Sugar Drinks and Weight Loss - Part 2
In our first article in this series, we made the point that you need to cut out the sugar drinks if you want not just short term weight loss, but life long weight loss. We pointed out that in addition to the weight loss issues from consuming sugar drinks, they accelerate the aging process helping to develop insulin resistance, increased oxidative stress and increased inflammation.
Today we continue to up your weight loss motivation helping you understand that not only do sugar drinks not help with weight loss, they facilitate metabolic damage that makes weight loss very difficult through the development of metabolic conditions such as insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. Now let’s get weight loss specific.
Want weight loss in the belly fat region? What you are about to learn is how sugar drinks promote fat storage specifically in your waist!
The problem begins with sugar and glycemic load. Our bodies are simply not designed to deal with the types of anti-weight loss/high glycemic load containing foods that have been created through modern food processing. These foods cause large amounts of glucose to hit our blood stream at a very fast pace. In turn, this caused large amounts of insulin to be produced by the pancreas to deal with the sugar in our blood. Large amounts of insulin and glucose in the blood promote what is known as oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a state of cellular damage and inflammation.
Several studies have shown that the result of sugar induced oxidative stress is depot specific fat storage! In other words, you don’t store fat evenly all over, you concentrate your weight gain in the belly!
The mechanism seems to be the combination of stress induced by oxidative damage from excess glucose (sugar) and what are known as glucocorticoids – think cortisol.
Glucocorticoids are hormones involved in the metabolism of glucose. The abdominal tissue tends to have more glucocorticoid receptors. In simple terms, too much sugar from sugar drinks causes oxidative stress. This causes excess cortisol to be produced which causes fat storage specifically in the abdominal region. Think of belly fat as sugar/stress fat.
In 2006, a study by the Department of Internal Medicine at Bari, Italy, examined the role between sugar and oxidative stress. The study confirmed a strong association between sugar induced oxidative stress and increased abdominal fat storage!
Where we have been going in this series on sugar drinks, is to give you a better motive than weight loss to get away from them. Weight loss is great, but recent research gives us evidence that sugar drinks play a role in emotional eating. The weight loss motive isn’t enough.
So far we have upped the ante for you motivation by helping you to understand that consuming sugar drinks ages your faster (part 1) and today have seen how sugar drinks concentrate fat storage specifically in the belly.
In the final installment – we will tie all of this together to show you how the regular consumption of sugar drinks makes weight loss very difficult due to damage to your metabolism.
Reference:
Is visceral obesity a physiological adaptation to stress?
Drapeau V, Therrien F, Richard D, Tremblay A.
Consumption of sweetened beverages and intakes of fructose and glucose predict type 2 diabetes occurrence.
Montonen J, Järvinen R, Knekt P, Heliövaara M, Reunanen A.
National Public Health Institute, Helsinki FIN, Finland
The link between abdominal obesity, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease.
Ritchie SA, Connell JM.
BHF Cardiovascular Research Centre, Glasgow University
A causal role for uric acid in fructose-induced metabolic syndrome.
Nakagawa T, Hu H, Zharikov S, Tuttle KR, Short RA, Glushakova O, Ouyang X, Feig DI, Block ER, Herrera-Acosta J, Patel JM, Johnson RJ.
Division of Nephrology, Hypertension, and Transplantation
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