The word “toxic” is so confusing it needs to be divided into 2 categories.
Category 1: There are things that we know are toxic and that will kill us quickly like ingesting rat poison or inhaling caustic chemicals. These things have an immediate and perhaps irreparable impact on your body simply because your body can’t process them, can’t clear them fast enough, so it overwhelms the system. It takes its toll and kills you.
Category 2: The word “toxic” is applied to all kinds of other things in our world from indoor air, to relationships to pesticide sprayed broccoli. These things won’t take your legs out from under you and make you turn blue; instead, they make their impact over time. Much depends upon how effectively you/your body deal with them or eliminate them. This category is HUGE and but humans are designed to handle little baby assaults that would have the capacity to kill us... slowly. The trick is to mitigate risk all day, every day by making wise choices and having healthy habits.
There is one insidious thing that does exist in our daily lives that heretofore has been believed to be in category 2 (not that bad) that turns out to be a category 1 (really bad).
Hints:
You likely consume it every single day and sometimes even feel bad about doing so
Most of us know already know that we are supposed to reduce it’s consumption
Kids today consume an exorbitant amount of it
It, alone, may just be the explanation for our rising obesity crisis
You can even pour it into a glass daily when you think you are doing a good thing
That’s right. Sugar.
(sometimes known as juice)
(even pure “freshly squeezed” fruit juice)
(also known as brown sugar)
(no better than High Fructose Corn Sugar)
There is a YouTube video lecture called Sugar: The Bitter Truth given by a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders (like diabetes) and the leading expert in childhood obesity, Dr. Lustig that has become a bit of a legendary sensation normally reserved for pop artists. This lecture makes a persuasive argument about sugar and its toxic impact on your body. He makes it clear that we can no longer just think of sugar as “empty calories” that can be “worked off” as long as you are otherwise healthy. The impact of sugar goes way beyond that to actually become toxic. He walks through the biochemical reasons why a glass of juice or soda is no different than a shot of bourbon. The impact on the liver is the same either way and it is killing us...sweetly.
Worth switching categories for, right?
Knowing this begs the question: Is it ALL sugar? Certainly all white sugar/brown sugar/corn sugar that is consumed in liquid form. There is no doubt that we need to reduce the estimated 40+ pounds of that stuff that we swallow in our snacks and pour into our cups each year. Then, you want to find alternatives to them as often as you can.
Printer-friendly version