I am pretty sure everyone enjoyed more sweets during Christmas. Upper respiratory illnesses often follow and directly correspond to times of excessive sugar intake like after the holidays.

As a herbalist and nutritionist, my passion is to share with you those empowering aspects of food work from the core of each individual to engage the natural resources of the digestive system as a pathway to heal all body systems, eradicate deficiencies, and open the channels to invite nourishment and healing.

But the power of food goes even deeper. Not only does adopting a healthier lifestyle allow you to feel more in control of your own health but food and lifestyle actually have the ability to influence your gene expression. There is plenty of research in this area called nutrigenomics.

Why am I talking about that now? Because sugar, as we will see, is such an anti-nutrient that it negatively influences gene expression, meaning it turns those hazardous genes on. My intention today is to encourage a permanent change in your relationship to sugar by promoting a deeper understanding of its effects on your body and your brain and to initiate the discovery of ways to deal with your own sweet tooth.

White sugar is made by refining the sugar cane or the sugar beet. This involves multiple chemical processes that filter and boil the liquid extracted from the original source using gasses such as sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. It’s those processes that result in the removal of all the fiber, protein, and minerals which originally counted for 90% of the natural plant.

Sugar is not just empty calories but an anti-nutrient. When the minerals are depleted from the body, the mechanisms for determining hunger and satiety are compromised. This leads to overeating. Plus, consider for a moment how refined sugar is made. Do you know how refined sugar is made? According to the PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, bone share which is used to process sugar is made from the bones of cattle from Afghanistan, Argentina, India, and Pakistan. The bones are sold to traders in Scotland, Egypt, and Brazil who then sell them back to the United States’ sugar industry. So, while not all sugar manufacturers use the bone share which is part of the whitening process, more of them do than don’t. It’s often hard to track down the sugar manufacturer in your premade confections. This fact alone has been enough to get some of my patients and including some children, to actually kick their sugar habit. One of my clients actually put a bone in her sugar canister in her home to remind her of this fact. Okay, that was a really deep exploration of mineral depletion and its relationship to sugar consumption. Mineral depletion upsets the entire body’s homeostasis, or balance.

Let’s now delve into the next physiological implication of sugar consumption- immune system repression. The immune system is clearly going to be compromised by the lack of minerals, particularly zinc—but what else? Studies have looked at white blood cells to see how well they respond to different bacteria. They have surrounded the blood cells with liquid with different concentrations of sugar in them. The result? The higher the sugar levels in that liquid concentration, the less the white blood cells were able to function. Your white blood cells are the cells of the immune system. They defend the body against disease and foreign matter.

Another study at Loma Linda University, and these studies are actually quite notorious,
looked at a host of subjects and the ability of their white blood cells to protect them against foreign bacteria. There were five groups in this study. One group consumed no sugar, the
next 6 teaspoons of sugar, the third 12 teaspoons, and the fourth and fifth 18 and 24 teaspoons respectively. After five hours, blood was drawn from each individual in all the five groups. Across the board, as the sugar consumption increased, the efficacy of the white blood cells, particularly the phagocytes which eat up bacteria—again, like little pacmen—decreased. Whereas the white blood cells of the first group were able to eat up to 14 bacterium. The cells of the fifth group were only able to eat one bacterium. It is said by many, including Dr. Sears, that one teaspoon of sugar depresses immune system function for five hours. It’s not surprising then that upper respiratory illnesses often follow and directly correspond to times of excessive sugar intake like after the holidays.

Sugar does not only decrease our ability to fight bacteria but also viruses, cancer, and parasites. The constant immune system response eventually exhausts the body and once the immune system becomes suppressed, the door is opened to innumerable infections and degenerative diseases.

There are several other factors to consider when it comes to the exhaustion of the immune system and response to sugar consumption. So high blood sugar itself is an immune suppressant. Also, glucose competes with vitamin C which is one of our main immune  boosting vitamins for membrane transport into the cells. They are kind of doing a little battle to get into the cells. Sugar directly inspires inflammation which we will also soon discuss. And putting out the fires of inflammation distracts the immune cells from what they might otherwise be achieving in combating foreign matter.

Sugar feeds tumor growth. Cells feed on glucose. As adults we don’t have that many actively growing cells in our body except cancer cells which we all have moving through us all the time. By feeding ourselves refined sugar we are more aggressively inspiring the growth of those cells. In his book Life Over Cancer, the renowned Keith Block of the Block Center for Integrative Cancer Care, with a foreword by integrative MD, Andrew Weil, states that “Tumors are gluttons for glucose. They consume this blood sugar at a rate of 10 to 50 times higher than normal tissues.”

Some of the clear research done on the relationship between sugar and cancer. Research conducted jointly by scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Harvard Medical School, the Instituto de Salud Publica in Mexico, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston showed that 1,866 women aged 20 to 75 in Mexico, amongst those who ate the most carbohydrates, particularly sugar foods, they were 2.2 times more likely to develop breast cancer than those who ate a more balanced diet. Several other studies looked at women with early stage breast cancer in the U.S. and in Italy and showed that both higher blood sugar levels and increased consumption of sugar correlated with a faster progression of the disease.

Dr ConnieBennett shows further research chronicling studies done on colon cancer, endometrial cancer, heart, lung, and blood cancers. Here was some really compelling information. This is a quote right from Bennett’s book. “Scientists from the John Hopkins School of Medicine, the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and John Hopkins Bloomberg School for Public Health found an association between those who died of cancer and those with high blood sugar levels. After looking at data for more than 3,054 adults aged 30 to 74 from the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Mortality Study, they found that those participants with impaired glucose tolerance were nearly twice as likely to die from any type of cancer than those with normal blood sugar levels. Their findings, they concluded, suggest that—and this is their quote from the study—“In the United States impaired glucose tolerance is an independent predictor for cancer mortality.” Ooh, that’s a lot!

Now you can clearly see there is an obvious effect on the immune system with high blood sugar and as a result, increased risk of cancer and death from cancer.

My intention today is to encourage a permanent change in your relationship to sugar by promoting a deeper understanding of its effects on your body and your brain and to initiate the discovery of ways to deal with your own sweet tooth. In the future I will talk more about how to eat smart while enjoying sweets.

Happy Holidays my friends!