In this video, the speaker discusses 10 signs that indicate one is consuming too much sugar. They explain that consuming excessive sugar can dull taste buds and lead to cravings, as sugar stimulates dopamine and creates pleasure. Other signs include skin breakouts, muscle and joint pain, tooth decay, weight gain, and frequent colds and flu. The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding insulin and blood marker levels, as increased insulin resistance can lead to serious health issues. They also address mainstream ignorance and misconceptions about sugar and its effects on the body. The video concludes by promoting a comprehensive course on mastering health and understanding the body’s functions.
Key Insights:
- Eating too much sugar dulls your taste buds, making you crave sweeter foods.
- Sugar addiction is driven by the release of dopamine in the brain, causing sweet cravings.
- Sugar is often used as a reward or bribe, creating an association between sugar and pleasure.
- Sugar leads to skin breakouts and premature aging.
- Excessive sugar consumption can cause muscle and joint pain.
- Sugar is a major contributor to tooth decay.
- Weight gain, especially around the midsection, is a common sign of consuming too much sugar.
- Frequent colds and flu can be a result of a weakened immune system due to excessive sugar consumption.
- High levels of sugar can lead to elevated blood markers such as glucose, A1C, and insulin.
- Testing blood markers, including insulin, is crucial to understanding the effects of sugar on your health.
Transcript
Hello Health Champions, today we’re going to talk about 10 signs that you eat too much sugar. So, we’ll start from the back, number 10 is that you dull your taste buds. If you eat a lot of sugar, then over time your taste buds don’t appreciate the subtle flavors anymore, and as a result, you need your sweets to be sweeter and sweeter. Hamburger buns, for example, most people think of them as bread, they don’t even realize how sugary they are. Hamburger buns in the US are basically like cake in other places of the world. Cookies, soda, pies, and cakes are getting more and more sugary over time, and they’re much sweeter in the United States than anywhere else you’re going to find. And the reason they add so much sugar is that it sells. As people get hooked on sugar, all they have to do to sell a product is just put more sugar in there. An example would be Starbucks and their popular coffee drinks. They don’t sell coffee there anymore, it’s like a tiny, tiny percentage is coffee. Most of what they sell is just sugar bombs. And a huge problem here is that now regular food becomes boring. The taste buds don’t appreciate the wonderful natural aromas and flavors of food like steak and fish and vegetables and natural things. And then you tend to drift toward fast food, where, of course, they add in all this sugar and these chemicals.
Number nine is sweet cravings. And this is similar to what we just talked about, but it goes much further because sugar has the power to stimulate opiate receptors in your brain and nervous system. So, when you eat sugar, you stimulate dopamine and you feel pleasure. So, a lot of our reward-seeking behavior is tied to sugar. But the problem is that we’re seeking it, but we never get satisfied. And if you have that sugar to satiate your sugar cravings, then five minutes later, they’re back. So, it’s a vicious cycle where you just want more and more and more. And the problem is that this becomes part of the culture and it starts already as kids where we’re using sweet as rewards, as bribes basically. That if you eat your vegetables, you can have dessert. If you do your homework, you can have a soda, and so forth. So, we instill this expectation and this behavior that sugar equals pleasure equals rewards.
And I have to also touch on some pretty significant mainstream ignorance about these issues. So, there was this video where they told you that you shouldn’t eat so much sugar, but then they go on to saying that sugar shouldn’t become your worst enemy. And they say just know your limits and control yourself. So, the disturbing piece of ignorance here is that we assume people all operate the same. Whether it’s sugar or alcohol, we’re very, very different. Some people have a much greater tendency to get addicted. So, you can’t just because you know how to control yourself, you can’t be judgmental and just assume that because someone else can’t, that they just don’t know their limits and they don’t know how to control themselves. For some people, this may be true, but for some people, sugar truly becomes your worst enemy. And then if you realize that and you know that for a fact, then just like alcohol, you need to cut it out completely, no added sugar at all.
