So you’re at a friend’s house for dinner and the main course has been finished. Your host says that the best is about to be served, and brings in homemade fudge brownies, with a huge carton of vanilla ice cream on the side. You know you shouldn’t, but what the heck, it’s a Friday night, you’ve been good all week, and what will one fudge brownie do to you? So you grab a plate, a dollop of ice cream on the side, and fork that brownie into your body. And then – well, what does happen next? Let’s follow the chain reactions set off in your body when you eat that sugar, and see if it’s really that harmless to have just one bite.
Ok, so you don’t explode or spontaneously combust. However, what you do with that brownie is eat about some 100 grams of sugar. That hits your stomach, and within a few minutes your pancreas reacts by ramping up the production of insulin to try and control the excess glucose that’s now in your system. Remember glucose is fuel for your muscles when it’s stored inside them, but when it’s simply floating around in your blood stream, it’s bad news. This is when you get your ‘sugar high’, when you begin to feel either elated and energetic or nauseous and flushed. If you’re insulin resistant, you might not even feel this, but this ‘rush’ is why most people enjoy eating sugar in the first place.
So your system is now awash with insulin, trying to control the sugar in your blood. If your muscles are low on glucose, some of it gets stored as glycogen there. If not, the excess glucose gets stored as fat. There it goes, right into your fat stores. Meanwhile, your body is trying to achieve homeostasis from all that insulin, so it releases epinephrine and cortisol from your adrenals. Your heart starts racing, and then suddenly your crash.
Sugar crash is what happens when the glucose is finally gone from your blood, leaving your sluggish, morose, irritable and tired. And that’s where most people thinks it stops, sugar high, sugar crash. But research has shown that sugar can have a deleterious effect on your immune system. Your immune related phagocytes are impaired for at least 5 hours after you eat sugar, and free radicals run amok for the few hours after sugar increases oxidative stress on the body. With your immune system temporarily compromised, you are prone to getting sick, catching colds and the flu.
Now, if this fudge brownie was a rare treat, you’ll probably be fine in a couple of days, having worked off all the effects. However, if this is a normal occurrence for you, and you’re constantly eating sugary stuff, then your system is constantly see sawing back and forth between insulin highs and lows, resulting in hormonal and adrenal burnout. Your body is in a constant state of alarm, constantly inflamed, and you’re on the highway to diabetes and insulin resistance. So watch out!
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