Dr. Jody Stanislaw is a naturopathic doctor specializing in the study of diabetes and the effects of sugar on the body. She is also a type-1 diabetic, which she credits as being one of the reasons she’s always been fascinated with sugar in her medical career.
Most of us are pretty fascinated with sugar, too—from the standpoint of a consumer, anyway.
Even if you don’t have much of a sweet tooth, chances are very good you’re just as guilty of over-indulging on sugar as the soda-drinkers and candy bar-eaters next to you. That’s because bread, beer, yogurt, pasta, cereal, and tomato sauce are all LOADED with sugar, either in the form of carbohydrates or sneakily added in to make them taste better.
The body needs carbohydrates to create energy in your body. If we ate no sugars whatsoever, we’d all probably have a pretty hard time getting up and moving. But the amount of sugar most of us consume on is light-years away from what our bodies actually need.
In the short term, it causes crashes, mood swings, sleep disturbances, and headaches.
In the long term? It can be a death sentence.
As Dr. Stanislaw explains in this TED Talk, that’s because over time, our over-consumption of sugar completely exhausts vital cells in our bodies that regulate the sugar in our blood. And when that happens, we experience diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and critical failures in all of our major organ systems.
With these medical afflictions combined, we can accurately say sugar—one of our most beloved foods—is responsible for more deaths globally than car accidents.
But, it’s never too late to cut back on your sugar consumption and begin to repair those regulatory cells. With a little discipline and a critical eye toward those nutrition facts labels, you can slowly roll back the effects—many of which you may not have ever noticed—of sugar damage.
