I recently visited a museum in my nearest town in Ireland, and there was one exhibit that I just couldn't tear myself away from. It displayed of the skeletons of three people that they had found buried under the gate of the museum, dating from the 1500's. One was a fully grown woman, one a teenage girl, and one a young boy. Their bones all showed various signs of illness, inflammation and malnutrition...they had led hard lives by the looks of it...but their teeth were PERFECT! Not one sign of decay. Straight, well formed and pearly white. The back molars of the woman had been worn down a bit, due to their bread being full of stone fragments, but the information panel explained that their diet would have been totally free of refined sugar, as it was still a luxury for most people at this time.
REDUCE YOUR SUGAR CONSUMPTION NOW!
The golden days before Cadbury Cream Eggs existed
Most of us know by now that sugar is not great for our teeth, but its effects are much more insidious than that. It's not merely that the presence of sugar on the teeth encourages dental caries, but that its absorption into the body creates an imbalance that causes minerals to actually be leached from our teeth, accelerating decay.
And that's not the end of it. Here are the other things you might not know that sugar is doing to your body:
Joint Pain
Because sugar encourages inflammation in the body, it can contribute to joint pain, and even raise your risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.
Skin
Sugar contributes to wrinkles and sagging skin by creating molecules called (brilliantly enough) 'AGEs', or advanced glycation end products. These molecules damage collagen and elastin in your skin, accelerating visible signs of ageing.
Liver
When sugar is added to food it is often in the form of fructose, or high fructose corn syrup. This damages the liver in high quantities, and also gets transformed into fat, which can cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (and build up of excess fat in the liver), or non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (fatty liver, inflammation and scarring of the liver). This can develop into cirrhosis, which requires a liver transplant.
Brain
Sugar causes your brain to release dopamine, which is the chemical that makes you feel good. It's easy to see why we would want more and more of that, especially if we're feeling stressed or depressed. However, studies show that sugar actually contributes to depression, and it also causes our dopamine receptors to become tolerant to the effects over time, so that we need increasing quantities to cause the same good feeling.
Heart
High sugar consumption leads to excess insulin in your blood, which causes the arteries all over your body to become inflamed, thickened and stiff. Over time this can lead to heart problems like stroke and heart attack. In fact, people who eat a lot of added sugar are twice as likely to die of heart disease than people whose diets include less than 10% of total calories from added sugar.
Cutting out sugar can also help lower blood pressure, another indicator for heart health.
Pancreas
If you eat too much sugar your body can stop responding properly to insulin, which means your pancreas has to work harder to produce enough of it. Eventually your pancreas becomes overworked and breaks down, and your blood sugar levels rise, which leads to type 2 diabetes and heart disease
Kidneys
For diabetics, too much sugar can lead to kidney damage, which means they can't do their job of filtering waste from your blood. This can ultimately lead to kidney failure.
Body Weight
Research shows that people who drink sugar-sweetened beverages tend to weigh more -- and be at higher risk for type 2 diabetes -- than those who don’t. One study even found that people who added more sugar to their diet gained about 1.7 pounds in less than 2 months. Excess amounts of sugar can inflame fat cells causing them to release chemicals that increase weight.
GIVING UP THE WHITE POWDER
Sugar is present in an incredible number of the foods we eat, even ones we might not suspect, like salad dressing and bread. It has become such a normal part of our modern diet that it is hard to avoid. Because it's so hard to avoid, it's also really hard to give up, or even moderate effectively.
Hypnosis, however, gives us a bit of an advantage if we're wanting to reduce our sugar intake, in that it goes straight to our subconscious programming and influences our choices before we're even fully aware of them. When your subconscious is convinced that you're not interested in consuming sugar, your mind and body tend to agree and your actions reflect this new stance.
Try our Control Sugar Consumption Hpynotherapy session today and experience for yourself how easy it is to make positive changes for your health and well being for years to come.
