Sugar is everywhere in the modern diet. The most common outcome of this situation is an increasing obesity problem, but sugar’s harmful effects go much further than that. If you want to improve your overall health, cutting back on your sugar consumption is one of the best ways to start.
Here are just some of the ways that excessive sugar damages your health and well-being.
1) It Starts a Slippery Slope
First, eating sugar stimulates your brain’s reward centers with powerful effects. To put it simply, eating sweet foods feels great. Unfortunately, the rewards are never enough. The more sweet foods you eat, the more you’ll crave them.
In a similar way to how an addiction progresses, the amount of sugar you eat can mount up alarmingly. You need to consume more and more to achieve the same pleasant effects, continuously harming your health along the way.
2) Increased Appetite
Of course, eating more sugar means taking on more calories, which makes weight control difficult. But unfortunately, the obesity implications go even further.
High-sugar diets can disrupt the body’s levels of hunger hormones ghrelin and peptide, encouraging you to eat much more than you would if you had a healthier diet. Sugar really is the number one enemy of successful slimming.
3) Skin Problems
A high-sugar diet can wreak havoc with your complexion. By reducing the quality of the collagen and elasticin underpinning your skin, your complexion loses tone and gets baggier and saggier. This means wrinkles and fine lines appear more easily and are much harder to get rid of.
What’s more, for many people sugar is strongly linked with skin inflammation and acne, making breakouts more frequent and severe.
4) Tissue Inflammation
But it’s not only your skin that can be inflamed by sugar. Over time, high sugar levels can lead to inflammatory conditions such as gout, causing swelling and pain in joints and the surrounding tissues.
5) Poor Dental Health
Any dentist will tell you that sugar is the leading cause of cavities and tooth decay. If you want to keep your time in the treatment chair to a minimum, cutting back on your sugar intake is the first and most important step.
6) Digestion Problems
Pure, refined sugar is hard to digest. This leads to wind, bloating, heartburn, and other digestive issues. The problem is made even worse when you consider that most sugary foods are also high in other indigestible ingredients, such as refined carbohydrates and processed fats.
7) Diabetes
If you consume too much sugar over a long period of time, your body reacts by becoming increasingly resistant to insulin. This is a dangerous first step on the road to type 2 diabetes, and the risk is only increased by being overweight at the same time.
8) Internal Organ Conditions
High sugar levels have been linked to many internal organ disorders, including fatty liver, kidney disease, and cancers of the digestive system.
9) Depression
Lastly, a diet high in sugar has been linked to an increased risk of depression and anxiety. The exact reasons for this aren’t known, but it’s suspected that frequent, rapid changes in blood sugar levels disrupt the natural chemical balance of the brain, making it harder to keep a stable mood.
Cutting back on sugar offers many benefits beyond simply lowering the amount of calories you consume. Whether or not you’re trying to lose weight, if your diet is high in sugar, your body will thank you for reducing your intake.