Number eight is skin breakouts. It’s pretty well-known that sugar leads to acne, and sugar feeds bacteria along with everything else. But there’s one more thing I want to be concerned with, and that’s advanced glycation end products (AGEs). So, sugar is kind of sticky, and when it sticks to proteins, then it forms these AGEs, which lead to premature aging. So, premature wrinkles, premature aging of the skin. But not just the skin, every organ, every cell in the body is subject to premature aging.
Sign number seven is muscle and joint pain, also known as osteoarthritis. When you have low-grade systemic inflammation, if that inflammation gets into the joints, now we know that as osteoarthritis. But here’s the problem, when people have pain, most people will just go take a pill. But is that a good idea? In my opinion, you do not want to take a pill, at least not without addressing the underlying cause, because what happens now is that you’re not addressing the root cause, you’re numbing out the pain but you’re allowing the root cause to continue. And this low-grade systemic inflammation is the number one cause of heart disease, stroke, as well as 90% of all the degenerative diseases that people take medication for, chronic medication, and which ultimately kills people.
Sign number six of eating too much sugar is tooth decay. So, of course, that means cavities and plaque. And if you cut out sugar completely, what you’ll find is that the plaque doesn’t even develop nearly as much as when you eat sugar. And in fact, if you eat very little sugar and you have just a single piece of candy, you will notice that plaque building up almost within minutes. And just how closely sugar and tooth decay were linked was discovered about a century ago by a guy called Weston Price. He was a dentist and he traveled around the world to study tooth decay versus diet. And he studied virtually all the leftover primitive or indigenous cultures in the world where they had not been in contact with so-called civilization and processed foods and sugar. And what he found was that even though most of these cultures did not use any toothbrushes, they also had no cavities or virtually no cavities, like 1% of the cavities of the Western World at the time. And he wrote a book about this which is excellent called „Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.“ And he found that basically almost no cavities occurred before people had sugar and processed foods. And in doing this, he also found that it wasn’t just the cavities, but people’s overall physiology and health.
And I have to touch on one more piece of mainstream ignorance. This is what I found in another video, and what’s scary is that this keeps coming up. This is what I hear from people every day. Don’t get the wrong idea or anything, sugar in the right amounts is good for you because glucose is what supplies your body energy. And there are two enormous problems and dangerous problems with the statement. The sugar they’re talking about is added sugar, and the truth is that added sugar is not the same as glucose. They put them all together in the second statement down here that 90% of energy comes from fat. This is a complete and total mystery because over and over we are being told that glucose is what supplies The Body Energy. We need to eat starches, we need to eat bread, we need to eat grains, they tell us so that we can get energy. Well, if you eat a zero-fat diet or nearly zero-fat diet, you’re still not getting most of your energy from glucose because that glucose you can’t, the body can’t store glucose well at all. Whenever you eat a lot of starch, whenever you eat a lot of carbohydrates, the body converts that blood sugar into fat before you use it. So even if you eat almost zero-fat, your body burns for energy probably somewhere around 50% fat and 50% glucose. So, if you eat a healthy diet though, like Paleo and a whole food diet with meat and fat and vegetables, over time you’re probably, as you get fat adapted, you’re probably going to run about 90% of your energy from fat. So this statement is just extremely inaccurate, but this is what we are told and this is what most people believe.
But what you will get from eating a lot of sugar and a lot of carbohydrates is unstable energy. You have highs and lows, you have inconsistent energy because you create blood sugar swings whenever you eat a lot of sugar or some processed starches. Your blood sugar spikes and then it drops, and then you eat again and it spikes. And this leads to energy when your blood sugar is high and then very low energy when your blood sugar is low. The solution to this, of course, is to not eat sugar or processed foods but rather eat whole food. And now your blood sugar becomes very, very stable and your energy becomes very, very stable. So if you have blood sugar swings, this also often leads to mood swings and irritability.
