Do you want to take control of your diet to stay healthy? In “Eating Better”, nutritionist Arnaud Cocaul answers, for Yahoo, the many questions you may ask yourself on a daily basis and shares with you his advice for eating balanced, healthily while having fun. He also speaks out on certain nutritional prejudices which continue to persist. In this episode, he warns of the hidden dangers (deliberately) of a product omnipresent in our diet: sugar. This video as well as the advice provided by Dr. Arnaud Cocaul cannot replace personalized medical advice. If you have any questions, consult your doctor.
From year to year, voices are raised to denounce the dangers of sugar. However, even if we take care to follow a balanced diet, excess sugar can enter our diet in products whose high sugar content we would not suspect.
25 sugar cubes in a baguette
“You consume sugar all the time without realizing it. And sometimes in a surprising way. When you take a white baguette, you have the equivalent of 25 pieces of sugar in your baguette. So sugar can be hidden in a surprising way in our diet” warns Doctor Arnaud Cocaul.
And that’s the whole drama. Processed sugar is harmful to our health and the diets of industrialized countries contain more of it than necessary. The food industry voluntarily adds sugar to the products it manufactures because the human brain is formatted to immediately recognize sugar. “It’s the first taste we experience as a human being. When you’re bathed in amniotic fluid, in your mother’s uterus, you have fatty, sugary foods that nourish you. The first taste a person experiences child, it’s the sweet taste.”
To provoke our brain, the food industry can even go so far as to add sugar to vacuum-packed meat on the shelves of our supermarkets. “When you look at the ingredient list, you find that there is glucose, glucose syrup, things that are calorie bombs, and most importantly, that transform the product.”
What are the dangers of sugar?
Excess sugar can be the cause of many diseases. The best known being “type 2 diabetes”, which affects 3.5 million people in France, or 5.3% of the population.
According to Ameli, type 2 diabetes affects 92% of diabetics in France. If it occurs more generally after the age of 20, it can also appear “as early as adolescence, especially in the presence of excess weight”.
“You have people aged 18 who develop diabetes linked to their junk food,” explains Doctor Arnaud Cocaul.
Type 2 diabetes represents a global problem, according to figures from the World Health Organization, which estimates that the number of type 2 diabetics worldwide increased from 108 to 422 million between 1980 and 2014.
Projections from the International Diabetes Federation estimate that by 2045, 700 million people worldwide will have diabetes.
Another known consequence, which the doctor distinguishes as a “corollary” is obviously obesity. Overweight affects 47% of the population in France with 17% declared obese. Among the other diseases, there is “hepatic steatosis which is exploding in our country” warns Arnaud Cocaul. More commonly called “fatty liver” or NASH (English acronym for “non-alcoholic steatohepatitis”), steatosis is “an accumulation of fats inside cells which normally contain little or no fat. . The liver, which contains very little fat when healthy, can be the site of this concentration. explains Ameli on her website. In France, fatty liver disease affects more than 200,000 people.
Doctor Arnaud Cocaul specifies that sugar can also be the cause of unsuspected diseases such as cancer or heart disease “because little by little you will transform your metabolism, the functioning of your body and it will no longer function in the same way, will no longer eliminate impurities in the same way.”
Faced with this invisible and sometimes inevitable danger, it is essential to get diagnosed.
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