- Sugar lurks in dozens of unsuspecting foods, from yogurt and salad dressings to granola bars and sauces.
- Another big source of sugar in our diets is high-carbohydrate food like bagels and rice, which are quickly broken down into sugar in our bodies.
- Occasionally indulging in a sweet treat isn't a problem, but continuously eating high-sugar foods has been linked with a wide range of health issues.
Sugar lurks in dozens of unsuspecting foods, from yogurts and salad dressings to juices and sauces. Even when sucrose — the popular form of table sugar is not present in a food item, sugar's cousins fructose and dextrose can likely be found somewhere on the label.
To truly avoid sugar, you'd also have to cut out simple carbohydrates, including the ones found in bagels and white rice, since they break down quickly into sugar in the body.
Thankfully, the bulk of scientific research suggests that you don't have to go sugar-free see benefits for your brain and body. Instead, most experts simply recommend cutting back.
Still, given sugar's omnipresence in our lives, reducing your consumption can be hard work. Here are some of the problems that can result when you consistently overindulge your sweet tooth.
Sugar is horrible for your teeth.
When bacteria in your mouth break down sugar, they produce acid, weakening the protective enamel that gives your teeth that glossy feel. If you're only eating it occasionally, that's no big deal — your teeth have a natural repair mechanism called remineralization that helps build back the enamel.
But when you indulge your sweet tooth too often, the repeated cycle of acid attacks can break down the minerals that keep your enamel strong, eventually producing a cavity.
The link between sugar and tooth decay is especially strong when it comes to sweet drinks like soda, since the combination of bubbles and sugar appears to be lethal for your pearly whites. A 2017 study of more than 20,000 adults published in the Journal of Public Health Dentistry found that consuming sugary beverages dramatically increased participant's chances of losing between one and five teeth.
Sugar has been strongly tied to weight gain and obesity.
The authors of a review of 50 studies on diet and weight gain published in the journal Food and Nutrition Research found that, on average, the more refined carbohydrates (such as sugar) that someone ate, the more weight they tended to gain over the study period. Similarly, the researchers behind a large review of 68 studies published in the British Medical Journal found that the more sugar someone consumed, the more they weighed.
In other words, the amount of sugar in a participant's diet could be used to roughly predict their weight, the researchers found.
Eating sugar may make you crave more.
When we eat carbs or sugar, the process involves the pancreas. That small, sweet-potato-shaped organ pumps out insulin, a hormone that mops up some of the sugar floating around in our blood stream. But when we consume large quantities of sugar, the pancreas goes into overdrive and pumps out so much insulin that we wind up craving more carbs or sugar.
Edward Damiano, a diabetes researcher and professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, calls this "the insulin effect": Ironically, you eat sugar, and then you crave more.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider