By Bob Livingston
#twill #health #sugar #honey #sbalich
Excess consumption of refined sugars affect the human brain in ways similar to drugs like cocaine and may be even more addictive. That means sugar is just as habit forming as narcotic drugs — and just as bad for us.
One cardiovascular research scientist at St. Luke’s Mid-American Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, found that rats hooked on cocaine will choose sugar over cocaine once it’s introduced as an option.
And did you know that that long-term excess sugar consumption reduces dopamine levels and causes a reduction in the brain’s dopamine receptors?
When dopamine levels drop as a result of long-term consumption of sugar, the brain requires ever-higher levels of sugar consumption to reach the same rewards levels and avoid mild states of depression. Drugs like cocaine, morphine and nicotine are addictive for the same reason – their effect on dopamine levels.
Commercial or white sugar is made from sugarcane, beets, corn… what we tend to think of as natural and healthy. Yet sugar is absolutely void of nutritional value. It’s also far from healthy: During the refining and manufacturing of white sugar anything worth consuming is stripped away or destroyed including enzymes and vitamins, organic acids, protein, nitrogen elements and fats. Worse, added during the process are hydrochloric, phosphoric and sulphuric acids, lime and other foreign substances.
Excess sugar consumption then leads to insulin resistance which leads to excess insulin, which builds up as fat and leads to chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity and heart disease. So we see that excess insulin creates a cascade effect of poor health.
Knowledge of sugar’s adverse effect on our health is nothing new. Dr. Frederick Grant Banting, Nobel laureate and discoverer of insulin, wrote in 1929 in regard to the causes of diabetes: “In the United States the incidence of diabetes has increased proportionately with the per capita consumption of cane-sugar. One cannot help but conclude that in the heating and recrystallization of the natural sugar-cane something is altered which leaves the refined product a dangerous foodstuff.” (Edinb. Med. J. 36, Jan. 18, 1929.)
Dr. Banting would probably roll over in his grave if he somehow knew just how prevalent diabetes is today in the United States. But since Dr. Banting’s conclusions, mountains of well-established peer-reviewed literature has demonstrated that sugar:
- Weakens your immune system
- Causes memory loss
- Accelerates aging of skin
- Ages connective tissue and joints and can cause arthritis
- Leads to or accelerates most all cancers
- Contributes to obesity
- Contributes to lung, skin and allergy problems
- Increases systolic blood pressure
- Contributes to metabolic syndrome and causes diabetes
- Promotes atherosclerosis
- Can cause headaches, including migraines
- Perpetuates irritable bowel syndrome
The sugar deception is a great undisclosed health addiction that has wrecked the health of millions of people.
Sugar consumption of all types has gone from 7 pounds per person per year in 1900 to more than 220 pounds per person per year average today. This by itself is the foundation of sickness and disease that guarantees conventional medicine perpetual multitrillion-dollar annual profits.
All disease directly relates to sugar consumption. This includes white and brown sugar and all the synthetic chemical sugars. Sugar, especially synthetic chemical sweetener, is the basic ingredient used by all commercial food processors.
Sugar used to be available to our ancestors only as fruit or honey — and then only for a few months of the year. Yes, honey is also a sugar. But is it really that much better for you?
Honey: the better sugar
Yes. A thousand times, yes. Honey is the original sugar, and the original healer. It’s been used by the oldest system of medicine on earth, Ayurveda from India, for more than 5,000 years.
One of reasons honey is so much better is because it’s a more complex sugar. This means for your body to break it down, it will have to expend much more energy. That means your body is left to deal with far fewer calories.
Honey also contains trace elements — mineral and vitamins — gathered by bees when traveling from plant to plant. Because honey is not processed, these nutrients can actually benefit you nutritionally.
And the clinical benefits of honey are mounting.
Consider Tualang honey, named for the trees where the bees make their nests. In Malaysia, where the harvesters risk their lives getting the honey from nests because the trees grow as high as 300 feet, Tualang in considered a healing tonic.
Researchers at the School of Medical Sciences at the Universiti Sains in Malaysia designed a study to look at the heart-protective effects of Malaysian Tualang honey against heart attacks in animals.
In all the animals they pre-treated with Tualang honey, it had “significant protective effects on all of the investigated biochemical parameters.” That’s a scientific way of saying that not only did no animal die of a heart attack, but when they tried to induce heart attacks in the animals, the honey protected them.
Even better, if your doctor is constantly hounding you about cholesterol, just eat Tualang honey. In the study I just mentioned, honey restored all the animals’ cholesterol to normal.
Honey appears to increase bile cholesterol excretion and lowers plasma cholesterol levels.
In another study done outside the U.S. realm of cholesterol orthodoxy, where only drugs are used to cut off cholesterol instead of keeping it healthy and normal, researchers added honey to the diets of 70 people at the Army Medical College in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Natural honey consumption not only blocked a rise in blood sugar (great for diabetics) but “significantly” decreased LDL and triglycerides and increased HDL in young healthy adults.
That makes honey more than just a cure for a sweet tooth.
I happen to keep a jar of raw, organic Manuka honey in my pantry because it has high levels of methylglyoxal, the antimicrobial that protects against infections and colds. But really, any of the darker honeys are good. The Journal of Apicultural Research found that darker honey has less water and more antioxidants than light-colored honey.
It’s also a good idea to buy locally produced honey. It will contain pollen spores picked up by the bees from local plants. According to the journal International Archives of Allergy & Immunology, this can increase your immunity to locally induced allergies by building up your natural immunity against them.
One tip for buying pure, unadulterated honey that you will not learn at any grocery store is to look at HMF (Hydroxymethylfurfural) level. Honey with too much HMF can mean it is adulterated with inverted sugars — i.e., white sugar or fructose.
These processed sugars are heated with acid, and industry then calls them “inverted sugars.” The heating creates HMF. Foods with added sugar or high fructose corn syrups can have levels of HMF up to 1,000 mg/kg. Look for a dark honey with less than 100 mg/kg of HMF.
