Nutrition-SUGAR (539)

At my high school, we have a gym class called Performance PE. Which is lifting and "hard-core" working out. For me, I lift Monday, Wednesday, Friday and I'm in the wrestling room Tuesday and Thursday. On Thursday we work out for about 20-25 minutes and then go upstairs and talk about certain things dealing with health and lifts. The first part of the semester we talked about proper techniques when dealing with lifts. And we just recently started talking about nutrition. And today we talked about sugar, so I'm going to share with you guys.

Around a month or two ago, we had the AP Gosh assembly. Dr. Gosh himself talked with are school and one of things he talked about was sugar. That the daily sugar intake has increased dramatically which causes obesity and other health problems. During Performance today, I learned that rather than looking at the nutrition facts for the amount what really tells you how much sugar is in there, is if in the ingredients sugar is listed in one of the first couple of them. My teacher also explained that since most people are aware of the high amounts of sugar in foods, that the companies don't say sugar, instead they say something along the lines of fructose. Just because most people aren't aware of what other names mean sugar. Any ingredient that ends in -ose is sugar. We looked at two different nutrition labels, one was a cereal, and one was mixed berries. The mixed berries had a lot of sugar, but if you look in the ingredients, sugar wasn't listed anywhere. That's because fruit has natural sugar but the body doesn't read that substance as sugar, it reads it as fiber, therefore not hurting your body but helping it. There is one time that it is okay to eat sugar, and that's after a workout. Because your levels drop while working out. We also talked about what happens when sugar has no purpose in the body. Like after a workout, it is absorbed by the liver. But when there is no useful place, it goes to certain parts of your body and causes inflammation. Which can cause problems for that area, and can dramatically increase your chance of injury.

This morning while I was finding breakfast I was looking at labels and finding out just how much stuff has loads of sugar in it. I had peanut butter toast today, peanut butter has a lot of sugar in, and it is listed in the top of the ingredients. Same with chocolate milk, which has loads of sugar in it. Little Bites Muffins, the first ingredient listed is sugar. This is surprising to mean because my teacher made one suggestion and that was to cut it out of your diet, how can I do that when it’s in relatively healthy things that I eat every day. He also told us that sugar is highly addictive, and that in brain scans it shows that after eating sugar the brain lights up just like a brain scan after using a highly addictive drug.

 

Be careful my friends! If you have any suggestions on how to cut out some of the sugar intakes let me know.