SUGAR, is it a Trick or Treat?

By Shannon Pierce

You hit the first house. You or your kids are dressed in their Halloween best. You grab a Tootsie Roll. So tiny, so innocent! Next house comes up, a Twizzler calls your name. Again, it’s “fun-sized!” By the end of the night you are looking at your trick or treat earnings and you decide to celebrate with just one more candy – a mini Snickers. It has peanuts in it after all. Well, unfortunately those three simple bites are enough to put you over the edge on your daily recommended intake of sugar – 25 grams for women and 38 for men.

 

There are lots of secrets about sugar the food industry does not want you to know, masking their ghoulish ways with labels like “fun-size” or “low-fat.”  The problem is, those words are just masking the fact that the product has increased sugar.

 

Here is what happens to our bodies after a night of nibbling on candy.

 

First the sugar is broken down into glucose and fructose. Next, your pancreas creates insulin that transports the glucose to your cells to be used as either energy or stored as fat.

 

When your body is on a sugar rush, your systems go into overdrive.  More insulin blocks leptin, a hormone that tells you when your full.  You know that food coma feeling? That is from your brain releasing serotonin and dopamine, which can make you feel drowsy and want to curl up on the couch for a few hours.

 

Consuming too much fructose can be even more dangerous as it goes directly to your liver, causing a build up of fat in your liver, and even causes fatty liver disease.

 

If you go through this cycle often by eating too much sugar, your body will eventually become immune to glucose and it won’t get flushed out of your blood. Welcome, pre-diabetes.  Not too mention fructose lowers the good kind of cholesterol, clogs your arteries, and more. 

 

So what are consumers to do when digging in that plastic pumpkin? Try a lollipop, a small Dum Dum, that takes longer to eat and is just 26 calories.  Do not grab candy corn by the handful! The Musketeer takes the cake on the “snack size” candy list, just 24 calories and less than a gram of fat. Smarties also take longer to eat because they are individually packaged. Want a healthy dose of heart benefits? Try a square of dark chocolate.

---

 Click on these hashtags to find similar articles.

#quot #false #lsdexception #locked #priority #unhidewhenused #semihidden #accent #medium #list