All Calories Count, but Sugar Calories Count Especially

All calories count, but they don’t all count the same, I said in my last post. So I ended with the horrible prospect of how many grams of sugar are in a 32-ounce Big Gulp regular soda. (At some point I’ll take on the diet soda industry, but not today.) 72 grams of sugar all dumped into the bloodstream at once constitute an EMERGENCY. Remember, these liquid sugar calories basically pass right through the stomach and into your small intestine where they’re absorbed. Alarm bells are going off and your pancreas is pumping out insulin at a mile-a-minute clip. And the system is proactive as well as reactive; your digestive system doesn’t wait for nutrients to hit it before swinging into action. You know this already: when you say, “My mouth waters at how good that smells,” what you’re actually recognizing is that your saliva glands (the first organs that contribute to digestion) start working even before you take the first bite. The sight and smell of food is enough to kick them into gear. Guess what? Your pancreas does the same thing. And this especially happens as that first gulp of sweetness hits your taste buds. Here’s the thing: there’s no way you can “tell” your pancreas how much sugar you’re actually going to take in. Bad as the 72 grams of sugar are, for all your pancreas knows you might take in far more. So it will keep on pumping out insulin until your blood sugar levels are brought down, often way down, thus bringing on the infamous “sugar crash.” Have you ever gotten shaky or dizzy after consuming a high-sugar item? I certainly have. This can be especially true when the sugar is consumed by itself, as would be true in our BG example. There’s no fat or protein to slow down digestion and mediate the blood sugar spike. If you could see someone’s bloodstream right after that sugar crash you’d probably think that person was starving, and indeed you’d be correct in that available nutrients would be too low. Studies have shown, by the way, that teens (and I’m sure people in general, but the studies were on a specific age group) who drink something sugary before a meal will tend to eat more at the meal than those who hadn’t gulped. That strange fact makes sense when you understand the actual processes involved.

Where does all that sugar get stashed? I’ve already covered the idea that the fructose in sucrose (table sugar) or high-fructose corn syrup (which is the sweetener in your BG) has to be metabolized by the liver, so that part of the sugar has already been shunted off there, where all sorts of bad things happen. The glucose remaining in your blood has to be ushered into your cells by insulin activity. I think of the insulin molecules as little whisk brooms, sweeping the sugar out of the bloodstream. Some of the sugar might go into muscle cells, and indeed if you’re involved in physical activity your muscles can use it on the spot. But here’s the important thing: muscle cells can’t store much glucose, being limited to roughly a day’s supply. So where else can the sugar go? Only one place: your fat cells. (This is assuming that you’re not a Type 2 diabetic, in which case a fair amount of the sugar is going to stay in your bloodstream, wreaking havoc.) If you’re just sitting and drinking your soda, your fat cells are pretty much the only possible destination.

So sugar is uniquely fattening because: 1) its solo ingestion tends not to suppress appetite and can indeed raise it, and 2) its easiest destination is our fat cells. As I said yesterday, you can gain weight with an excess of any food; it’s just harder to overeat nutritious and satisfying items, strange as that seems. I’m finishing up this post after a dinner of homemade beef stew (following pretty closely my version of beef Burgundy), and a small bowlful was plenty. It was rich and flavorful, not the sort of thing you could just keep eating. In reality, we often keep eating (or drinking) things that aren’t satisfying, partly in an effort to attain satisfaction and partly because the items are all too easy to ingest. How much effort does it take to suck down that soft drink? Pretty much none. Or to keep shoving a handful of something into our mouths? But the stew required some cutting up (because I’d left the meat in fairly big chunks) and some chewing (even though I had cooked it until quite tender). The very slowness of the process guaranteed that I’d reach the 20-minute line without thinking about it much. And once you’ve reached 20 minutes of eating you’ll start feeling full.

That’s enough for now. Take some time to think about the items you tend to eat mindlessly. How much sugar do they contain? Are they satisfying? Could you just, like . . . throw them out? (Always remembering that extreme actions, such as the infamous “pantry purges,” usually have blowback.) Next up: What’s the harm in following a diet that helps you lose weight even if you don’t understand why it’s working?

See you soon!