Sugar, sugar, sugar | Teen Ink

Sugar, sugar, sugar

January 8, 2014
By miyaducky BRONZE, Cambridge, Massachusetts
miyaducky BRONZE, Cambridge, Massachusetts
3 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Highly addictive.

Highly unhealthy.

Highly delicious.

Sugar. Sugar is in so many things that you can barely count. It’s even in healthy things such as apples and bananas, but it’s a different kind of sugar. The sugar that is highly addictive, unhealthy, and overall delicious, is the type that is in candy, icecream, different types of desserts in general. It’s not that if you eat sugar once in a while as a treat, you are going to drop dead, but if you decide it’s going to be a good idea to eat dessert every day in large amounts, you’re probably going to end up dead before you know it.


There are many different reasons why sugar is unhealthy, but to name a few, it’s bad for your teeth, it makes you fat if you consume it in large amounts quite often, it has a very addictive effect on your brain, and to state the obvious, there’s no nutrients.



After you eat sugar, but before it enters your bloodstream, it is separated into two simple sugars, glucose and fructose. Glucose it in every cell on the planet, and if our bodies do not get it from our diet, then we produce it. Fructose is just useless. Our bodies do not produce it and studies have shown that there is no physiological need for it.



The bad simple sugar (fructose) can only be metabolized through the liver. When you consume sugar in large amounts, that means that you are consuming fructose in large amounts. If you only consume a little bit, such as from fruit, it is turned into glycogen, and is stored in your liver until it is needed. However, if there is too much glycogen, it can overload your liver, because your body doesn’t need that much, and is then turned into fat. The fatty liver can lead to many problems.


Sugar is also very bad for you because when you eat it, like addictive drugs, it releases dopamine in the reward part of your brain. This means that sugar then becomes very addictive, and you then start to need more and more. This then leads you down a long path of eating large amounts of sugar every day, which then causes your liver to be fatty, and you become a candidate for many diseases that have to do with your liver.



In 1915, the average sugar consumption per person every year was 15-20 pounds. Today, the average person consumes at least his/her weight every year, plus another 20 pounds on corn syrup. However, there are probably some people who don’t eat sugar, so, there must also be people who eat at least 2 times their body weight in sugar. Again, when you consume these large amounts of sugars, it damages your livers, and other vital organs in your body.


Dr. David Reuben, author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Nutrition says, “white refined sugar-is not a food. It is a pure chemical extracted from plant sources, purer in fact than cocaine, which it resembles in many ways. Its true name is sucrose and its chemical formula is C12H22O11. It has 12 carbon atoms, 22 hydrogen atoms, 11 oxygen atoms, and absolutely nothing else to offer. The chemical formula for cocaine is C17H21NO4. Sugar’s formula again is C12H22O11. For all practical purposes, the difference is that sugar is missing the “N”, or nitrogen atom.”


As you can see, there are many things that are extremely bad for you. It’s not like you have to stop in sugar all together, but that would definitely improve your health. Instead of taking away sugar, just limit the amount you consume, and resist the urge to eat more and more of it. If you want something sweet, you could eat fruit like an apple or some strawberries instead of and apple pie or strawberry ice cream.



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