The dangers of consuming too much artificial food and drink

The main function of sugar is to provide energy for the body, and about 50-60% of the energy needed by the body is provided by sugar. The “sugar” mentioned here is the medical term “sugar” in a broad sense. The medical term “sugar” refers mainly to the sugar molecules in various carbohydrate-rich foods, including rice, flour, sweet potatoes, lotus roots, radishes, beets, and fruits, and not just simple sugar molecules such as sucrose, glucose, fructose, and so on. This concept is unfamiliar to the vast majority of non-medical people. It is important to understand that the carbohydrates we eat every day already provide our bodies with enough sugar when broken down in our bodies, and that adding additional “sugars” to our food is purely for the sake of taste, so it is easy to understand that these additional sugars should be limited as much as possible. As mentioned above, the carbohydrates we eat every day already provide our bodies with enough sugar after decomposition, but many people unknowingly consume too much sugar every day because they also eat a lot of artificial foods and drinks containing sucrose, fructose, and other simple sugar molecules. For this reason, we strongly recommend that the intake of sucrose, glucose, fructose, and other simple sugar molecules should be controlled to less than 10% of the total daily intake of carbohydrates containing energy, that is, less than 30-40 grams. However, due to insufficient medical knowledge, many people are not well aware of this issue. A scientific issue that is little known to the general public is that artificial beverages and artificial foods commonly contain an ingredient called fructose, which is an important additive to artificial beverages and artificial foods. Although it is also a type of sugar, it is rarely recognized and is much less well understood than sucrose and glucose. Although it is also stated on food packaging strips that it contains fructose, very few people bother to understand what it is and what the benefits and drawbacks are. The reason for adding fructose is that it is twice as sweet as sucrose, which saves money and increases sales for manufacturers of artificial foods and beverages. However, in recent years, numerous scientific studies have confirmed that excessive intake of fructose can lead to resistance to insulin, a substance that regulates blood sugar, which is medically known as “insulin resistance”. Insulin is the key substance to regulate blood sugar level, and insulin resistance not only means that insulin’s sensitivity to blood sugar changes decreases, resulting in diabetes; but insulin resistance is also the culprit of the most widespread chronic diseases, namely “metabolic syndrome”, whose clinical manifestations include obesity, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, high uric acid and atherosclerosis. The clinical manifestations of metabolic syndrome include obesity, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, hyperuricemia and atherosclerosis, which are the most important diseases that damage public health. In the last two decades, with the improvement of living standards, artificial foods have been introduced into people’s lives carrying large amounts of fructose, resulting in an increase in the number of patients with these chronic diseases. Our epidemiological survey of more than 20,000 people in six Chinese provinces reported a five-fold increase in the number of people suffering from hypertension and heart disease and a ten-fold increase in the number of people suffering from diabetes, as well as an increase in the incidence of atherosclerosis, obesity, dyslipidemia, and hyperuricemia. This situation is present worldwide.