Does diabetes cause high blood sugar? Eating only sugar does not increase blood sugar.

Does diabetes cause high blood sugar?

Eating only sugar does not increase blood sugar.

Today I’m going to talk about the only sugar that won’t raise your blood sugar. Now, I see you’re getting pretty excited about this, but before you get too excited, let me explain. Sugar is classified in a certain way. You have something called a monosaccharide, and you have disaccharides. So let’s just talk about those first.

So a monosaccharide is like one individual sugar molecule, like glucose. That would be a monosaccharide. Mono, meaning one saccharide, means sugar. And you also have another monosaccharide called fructose if you combine these different monosaccharides, you have different types of sugar.

For example, table sugar is about 50% fructose and 50% glucose. And then you have honey, which is 30% fructose and 70% glucose. Then you have other sugars like lactose, that’s like milk sugar, that would be glucose, plus another type of monosaccharide called galactose.

And then you have something called high fructose corn syrup because it’s a combination of glucose and fructose that could range anywhere between 55% to 90% fructose. And then you have agave nectar, which is combined with glucose and fructose. And fructose in agave nectar is about 85%.

Okay, so it’s a lot of fructose. Then you have fruit. Fruit is a combination of glucose plus fructose, but the fructose in fruit can vary between 1% and 30%. Now, you’re probably saying, like, what would be 1%? Well, it could be like avocados, which would be considered a fruit.

Or maybe olives, which would be considered a fruit. Very low sweetness, right? Very low fructose. What’s interesting about fructose is that it’s the only sugar that does not activate the beta cells. That’s the cells in the pancreas that release insulin.

It does not increase your blood sugars, at least initially. When you think about it, when you go to the doctor to get your blood sugar tested, they’re not going to be checking how much fructose that’s in the blood. They’re going to be checking how much glucose is in the blood.

Two completely different monosaccharides. And fructose as sugar is like twice as sweet as table sugar. And this is another reason why manufacturing companies might be putting fructose in our food because it’s just sweeter. If you take artificial sweeteners, you’re talking about a factory of like 10,000 to 10,0000 times sweeter than sugar.

So that’s why you need just a tiny bit. And humans lack the enzyme to convert fructose into glucose. So when this was studied and realized that, wow, fructose does not increase your blood sugar, they started to recommend it for diabetics. But let me explain the other half of the story, okay?

Because fructose follows a different biochemical pathway than glucose. Glucose is absorbed by all the cells, but fructose is only really absorbed by the liver. Some of it passes through the intestine because it’s not easily absorbed, and it can get into the colon, where your microbes have a frenzy.

Okay. It’s kind of like crack to your microbes, and they will start eating this up and start growing rapidly and you’ll get a lot of gas and sometimes diarrhea and a lot of digestive bloating and all sorts of digestive problems. This is why a lot of people cannot do fruit or just fruits in general. But what about the stuff that’s absorbed into the liver?

I want to talk about that because the fructose in your liver that can be converted to glucose and stored as glycogen. Now, if there’s enough glycogen stored in the liver, then the body will instantly start making triglycerides, which are blood, fats, and cholesterol. It’s been well documented that fructose will make a liver very fatty very quickly if you consume enough of it.

Right, but we don’t consume very much of it. Well, just what happens is that for kids, for example, 25% of their calories are in the form of fructose on average. That is crazy. So we’re consuming a massive amount of fructose in many different forms. The other problem with your liver becoming fatty and you producing all these triglycerides is that will now create insulin resistance in a bad way.

Okay. More potently than glucose. So now we’re going to go right into diabetes a lot quicker. And now the body is going to produce more insulin indirectly. So just because fructose is low on the glycemic index and it won’t raise your blood sugars, it will do it indirectly and create problems way worse than glucose, but differently.

I’m sorry, you just kind of got excited there, right? You thought maybe you could start consuming fructose. Well, you don’t want to do that. That fructose will also be converted to uric acid, right? So now your gout increases as well. And the more uric acid you have in the kidney, the less vitamin D you’re going to activate.

Because the activation of vitamin D happens mainly in the kidney. So that could be another problem. And we’re going to end up with more inflammation and also profound atherosclerosis that’s, right? It leads right to the clogging or the plaquing of your arteries.

Now, in certain mice studies, and by the way, mice and humans don’t have that enzyme to convert fructose to glucose, there is shown a spike in homocysteine by 72%. Also, you’re going to get low leptin levels, and that has everything to do with your appetite. So you’re naturally going to not get satisfied and you’re going to overeat when you consume fructose.

Probably another reason why they use high fructose com syrup in so many drinks is to get you to drink more and more because you’re not going to be satisfied. Given that information, you can have alternative sugars, okay? These are called sugar alcohols.