“In the past, one of the biggest drivers of type 2 diabetes was in fact alcohol. Sugar has a very similar impact on the liver as does alcohol. In fact, that’s why we now call this disease non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Look below at these two sets of liver cells under the microscope. On the left is the normal liver, nice and pink, and you can see the blood vessels nicely formed and flowing throughout. On the right is a patient with fatty liver disease, and you can see the white spaces (that’s fat) inside the liver cells themselves. The blue on the right is the fibrosis and inflammation, and the little dots are cell death.”
“Here’s the surprise, as you can’t tell from the right image if that came from a patient who’s sick from alcohol or sick from sugar. Alcohol and sugar have a lot in common in terms of their impact on the body. They’re both metabolized exclusively in the liver, in excess they both lead to liver fat accumulation and they both cause metabolic syndrome. Another reason sugar’s like alcohol is because it also affects the pleasure center of the brain in the same way to make you want to consume more. Fructose is a substance just like alcohol where it acts just the same in the liver and just the same in the brain. In fact sugar is worse. When you go drinking you can only drink yourself under the table once that evening, but sugar doesn’t have that effect and allows you to continue eating it until you become sick from the inside out.”
Read the article Hormones – are yours helping or hurting you? to find out more about why eating food with added sugar and eating processed food are the real causes of bad health, disease and death these days!
Related articles by the same author, George Minors: <Obesity isn’t the real problem> <Science of Leptin Levels and Re-feed Days> <Sugar is a Poison?>
Ghrelin = hunger hormone
Peptide YY = satiety hormone
Insulin = energy storage hormone
Leptin = starvation hormone
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