Sign number four is bloating. And this comes from all the bacteria in your gut. When those bacteria are imbalanced, when they can’t process the food coming through, then you should not have a lot of bloating. But if you have a lot of sugar, this sugar feeds the wrong kinds of pathogens. It creates an imbalance in your gut flora, and it leads to something called dysbiosis, which is just that, an imbalance in the bacteria. And now over time, what can happen is that you get a gut compromise. The intestinal lining might deteriorate, the mucus layer might deteriorate, and as a result, you could have a leaky gut and you could have things like immune compromises as well. And this is really important to understand that the signs and the symptoms should not be our primary concern. We should understand that it’s just the tip of the iceberg, that this is part of an imbalance and we need to address that root cause so that we can restore full function.
And let’s just take an example of how we’ve been feeding that gut biome, that microbiome over time. So, if we look at the green, which would be historically, and the blue, which would be how we eat currently, and we look at three things: soluble fiber, lactose, and sucrose. So, there are some other things also that can feed the microbes, but these three things are the primary food for those microbes in your gut. So, when we look at soluble fiber historically, we ate much, much more soluble fiber because natural whole food has more fiber. Processed foods and sugar have no fiber, basically. Lactose, we probably ate a little bit less. Lactose is the sugar in milk, and it’s a disaccharide, meaning two sugars, so we need an enzyme to break it down before it can be absorbed into the bloodstream. And this is why glucose is not a primary fuel for these gut bacteria, even if they could consume it. Glucose is a single molecule and because it’s single and ready to absorb, it basically never makes it down to where the bacteria are living. We absorb it in the first half of the digestive tract. So glucose is not a factor here really. And depending on how far we look back historically, we may or may not have had dairy, but for about 8 to 10,000 years, we have had some dairy and some lactose, even though a lot of it was probably turned into butter and cheese. And we also had it raw, which meant that there were enzymes and bacteria in the milk to help us break down the milk and the proteins and the lactose. So today, we eat a lot more dairy products, but also we have a lot of pasteurized milk that is much harder to digest.
And then when we look at sucrose, which really has the potential to disturb and unbalance your microbiome, we used to eat maybe a couple of grams because we had some in leafy greens and in fruits, which were seasonal. We might get a couple of grams a day as opposed to over 100 grams of sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup and honey and agave and all that stuff that we’re consuming today. Just to give you an idea, I’m not claiming that these are graphically exact or anything, but just to give you an idea of how much it has changed and why our gut biome is probably not the same because we’re not feeding it the same things. And as a result, we end up with a lot of bloating.
Number three is weight gain, especially if it’s around the midsection, but generalized weight gain as well. And the key here is to understand insulin because when we eat sugar and processed carbohydrates, the blood sugar rises and the body responds with insulin. And like we said, sugar has glucose and fructose, and that fructose can only be processed through the liver. So the potential to overwhelm the liver and cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is tremendous. The vast majority of fatty liver disease today is from sugar. And of course, when we get very insulin resistant and we have that fatty liver, now we are almost guaranteed eventually to get type 2 diabetes if we continue on that path. But again, even though most type 2 diabetics, not all, but most have weight gain and are obese, that should not be our main concern. We need to understand what this process, what this adaptation is doing to the body and realize that this mechanism, this adaptation, is also responsible for the number one cause of blindness, the number one cause of kidney failure, and the number one cause of amputations.
