What else does eating unhealthy mean? Here’s another idea: when we think we eat healthy by eating foods that have replaced natural ingredients considered unhealthy with artificial variants. I wrote about so-called “fat-free” foods, from which fat was replaced by sugars. It is not a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact, that in the 60’s and 70’s the sugar industry paid colossal sums for studies that “proved” that fat is bad for health, not sugar. The outcome? The explosion of obesity, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and others. Mankind has become addicted to sweet taste. Because, yes, sugar is addictive, just like a drug. And here the sugar industry also found “salvation”, because it wants the best for us, doesn’t it? They replaced the sugar in the products with sweeteners. The first sweetener was discovered in 1879 by a Russian chemist who was trying to invent a new paint using coal-based derivatives. Arriving home one day, he noticed that the food served by his wife was very sweet and asked her if she had added any new ingredients. When she said no, he realized that the intense sweet taste came from his hands. He returned to the laboratory and researched the compounds he worked with until he discovered the sweet taste among them. This is how saccharin appeared. Saccharin is 300 times sweeter than sugar and contains no calories. This is where its benefits end, because it keeps us addicted to the sweet taste more than sugar. It makes us want everything we eat to be sweet. So the food industry has complied, we can hardly find foods that do not contain sugar or its substitutes, even pickles have added sugar. You can see on the labels, everything that ends in -in, -ol and -ose is sugar in different forms. Meanwhile, other artificial sweeteners were discovered, which were intensely advertised. Some were later banned after a period of use because it was shown to cause serious illness. Saccharin has remained and is recommended for diabetics in all diets designed for them. It has been suspected to cause bladder cancer, but has not been shown in studies. Instead of trying to educate the diabetic not to want sweet, the addiction is accentuated by recommending sweeteners, which are much sweeter than sugar. For type II diabetes, who make up 90% of people with diabetes, there is a genetic predisposition, but this can be counteracted by adopting a lifestyle that involves normal body weight, exercise and a proper caloric diet, giving up carbohydrates from refined cereals, sweet drinks and any source of hidden sugar. Most of the time, just switching to this lifestyle is enough for the diabetic to lead a normal life without medication. But who gets rich if people don’t buy medicine, but parsley?
Think about what I wrote when you buy a 0-calorie, sugar-free juice, or a jar of mustard in which sugar is the second ingredient on the list. Read the ingredients on the product labels and educate your taste. If a product is not in the category of “sweets” then sugar or its substitutes have no place there.
You can read the first part here.