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Early on in the process of gaining an understanding of how the food world works, it is important to understand the nature of sugar, and especially to understand the critical difference between simple and complex sugars — without exaggeration, this information could save your life.
Truly, sugar is the modern day Bogeyman, being blamed for all kinds of lethal health maladies, the world’s weight problem, and all sorts of deficiencies in the modern day standard of wellness. In part, this is correct. But actually, this is painting with too broad a stroke — there are two kinds of sugars and the differences between them is night and day.
Simple sugars are fuel to the body and the best thing you could possible energize your cells with. Without simple sugars, your body has to survive off your fat reserves and even breaking down organ tissue and consuming that for fuel which can be a dangerous proposition. Simple sugars are 100% essential and the concept of sustaining yourself without them is ridiculous on its face. The process of digesting and utilizing simple sugars for the human body is an easy, intuitive, harmonic process with little to no downsides.
Complex sugars are an entirely different beast. They are more complicated in their chemistry and structure. The human body can only utilize simple sugars, so complex sugars must be broken down into simple sugars before they are of any use. That process of breaking them down creates acidic by-products which cause over-acidity in the body and tissue damage. This is extremely harmful and — if this type of consumption is sustained over time— can cause lethal health problems for an individual.
Let’s look a little deeper into both:
Simple sugars are also known as monosaccharides. There are 5 basic types:
— Glucose (from vegetables)
— Fructose (from fruits)
— Galactose (from mother’s milk)
— Ribose (from both fruits and vegetables)
— Deoxyribose (from both fruits and vegetables)
Complex sugars are known as either disaccharides or polysaccharides, and there are 5 types:
— Sucrose (in many plants, most commonly refined from sugar cane or beet sugar)
— Lactose (from milk and dairy)
— Maltose (from grains and seeds)
— Starch (from plants especially starchy plants)
— Cellulose (from plants of all types)
As you read through this, it really becomes common sense that simple sugars and complex sugars couldn’t be farther apart from each other. Simple sugars basically indicate you are eating the elementary building blocks you get from fruits and vegetables — which we know are healthy.
When people warn about the dangers of too much sugar, what they should really be saying is: Don’t eat refined, artificially processed sugars, milk and dairy products, grain products like bread and rice, or starchy foods like potatoes and corn.
Cellulose is a notable exception, because it basically provides fiber to the diet and is not so much digested as it is transported through the bowels, acting as a cleaning broom. The other four complex sugars, on the other hand, are all types of sugars that can lead to big-time problems.
When the body digests simple sugars, it is a very straightforward digestive process. When glucose or fructose is consumed, it gets absorbed through the intestines into the bloodstream and then transported to cells where it is used for energy. In the case of glucose, insulin is required, which gets secreted by the pancreas, to transport the energy across the cell wall. In the case of fructose, very little to no insulin is required, because the fructose will enter the cell by chemical process of diffusion, eliminating the need to create extra work for the pancreas.
When the body digests complex sugars, it is a much more involved process. The complex sugars must be broken down back into simple sugars (via the digestive system) before they can be fed into the bloodstream and used by the body as energy. When this happens, excessive carbon is created, resulting in acidic chemistry including carbon dioxide and carbonic acid. The body must then work overtime to alter this negative chemistry and buffer these acids. This can result in long-term acid-buffing issues like water retention, cholesterol plaque, calcium loss issues relating to the thyroid and parathyroid, and many other problems.
In addition, due to the overload of glucose in this scenario of excessive carbon creation when complex sugars are being digested, the pancreas is overworked in creating insulin to assist with the energy transport to get all of this excessive glucose to the cells. The liver is also overworked in converting the excess carbon into fat reserves or storing it as glycogen, and the kidneys are being overworked in filtering out and eliminating the acidic by-products.
You can see that complex sugar digestion creates an overly acidic condition within the body because of all kinds of extra metabolic wastes. Many people have become very acidic due to a lifetime of eating and drinking complex sugars. As a solution to this issue, aside from being very easy to digest, simple sugars are also alkaline-forming to the body, putting you back into a state of alkalinity.
I will give partial credit to the mainstream scientific and media community, in the commonly espoused view that sugar is extremely harmful and even lethal — they are halfway correct. I hope that I have helped you to look a little more deeply into this, so you can now see that this accusation is really a half-truth.
Complex sugars are a serious offense to your body and can create many harmful problems for you both immediately and chronically. However, why throw out the baby with the bathwater? Simple sugars are not only good, alkaline-forming, and agreeable to the body, they are the only proper food the body can use as fuel for energy! It seems insane to villainize all sugars, when our survival depends upon the processing of simple sugars for fuel. Have we lost the plot? Where did we miss out on that key point? This should help you gain a more nuanced understanding of what this Bogeyman actually looks like — and what he definitely does not look like.
Equally dangerous as ignoring the perils of consuming harmful complex sugars is not appreciating simple sugars in their essential and alkalizing role of supporting our health and vitality.
No wonder the health of the general population is going downhill, because people are only armed with half the truth! That is why I am on a mission to put out this documentation, so I hope this will help you better understand ‘the whole enchilada’.