| credits: missrusty.net
On the average, a healthy person is not only active, he also has sunny attitude towards life. This is because, as mental health experts say, being healthy isn’t just the absence of diseases, it is also about being stable emotionally and psychologically.
However, physicians say many people report being moody and sluggish, even when they don’t mean to. The culprit, they contend, has to do with their diet which, clinicians say, is rather too sugary for comfort.
Family physician, Dr. Mary Ogbe, says sugary diets leave harmful effects on metabolism and contribute to all sorts of diseases, hence the admonition for people to go easy on sweet foods that are so common these days.
orexin, which helps you to be awake when you should. They warn that when you eat sugar, this chemical is inhibited and that is when you feel sluggish, sleepy or moody.
Nutritionists say in order to counter this effect in your body, make sure you balance your sugar consumption with protein-rich food that will tackle the effects that the sugar you eat would have had on you.
“This is not to say that you have the open cheque to eat all the sugar you want; but since we take sugar anyway, it is also good to know how to counter its likely effect by eating healthy food that will level off sugar’s effect as the body digests it.
“If, for instance, you are taking a cup of sugar-containing tea with your food, it’s advisable that you complement it with protein-rich foods such as eggs, beans or any beans-based foods and such like. Your mood will be the better for it,” Ogbe says.
She expresses concern that most health-conscious adults actually want to avoid taking sugar altogether, but they fall victim to merchants’ lies, which give them the so-called alternatives to sugar. “These alternatives are, much of the time, not only sweeter than the sugar they try to avoid, but do more harm because they are laboratory grown!” Ogbe notes.
Such laboratory-grown sugar substitutes include demerara sugar, dextrose, agave nectar, corn syrup, beet sugar, barley malt syrup, galactose, lactose, malt syrup, etc.
Stress plays a part in moodiness and sluggishness, physicians say. When you’re undergoing a stressful situation, your stress hormone levels rise. The same chemicals also affect you when your blood sugar is low, researchers say.
Experts at atkins.com explain that, for instance, when you eat a piece of cake, your blood sugar will rise, and stress hormones such as adrenalin, cortisol or epinephrine are released.
“One of the main things these hormones do is to raise blood sugar, providing the body with a quick energy boost. The problem is, these helpful hormones can make us feel anxious, irritable and shaky,” Ogbe adds. And that’s when you become moody and sluggish, even when you wish to feel otherwise.
Beyond mood swing
Beyond its effects on our moods, nutritionists say sugary foods do worse stuffs to human body. A nutritionist, Dr. Dayo Umoh, says before sugar enters the bloodstream from the digestive tract, it is broken down into glucose and fructose — both of which are simple sugars.
“It is easy to get glucose in our diet, even though the human body also produces it. Indeed, glucose is present in every living cell. This is not the case with fructose, because the human body doesn’t produce it in any significant amount. That tells you humans don’t have any physiological need for it.”
Experts say the main issue with fructose is that it can only be metabolised by the liver. In lay man’s language, the liver processes the fructose you eat.
“This is not a problem if you eat a little bit as found in fruit, for instance. But when you eat too much of fructose, you’re giving your liver extra load of work to do, and when this happens, it will make the liver to turn the fructose into fat.
“When you repeatedly eat huge quantity of sugary foods, you can develop fatty liver and myriad of other serious health issues. By the way, fatty liver disease is a fore runner of liver failure, so you need to watch it. However, if your fructose is simply from fruits, you are on safe grounds, as you cannot overdose on fruits.
“That is why we also counsel our clients to eat organic fruits. This has become imperative in view of the fact that we import fruits these days and you can find assorted and esoteric fruits in high-end supermarkets.
“If you’re wondering what ‘organic’ fruits look alike, the way to recognise them, usually, is by their size. We are familiar with the size of guavas, for instance; but when you buy these inorganic fruits that have been modified genetically, they are bigger than their natural size as we knew them to be. Avoid such fruits,” Umoh submits.
Susceptibility to infection
Many people find themselves being susceptible to bacterial infections and they wonder why. The probable answer to this, Ogbe says, is that you eat too much sugar.
“Eating or drinking too much sugary foods inhibits the optimal functioning of immune system cells that otherwise defend the body against bacteria. Instead, eat more fruits and vegetables, because they are rich in nutrients such as vitamins C and E, beta-carotene and zinc, all of which work to strengthen your immune system and thus protect you from bacterial infections,” the physician counsels.
In conclusion, experts add that it is not necessary to cut off sugar from our diet entirely, unless otherwise advised by a physician for health reasons. Rather, they advise, those who feast regularly on sugary foods to reduce their sugar intake, while moderate users of sugar are still counseled to reduce it to the barest minimum.
“Sugar contains no nutrients, no protein, no healthy fats and no enzymes. This being the case, why should it kill you?” Ogbe asks rhetorically.
