Nutrition series: How sugar is damaging your health (part 2) - DAY 11 ( 30 days writing challenge)

The nutrition series is back! I hope I'll be able to cover it as often as possible during this 30 days challenge.
If you want to know more about why I'm doing this series and about the challenge, you should check out this post here.

The focus of this post will be how sugar is damaging your metabolism, which is the first step in developing more serious problems like diabetes and heart disease. I'm talking, of course, about insulin resistance and I will try to explain the how and the why, as well as trying to dispel some of the misconceptions surrounding this highly debated topic.

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Before I'm going to jump in and explain how things work I'm going to rely on the fundamentals which you can check out here:

What is sugar?
How is sugar metabolised ?

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Insulin resistance

As I said in previous post insulin is responsible to get glucose into most of the cells in our body because otherwise it can't get in. The problem is that in certain pathological situations insulin starts to not work properly which leads to glucose just accumulating in the bloodstream, leading in turn to a whole host of problems that I'm going to cover later in the series.

In other words the cells don't respond to what insulin tells them to do and thus they develop resistance to it's actions. The next question would be: why does this happen? - here is where sugar (or table sugar or sucrose- all mean the same thing) comes in.

Chronic high levels of blood glucose ( due to ingestion of too much table sugar) can lead to chronic high insulin levels, which appear to desensitise the insulin receptors and thus the cells don't respond the way they should to the stimulus provided by insulin.

High-fructose corn syrup, source

Also the fructose contained in sugar can lead to fatty liver disease which in turn can cause insulin resistance through a complex mechanism.

The challenge when reading the literature is that the way insulin resistance works it not fully understood and there are a lot of research that is at times conflicting or confusing.

For example there is strong evidence that free fatty acids play a key role in developing insulin resistance by affecting how the insulin receptors work ( basically hampering their function). So, a lot of sources will say that fats are the main problem. And while fats definitely play a role in this whole process, especially because fat intake is also associated with sugar intake, the danger is to side track the very serious impact that sugar has on our health.

To further exemplify this, fructose has been associated with high triglycerides levels which are a source of free fatty acids. So what if the free fatty acids that play a role in insulin resistance are a more distant consequence of ingesting a lot of sugar ? ( which contains fructose) or foods that contain high fructose corn syrup which is used to sweeten a lot of things.
Of course, connecting the dots and scientifically proving that this is how things work is very difficult, and the complexity of the problem will lead to a lot more disinformation about this topic.

What is very clear is that insulin resistance is associated with to type 2 to diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, atherosclerosis ( fat in the arteries) and polycystic ovary syndrome among others.

The topic of insulin resistance has a lot of intricacies and there is a fair amount of reading to be done if you even want to scratch the surface. In this post I tried to keep things as simple as possible and encourage you to read further on this topic. I'm going to link what I found to be the most interesting sources:

Fat vs sugar
Excess sugar in liver causes insulin resistance
Insulin Resistance
Fructose, insulin resistance, and metabolic dyslipidemia
The pathogenesis of insulin resistance: integrating signaling pathways and substrate flux

In the next post I will cover how sugar ties in with diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome.

My name is Adrian a.k.a "The nearsighted traveler". I'm a running enthusiast who loves to spend time enjoying nature. I write mostly about running, the places I explore and the interesting stuff I learn here on steemit.
If you are new to this platform you might want to check out these posts:

5 Easy Rules for Navigating The Steem Ecosystem
The 6th Easy Rule for Navigating the Steem Ecosystem

And if you want a good laugh you can visit my other account @cmmemes where I fail at being funny but persevere anyway :)