Is Eating Sugar Really That Bad for Us?

Use of Palm Sugar negates the adverse effects of the present sugar we are using.
Story:
A lot of things being sold as foods have low or zero nutritional value aside from calories,” says Joel Kimmons, a nutritional epidemiologist with the CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity. “From a health and culinary perspective, the foods that we feed our children, our families and ourselves need to have more than calories — they should include a wide variety of vitamins, minerals, protein, phytonutrients and fiber. The problem with sugar and other refined foods is that they dilute the nutritional content of your diet overall. It becomes more difficult to meet your nutritional requirements within your calorie limits every time you add sugar.”

Yet we add so much. Those 22 teaspoons a day — which comprises all sweeteners put into foods during processing and preparation by the manufacturer and the consumer — amount to 156 pounds per person per year, according to the USDA. This figure is “shocking,” avows Anticancer author Servan-Schreiber, railing against what he calls “the sugar boom” and noting that in 1830, the average American ate only 11 pounds of sugar a year.

Right, but it’s everywhere. (Every four grams of sugar, as listed on food labels, equals about one teaspoonful.) And it goes by so many names. Maltodextrin, rice syrup, dextrose, galactose — to choose from two dozen. Especially ubiquitous, in a country whose government subsidizes corn production, is high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a lower-cost alternative to cane sugar that was first developed in the 1950s, entered the processed-food scene bigtime during the late 1970s, and now represents between 40 and 50 pounds of our annual 156.

Many food activists, including Michael Pollan, point damning fingers at the fact that the industrialized world’s recent rise in obesity coincides with the mainstreaming of HFCS. For this, many blame HFCS’s high fructose content: 55 percent as compared to white sugar’s 50 percent. Several studies, such as one performed at the University of Texas in 2008, suggest that fructose metabolizes differently than glucose does and transforms into body fat much more rapidly than glucose does. Yet many, including a 2007 University of Maryland project, argue the opposite. “Based on the currently available evidence,” reads the Maryland report, “the expert panel concluded that HFCS does not appear to contribute to overweight and obesity any differently than do other energy sources.”
http://www.alternet.org/story/145367/is_eating_sugar_really_that_bad_for_us