these diseases there are many others supplements for sugars that can harm us to. In our health class we learnt how harmful sugar is and how often we expose ourselves to it even if we think we are not.

Sugar is a sweet carbohydrate and is used in many of our foods, even savory foods. Whenever you god to buy anything sweet you should first check the label and see how much sugar is in the item. Manufacturers try to hide these amounts so we don’t notice. The amount of sugar is normally for one serving but you must always remember to check how much you are going to eat and then correspond that with the sugar. For example if somewhere where to buy a pack of cookies and they check the label and it says 2g of sugar, that is for one or two cookies not for the whole pack. We should try to educate people on these labels and how they are placed in a way to trick and deceive us.

Another very interesting topic is the avoided foods list. The avoided foods list is basically types of sugars and poisons that are very harmful and are written in different ways on different packages. An example of an item on the avoided food list is MSG or monosodium glutamate. MSGs are food enhancer, they make the taste more appealing and addictive. There are also many other things we should look out for on labels like artificial flavors, enriched wheat, hydrogenated oils, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, sucralose, aspartame, sodium chloride, soy, corn, soy lecithin, and many more.

The avoided food list may sound harmless, however all of these items also have many different names so we can tell what they. For example MSG is written on different packages as natural flavoring, yeast extract, autolyzed yeast extract, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, caseinate, textured protein, and hydrolyzed pea protein. We need to raise the awareness and teach people of all these chemicals so we don’t digest them and ruin our bodies. Finally one way to not have to deal with any of these issues is to eat whole and healthy foods and not packaged items. When a food is whole or unprocessed it has all the fibers and nutrients but when the food gets pasteurized or processed it loses the good nutrients and is given additives to give it shelf life.

In conclusion this health class has been very informative and has taught me about the types of sugars and how sugar can harm you when in excess. I also learned that there is a list of foods that are very harmful and we should always avoid them. This class has changed my views on sugar and has shown the real danger of this sweet poison.