The Problem With Sugar

The presence of sugar and refined carbohydrates in the modern Western diet represents one of the two major deviations that entered into our eating patterns compared with what we ate a few hundred years ago. The other deviation is the introduction of over 60,000 different chemicals into the food chain over the last 100 years.

Research has found that both of these deviations have had serious implications to our overall health and wellbeing. We will focus in this article on ‘the problem with sugar’.

As a species, most of our evolutionary history (approx 1 million years) involved eating only what we had access to from the land or water i.e. the Paleolithic diet. So our systems have developed or evolved to function ideally based on what we were exposed to in the environment. Our diet consisted of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, meat or flesh when we could find it and we drank water. The only access to sugar we had came from some fruits.

Grain as an edible food source came into our diets 5,000 to 10,000 years ago representing, at best, 1% of our evolutionary history. Whilst we have adapted to some grains, this is a very small fraction of our evolutionary history and therefore grain should contribute only a very small portion of our dietary intake and source of fuels.

Furthermore, wheat as an edible grain has only existed for a few hundred years and white flour, or refined grains (including white rice) have only come into existence in our diets over the last hundred years.

Download the entire article, The Problem With Sugar

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