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Sugar Addiction

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You will be surprised to know that of all the addictive agents that you can list such as tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, betel and drugs, one that has probably sneakily getting you hooked from early childhood and making the largest impact on your health could be your addiction to sugar.

Sugar, scientists point out, poses far greater danger than we seem to realize; it is a toxin that harms our organs and disrupts the body’s usual hormonal cycles. Excessive consumption of sugar, they say, is one of the primary causes of the obesity epidemic and metabolic disorders like diabetes, as well as a culprit for cardiovascular disease. More than 20% of urban Indians and 10% of urban school children and adolescents in India are obese largely due to excessive consumption of sweets and sugar.

That the landscape of health across the world and especially in India is undergoing drastic change is reflected in the WHO’s recent report attributing over 60% of urban deaths in our country to life-style disorders of the heart, brain or cancers, replacing the old causes such as infections and starvation.  And what lies at the heart of these metabolic causes seems to be our addiction to sugar!

Our “Pavlovian” dependence on sweets start from infancy when we are introduced to sugar water, kheer, sweets and ice-cream.  And think again, how do we reward or show our love for someone? By giving him or her sweets, chocolates, rasagullas or laddoos!

The excess sugar that enters our body requires excess amounts of insulin to be secreted by the Beta cells of our pancreas. Over time, these cells get exhausted leading to diabetes. And as sugar cannot be stored in our body effectively, it is converted to fat that gets deposited in our buttocks, paunch, livers and heart!

Around the world, a growing body of opinion – the 'No Sugar’ movement – is leading a global fightback and warning that our sweet habit is completely out of control. Sugar, whether added to food by you or the manufacturer, is the greatest threat to human health. And unless we wise up and quit en masse, we don’t just risk personal obesity and disease, but national bankruptcy and collapse as the toll our ill health takes on our countries’ economies threatens to destabilise the modern world.

The sugar trail seems to be coming back to haunt India. Sugarcane has been grown in India since 500 BC. We learnt to make the white crystals from the juice much before the European tongue had its first taste of sweet  around 1500. In fact, sugar was called the white spice and was considered more preciious than gold, and shipped to Europe by the colonizers.

The movement is led by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco, author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar, numerous scientific and press articles, and presenter of “Sugar: the Bitter Truth”, a YouTube clip viewed more than 3,300,000 times.  

It is time we woke up and fought our most primodial addiction to save ourselves and our future generations!

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