Oh, who doesn’t love a great piece of pie, a chocolate bar, an ice cream or another sweet sensation...?
Most of us have seen white granulated sugar all our live, directly placed into our coffee cup or hidden in a product without even really knowing it’s there. Sugar is so often used to sweeten processed foods. But did you realize how addictive sugar actually is and how it robs your body of energy and health? To make you understand what damage sugar brings you, hereby some (there are too many to even list!) of the reasons why you should try to avoid it as much as possible:
- Sugar raises your blood sugar level
- Sugar can suppress the immune system
- Sugar is bad for your teeth
- Sugar robs your body from energy
- Sugar can help cause cancer
- Sugar contributes to diabetes
- Sugar causes food allergies
- Sugar feeds Candida
- Sugar can speed the aging process, causing wrinkles and grey hair
- Sugar can help cause a depression
- Sugar can promote weight gain and obesity
And this list actually is so much longer, but let’s not make it too depressive ;-)
A little bit of sugar a day, for example by eating a piece of dark chocolate (minimum 70% cacao) really doesn’t do much harm. Actually the high amount of cacao in dark chocolate is super healthy, it's just the sugar that should be tried to avoid as much as possible. But drinking Coca Cola or something similar, really is damaging.
Most fruits are also high in sugar, but of course good natural sugars. Although eating fruit is super, super healthy, you should also make sure you don’t eat too much of these natural sugars. Everything in moderation… Fruits that contain less sugar are for example lemons, limes, strawberries, kiwi, nectarines and sour grapefruit.
How to avoid sugar as much as possible? Hereby a few tips:
- Add some fruit to your meals: add some healthy whole and/or dried fruit to your meals. This will help your taste buds believe they are getting sweets and it will help you to lower your cravings for sweets after dinner. Dried fruit in a salad for example or some raisins in your rice or couscous.
- Chromium Polynicotinate: Chromium plays a great role in insulin's regulation of blood glucose, and also plays a role in energy production. Chromium helps maintain a normal blood sugar level. When blood sugar levels are out of balance, a person will crave for sugar. So when you have problems with carbohydrate cravings, sugar cravings, low blood sugar levels, insulin resistance, taking chromium as a supplement can help.
- Eat as close to natural as possible: In most processed foods, sugar can be found. When using fresh, unprocessed products, you know exactly what you eat and in this way you can avoid sugar as much as possible.
- Always check the ingredients labels on products: Did you know that for example in most breads sugar is used? Of course they also exist without sugar and when paying attention you can make sure you will get the right products.
- Replace high-sugar snacks like cookies and candy bars with fruits, healthy unsalted nuts and vegetables like small tomatoes or cucumber.
- Use artificial sweeteners in moderation: these also seem to have an effect on insulin levels.
- Replace soda drinks for water or unsweetened fruit/vegetable juices.
- And really, the less sugar you eat, the lower your cravings will become. You will just have to get used to your new lifestyle and afterwards you probably never want to return anymore!
Do you have any other suggestions? Please let us know by leaving a comment below!
