Researches have shown that sugar can cause teeth decay, obesity and diabetes and could also trigger high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, and possibly cancer. VICTOR OKEKE writes on the need to exercise caution and regulate the sweet poison .
A group of progressive medical researchers have argued that sugar acts as a toxin in the body and it’s responsible for not only the body’s rising rates of diabetes and obesity but increases incidences of heart diseases, cancer, and other chronic illnesses, while pushing for its regulation.
Because sugar is so prevalent in food today – in obvious items like ice cream, cookies, and soda, as well as in “healthy” foods like crackers, energy bars, and salad dressings –Experts contend that most people are living in toxic overload.....

“Sugar is the biggest public health crisis in the history of the world,” says Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist at the University of California. In an opinion paper published this year in the journal Nature, Lustig and colleagues provoked debate when they stated that sugar is so harmful, it should be regulated like alcohol and tobacco. “Every substance of abuse – cocaine, heroin, you name it – has required personal or social intervention,” says Lustig.
“For sugar, we have nothing, and my prediction is that we will need both.” Sugar triggers a toxic chain of reactions in the body that produce harmful fats, hormones, and other metabolic by-products. At first blush, this anti-sugar advocacy may seem alarmist. But Lustig and his University of California colleagues argue that sugar is harmful in significant amounts – not necessarily because it’s high in calories but rather because it triggers a toxic chain of reactions in the body that produce harmful fats, hormones, and other metabolic by-products.
Sugar is found in nearly every food except meat, oil, and butter. But there’s a big difference between the sugars that occurs naturally in raw, unprocessed foods like fruits, vegetables, milk, and whole grains and the type added to prepared or processed foods. Added sugars include every sweetener imaginable: white sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, honey, agave nectar. It’s these added sugars that experts say are the root cause of our sugar problem because high amounts of them are found in almost every food we eat, most of which are also high in calories and devoid of nutrients. “Nature made sugar hard to get, but man made it easy,” he said.
Among all the different types of sugar, fructose may be the most harmful, many experts believe. Fructose is found naturally in small amounts in fruit, but is also combined with glucose (the other basic sugar molecule) to make nearly every type of commercial sweetener, including table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Why is fructose so harmful?
“It’s primarily metabolized by the liver,” so when you eat it, it’s processed and then stays in your liver and starts producing harmful blood fats called triglycerides.
Sugars that don’t contain fructose, on the other hand, like pure glucose and corn syrup, are processed by the liver and then sent out into the bloodstream, whether you need the fuel or not. Eat enough fructose and build enough triglycerides, and the result can be a fatty liver and insulin resistance – when the body can’t produce enough insulin to break down the sugar you eat.
For years, researchers have known that insulin resistance can lead to weight gain and diabetes. More recently, though, they’ve also discovered that it can cause heart disease, in part because eating too much sugar suppresses “good” HDL cholesterol.
Unfortunately, exercise can’t entirely save you from the negative effects sugar has on the body. While exercise may improve your cholesterol numbers by a few points, it’s usually not enough to bring levels into a healthy range. “If you are a thin, active person, having a diet high in sugar is still harmful,” says Vos. If you are an athlete, you may not want to cut out sugar entirely, especially before and during hard workouts.
“There is some evidence for the super-athlete that small amounts of fructose are good,” says Dr. Richard Johnson, a nephrologist at the University of Colorado, noting that the effect is beneficial only when sugar is consumed in moderate amounts before or after intense activities.
To gauge that limit, start scanning the nutrition labels of the packaged products you eat every day for at least one week. Add up your daily intake, keeping in mind that four grams of sugar on a food label is equivalent to one teaspoon of sugar. If you exceed nine teaspoons on a regular basis – and most men do – start by substituting lower-sugar options for foods that shouldn’t taste sweet, like crackers and salad dressings.

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