It’s High Time You Cut the Sugar and Here’s Why

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Out of the five basic tastes that everyone experiences whenever eating or drinking something, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone with an innate preference for something that doesn’t taste sweet. What causes most foods and drinks to taste sweet is the sugar that is added to them. Eating food or taking a drink with sugar added to it is absolutely fine when you’re doing so in moderation. However, processed foods usually contain too much sugar which you’re consuming, sometimes without you even knowing about it until it’s too late. In fact, the average American takes in around 66 pounds of added sugar each year! To protect your health and well-being, it’s high time you cut the sugar and here’s why.

What Are Some of the Reasons for You to Cut the Sugar?

With the prevalence of processed foods in the typical modern-day diet, added sugar has become quite commonplace already. In fact, some manufacturers of processed foods don’t even bother putting the amount of added sugar in the labels of their products. As a result, there might be some instances when you think you’re in full control of your sugar when in fact you’ve already consumed too much of it. Still, whether you’re religiously monitoring your intake of it or not, you would want to find out which foods and drinks contain too much sugar so that you can stop consuming them. To help you ease your way into a healthier lifestyle, here are some of the reasons why you should cut the sugar out of your normal diet:

Consuming too much can put you in the same level as someone diagnosed with a drug addiction

No matter how much you might deny that you’re addicted to illegal drugs, you might have been achieving the same without breaking the law by taking too much sugar into your system.

• Overconsumption of sugar targets the same areas of your brain that are responsible for making someone crave illegal drugs.
• If you’re decided enough to start cutting the sugar, you would have to brace yourself for withdrawal symptoms similar to those experienced by drug addicts such as nausea and uneasiness, to name but a few.

Consuming more than the amount your body can handle can cause diabetes

One major reason why you should cut down is to prevent the onset of diabetes.

• Sugar added to processed foods has been widely observed to be the one of the leading causes of diabetes.
• Taking even only two servings of any drink that contains sugar can double the likelihood of you developing Type 2 diabetes where your pancreas is producing less than normal amounts of insulin compared to before.

Your body can gain an unwanted number of pounds if you’re taking in too much

While less than normal amounts of insulin as generated by your pancreas can lead to Type 2 diabetes, greater than normal amounts of it is also a bad sign as it stores too much fat that leads to obesity.

• Children are more prone to suffering from obesity as a result of overconsuming sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs).
• Consuming too much sugar also targets areas of your brain responsible for controlling how much food you’re supposed to eat by making you hungrier.

Sugar added to processed foods can destroy your teeth

If you’ve heard the expression “sweet tooth” that’s commonly used to refer to someone who likes to eat sweets, being one yourself won’t do your teeth any good at all.

• Your mouth has friendly bacteria in it that thrive on sugar. Thus, any food or drink with sugar added to it that you consume provides bacteria in your mouth with enough energy for them to grow.
• Overconsumption of foods and drinks with too much sugar multiplies the bacteria in your mouth that can cause your teeth to suffer from gum disease and tooth decay.

Like everyone else, you have an innate tendency to prefer sweetness compared to the other basic tastes that your tongue’s taste buds can detect. That’s why several foods and drinks have certain amounts of sugar added to them to make them taste sweet. While not exactly harmful when taken in controlled amounts, too much has been added to processed foods. And as lots of processed foods have become a part of the average person’s diet, you might be over consuming sugar without knowing about it at all and this long term can cause you to take a ride in an Ambulance. Thus, you would want to cut it out of your own diet, and the reasons listed above should help you achieve that goal.