By Tara Patel

IT’S SUMMER time and as hot as Hades. It’s so easy to reach out for one of the soft cold drinks of the market place - there’re any number of them pretending to be fresh fruit juices, but are hardly that. Then there’re the plethora of sherbet and powder concentrates to pour water in, chill and drink…there was time when lemonades were made with fresh lemons and sweetened with wholesome honey and jaggery. Now in the advertisements they show loving mothers squeezing out lemons…but at the end of the advertisement it’s a bottle of Minute Maid lemonade they show you! So much for mother’s love and brainwashing.

As consumers, we hardly ever realise how we exchange good health for bad health in our times and are barely conscious of the fact that the amount of refined sugar we consume as adults and children lead us down the path to such things as obesity, insulin resistance, glycosylation, diabetes - the first nails in the coffin of life or so to speak. Okay, to take first things first, what is sugar?

The beautiful white shimmering sugar as we know it is sucrose, a refined carbohydrate processed from natural sugar cane or beet. That makes sugar a chemical, yes, a carcinogenic chemical in the long run because of the large quantities in which we consume it directly and indirectly. One of the common myths about sugar is that we need it for energy or we’ll all be dead! Nonsense, we don’t need sugar. What we need is glucose which the body extracts from the food we eat…to release energy to live. Of course, sugar or sucrose when consumed is broken down into glucose (blood sugar) for energy, but because it is in the form of a refined carbohydrate, it gets assimilated real fast and because we consume sugar in a myriad processed products, it gets converted into fat and that’s when you start putting on weight you don’t need.

Make a note of this: Sugar is a refined chemical devoid of any nutrients, it has only empty calories. Carcinogenic calories. A better idea is to get your glucose coming from eating wholesome carbohydrates or food in a manner in which your body works to create glucose, honest sweat glucose! All food - protein, carbohydrate or fat - get converted naturally into glucose in the body. This is the glucose your body needs. But if you tell your body constantly, “Hey, I want to make things easy for you, here’s sugar! I’ve already refined it for you - it’s easier to eat and drink than chewing a piece of sugarcane or eating a beetroot or fruit salad! Have fun turning it into glucose in double, triple quick time, eliminate all the hard work.” Then you’re as good as really telling your body, “Hey, I’m lazy, you be lazy too!” It’s the road to perdition as far as good health is concerned because we cannot subvert our natural bodily systems without suffering from the consequences and damage control is as expensive as it is frustrating eg in terms of glycosylation, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, diabetes.

We’re suffering from metabolic syndrome if we suffer from at least three of the following symptoms: abdominal obesity (i.e. in men a 40 inch waistline and in women a 35 inch waistline); high triglyceride levels (more than 150 mg/dl); low HDL or good cholesterol (men less than 40 mg/dl) and women less than 50mg mg/dl), elevated blood glucose (equal or greater than 100 mg/dl) and hypertension (140/90 or above).
Glycosylation too is something worth understanding. Glycosylation occurs when sugar molecules or glucose in our blood start attaching themselves to protein molecules to diminish their effectiveness and cause inflammation. It’s a process which increases with age and that is why the more excess glucose in our system the faster we age… actually, science nicknames the effects of glucose on protein as “ageing”! The speed at which glycosylation happens in our body is the speed at which we suffer from diabetes, blindness (e.g. cataracts), kidney damage, nerve damage and heart disease.

And, yes, eating too much and eating too much refined carbohydrates, especially in the form of refined sugar — found generously in most of our junk drinks and foods ranging from bottled soda drinks to designer breads to biscuits to confectionary to sweets — has a lot to do with it amongst other things. Nowadays we see upper middle class families where they think it’s downmarket to drink humble water! Adults and children quench thirst with any number of bottled drinks and their number keeps increasing in the market. Ever wondered how much sugar there is in a glass of so called aerated soft drink? To quote copy from The Health Awareness Centre’s latest desktop calendar, “Each glass of cold drink contains four tablespoons of sugar and stops digestion for four to six hours! The loud burp after is a sign of indigestion - not digestion.”

Do you know that “sugar is addictive, destructive in behaviour and causes similar physiological symptoms as cocaine, heroin or alcohol?” That the “average pH of soft drinks is 3.4! This acidity is enough to dissolve bones and teeth. Stress and diseases flourish and spread in an acid medium. So do allergies and acne. Bubbles and fizz are phosphoric acid and CO2 that burn our insides, tax our kidneys, cause kidney stones, and create lesions in our liver, spleen and stomach. Ruins eyesight! Is carcinogenic. The high fructose corn syrup in colas has been proven to interfere with pancreatic function….”

You want to know why there’s such a high incidence of kidney and pancreatic cancer in Goa? Could be Goans consume a lot of refined sugar in their daily diet, in their daily drinking and eating habits? How often do our health departments make the connections between what we drink and eat and the diseases we suffer from…never or rarely! Our food departments don’t even run campaigns to tell us to drink tender coconut water or home made kokum tival instead of Maaza or Minute Maid!

Of course the mega drinks and food industry wants us to drink and eat more and more sugar in every which they can give it to us so that they can go laughing to all those Dubai and Swiss bank accounts! If you feel hot and thirsty, please don’t drink tender coconut water or sugar cane juice or kokum tival or fresh lemonade….but be sure to buy that bottle of coke or power drink or just mix powdered glucose into water and drink for instant energy! Instant energy makes hyper, unnatural, temporary energy and then if we stop listening to our body’s fine-tuned protests we get into a vicious cycle of drinking and eating to kill ourselves prematurely! If we make life so easy for ourselves in mind and body, heart and soul…we will be punished sooner or later!

After reading all this you’re welcome to carry on as usual, it’s your life. But hey, don’t blame anybody when you run out of energy constantly and behave more like a weary, tired, sick patient at whatever age…and without a clue about why you’re feeling that way. It could be the amount of “cold drinks” and foods you imbibe and consume morning, noon and night. So all this is by way of just updating you about how what you drink and eat makes a difference to your energy levels, the quality of your immune system which defines fitness and health.