Sugar High

When it comes to sweets, yours truly is a true junkie but at least the sweets in fruits, beets and other such bennies are not the problem like the processed crap yours truly occasionally eats because it's so addictive. 

To whit ...

Defining Sugar

No matter what your source of sugar, it is made up of a combination of fructose and glucose, and you’ll find the same molecular structure. It’s worth noting that fructose and glucose are metabolized differently.

On one hand, fructose is metabolized almost exclusively in the liver. While this has some benefit (it doesn’t affect blood glucose or insulin levels), there are potential issues (such as conversion to triglycerides/fat) with consuming an excessive amount of fructose.

Glucose, on the other hand, affects blood sugar levels, of course, and along those lines, it requires insulin for its metabolism. While there is quite a bit of variation and thus some exceptions, fruits tend to be 40 to 55 percent fructose. Sucrose or table sugar is 50/50.

Why sugar in fruit is different?

As mentioned above, the BIG difference is in how the sugar is packaged. While added sugars are empty calories that provide no additional nutritional value (besides energy) whatsoever, and they are most commonly found in highly processed foods. On the other hand, fruits are packaged with much more than naturally-occurring sugar, including water, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants (e.g., phytonutrients), and fiber. Fruits are nutrient-dense (the opposite of cakes and candies). Fiber is vital in that it also slows down digestion, so you don’t get the insulin spike and subsequent crash caused by candies, cakes, and similar sweets.

And we haven't even talked about cancer and sugar until now ...

We know that almost all the cells in the human body require energy, and they derive this energy from the sugars in the food we eat. Cancer cells also require sugars to grow. But their glucose intake is a lot higher than that of healthy cells, as is the rate at which they ferment that glucose into lactic acid.

This is known as the Warburg effect, and it may, scientists have hypothesised, have something to do with cancer's rapid growth rate. But it's hard to determine whether the Warburg effect is a symptom or a cause of cancer.

It's been proposed that the growth of cancer cells may be stymied by starving them of sugar, but the problem with that is there's currently no method of cutting off the supply to cancer cells while keeping it open to normal cells.

This is why the biological mechanism behind the increased glucose metabolism is important. It may hold the key to starving cancer cells while keeping healthy cells functioning. We're not there yet, but this research brings us a critical step closer.

Yes we are and it's about time, don't you think?