And here I want to cover something that I came across, which I believe is a lazy viewpoint. That everyone talks about how we eat too much sugar, we need to cut back on sugar. But where do we draw the line? So this viewpoint was that it’s simply not realistic to avoid all added sugar in your diet. And my question is, that maybe not all people have to, but why is it not realistic? And it’s like saying to an alcoholic that you know we have a problem, but it’s simply not realistic for you to avoid alcohol because all these parties, all these stores, everywhere you go, there’s alcohol available. So surely it’s not realistic to cut it out. Or if you were misled during a period in your life where your frontal lobe wasn’t fully developed and you ended up at some parties where they were distributing certain not-so-great chemicals, addictive chemicals, etc., would you say that just because they’re available, just because everyone is doing them, because you’re kind of on this party circuit, that now it’s not realistic to stay away from those chemicals anymore? Of course not. And my point here is if it’s possible and realistic to stay away from alcohol and from illicit chemicals, then why would it not be realistic to stay away from added sugar? Because added sugar has no place in real food. So again, I’m not saying that 100% of people should never have sugar, that we should make it illegal. But why wouldn’t it be realistic? We are getting lazy, and we’re allowing all this garbage in just because it’s so abundant.
Sign number two would be frequent colds and flu. If you find that you get sick all the time, maybe cut back some on the sugar. There’s many, many different ways that sugar decreases immunity. But one more interesting way is that glucose and vitamin C, vitamin C is very important for your immune system, for activation of certain white cells. And glucose and vitamin C use the same transport mechanism. So everything in your body is shuttled and moved on purpose, molecule by molecule. Nothing’s just floating around randomly getting to places by accident. The body, on purpose, will transport it and shuttle it across membranes. So the more glucose you have lying around, floating around, the more of the glucose is going to occupy the sites and compete for this transport mechanism, meaning we can’t move the vitamin C to where it needs to be if we have too much sugar around. And interestingly, humans and primates and guinea pigs are the only mammals that cannot manufacture our own vitamin C, our own ascorbic acid. And then you might wonder, well, isn’t that just a huge defect in our genetic makeup if we can’t make it? What’s wrong with us? But the way I look at it is that it’s never been a problem because the food would provide a certain amount of vitamin C that was plenty until we started competing with sugar for that transport mechanism.
And the number one sign that you’re eating too much sugar is that your blood markers start going up. And there are lots of blood markers we can look at, but three of the main ones would be glucose, A1C, and insulin. Glucose is how much sugar is in your bloodstream in this moment. A1C is a 3 to 4 month average, and insulin is an indirect indicator. It tells us how hard the body is working to keep it down. And why does this matter? Well, if we look at glucose and A1C in yellow and we look at insulin in red and we see how that would develop over time, if we start at time zero and we are insulin sensitive, we’re healthy, we’re metabolically healthy, then there would be a balance between glucose and insulin. And then the body, if we start eating more sugar, if we keep eating more sugar and more carbs, the body is going to work really, really hard at keeping that glucose down. That’s what the body has to do. High levels of glucose are toxic to the brain. So in order to keep the glucose down, the body is going to increase the insulin levels. So, even though the glucose stays the same here from year 0 to year 5, we have become many times more insulin resistant because it takes that much more insulin to control the situation. If we go 10 years into the future, we see that there’s still not really a change in the glucose levels, maybe a couple of points, but that insulin just keeps going up. 15 years, same thing, keeps going. 20 years, and now maybe you can see if you look at the size of these yellow, that this would be maybe a healthy level around 80, and here we might be at 90, 100, 120, 130, which is a diabetic level. So the glucose, even going from super healthy to diabetic, only changes by a few percent. It only changes very marginally because it’s a controlled variable, but the thing that controls it is insulin, and the body has to work that much harder at controlling it. So insulin might increase 10, 15, 20 times.
And this is one of the biggest problems in my opinion that when we test things, we don’t test the really important stuff. We don’t test the things that can show us early on the changes that we need to make. So, if you really want to find out your blood work markers, you want to test all three of these, including insulin. And for those who really want to take charge and understand more about this, I created a course, and I’ll put some information in a link down below. And you could also order a very complete set of blood work to follow along with the course if you really want to take charge and understand it. I also created a little document where I put all these slides together that you can click on a link and get those if you want to use them to follow along. If you enjoyed this video, you’re going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.
