Sugar is a Poison!

As a teenager, I used to have two spoonful’s of sugar in my tea. As a rather physically lazy and large young man, I soon realised that I would put on weight (as a kapha body-type if using the language of Ayurveda!). So, I gradually cut down over six months to no sugar. After that, of course tea with sugar in tasted disgusting. 

Forty years later; I am now convinced that sugar is basically a poison and the most widely “pushed” drug in the world. It does more damage than tobacco, or cocaine. By sugar, I don’t just mean white sugar; I mean all types of sugars. That is all chemicals that end in “……ose”: glucose, sucrose, fructose, lactose, dextrose, maltose. Plus anything called syrup. It can seem natural, even wholesome like honey or unnatural like high fructose corn syrup. It is all more or less the same. It is all damaging. It is all highly addictive by hitting the dopamine reward centres in the brain. 

As an addictive drug, it is used to sell a staggering range of products; I can hardly call them foods. There are the obvious ones, like a can of soda containing 11 teaspoons of sugar; and there are the less obvious, like bottles of soy sauce where sugar is the second ingredient after water; or cans of baked beans and jars of peanut butter.  Many products that were, or could be, healthy like natural live yogurt are hard to find amongst the flavoured sweetened yogurts in most shops.

So depending on where you look for data the Average American now consumes up to 300 lbs of sugar a year. Four hundred years ago it was 2 lbs of sugar. The Ancient Romans and later people used sugar just to sweeten bitter herbal medicines. 

In fact; things are even worse than this. We think of fruit as natural and wholesome; but all the fruit we eat today has drastically changed through selective breeding from The Middle Ages. They have all been bred to have more sweet flesh.  Every market stall selling fruit proclaims that these are “sweet” grapes, or peaches or apples….And making fruit in to fruit juice makes it even sweeter and absorbed faster. Drinking a glass of pineapple juice gives your body a huge hit of sugar.

Medieval banana

Sorry, but it gets even worse. Our body converts starch and many carbohydrates in to sugar. This starts even in the mouth. I remember at school in science being asked to chew a piece of raw potato and in a minute or so getting the sweetness of sugar in the mouth.  As with fruit; the grains we now eat as bread and cakes are far from the ancient varieties. Some complex carbohydrates like puffed rice are converted more and faster than white sugar. 

Sugars and some carbs are fast becoming the primary source of calories in our diet. Sugar, not itself an opioid peptide, is known to increase brain levels of endongenous morphine and may produce metabolic products in the brain very similar to those produced by morphine. Fructose in isolated or concentrated form is highly toxic. Sugar is a poison. Not an acute poison like arsenic, but a chronic poison which over years promotes inflammation and diseases including cancer. It leads to obesity, heart disease and diabetes where the body can no longer cope with the sugar. It is an addictive poison. John Yudkin, a professor of nutrition published his book "Pure White and Deadly" nearly 50 years ago and was ignored.

The industrial revolution was able to happen because of the development of the steam engine which used coal as a fuel to power the machines and the development of easy sources of sugar which was the cheap fuel to power the workers in the factories. Now sugar is pumped in to everything to create addiction. This is quite deliberate and a merciless attack on the worlds population by big business. It completely dwarfs the whole of the illegal drug industry.

At the moment I am on a very low carbohydrate and no sugar diet and it is hard to go in to any small shop and in all the rows of shelves of products, to find anything I can eat at all; other that buy a bottle of water (and I am certainly not paying for something that comes out of taps!). The poorer the area the more shops are filled with products full of sugar, and carbohydrates. This is true throughout the world. Sugar and carbs are not necessary; my body is running perfectly well on fats and protein. Hiding in plain sight, in every corner shop is a blatant and successful attempt to enslave the world through addiction to sugar. 

Breast milk is sweet, so sugar gives us an artificial sense of comfort. Instead, we could seek the “sweetness of life”. If we are really adult (and consumer culture keeps us as needy children wanting the reward of sugar); then the sweetness of life comes from a deep connection to Self, to others and to Nature. This is the only real cure for addiction.