Tuesday, April 03, 2018

Sugar - Good Yet Toxic!

An interesting piece by Clara Wiggins appeared on the BBC website last week:
Doctors are finding one way that sugar can benefit your health: it may help heal wounds resistant to antibiotics.

It begins:
As a child growing up in poverty in the rural Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, Moses Murandu was used to having salt literally rubbed in his wounds when he fell and cut himself. On lucky days, though, his father had enough money to buy something which stung the boy much less than salt: sugar.

Murandu always noticed that sugar seemed to help heal wounds more quickly than no treatment at all. So he was surprised when, having been recruited to come to work as a nurse for the UK’s National Health System (NHS) in 1997, he found that sugar wasn’t being used in any official capacity. He decided to try to change that..........

On the inside of a human body, however it's a different matter:

Sugar Is Definitely Toxic, a New Study Says
by Alice Park at time.com (2015).
First paragraphs:
Fat was the food villain these past few decades but sugar is quickly muscling in to take its place. As rates of sugar-related disorders such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease climb, many experts believe that when Americans rid themselves of fat, they simply replaced it with sugar in all its forms.

But proving that the rise of the chronic diseases was actually linked to higher sugar consumption is a challenge. Dr. Robert Lustig, from the department of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, who has made a name for himself publishing books and research addressing the question of sugar’s effects on the body, wanted clearer answers. Now, in a paper published Tuesday, he and his colleagues believe they have come up with the definitive evidence that sugar, as Lustig says, “is toxic.”

2 comments:

Wisewebwoman said...

I remember reading a book about sugar, "Sugar Blues" I believe it was called. It was riveting. How addicted we've been for centuries and now that they're putting it in everything, scary too. And corn is one of the most toxic agreements there is too.

I remember my granny curing one of my infected knee scrapes with a poultice of some kind, I do believe there was sugar in it.

XO
WWW

Twilight said...

Wisewebwoman ~ Sweetness sure is addictive! And starch too, for me anyway! I could live without sugar, but not without starch...potatoes, good bread... Yummmmm!

Yes, sugar's healing properties are fairly easy to accept - honey has had the reputation of having healing properties for centuries, sugar has to be a close cousin of honey - sibling even. :)