Too much sugar makes you fat and is unhealthy. However, there are a number of foods that are even more dangerous than sugar.
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Dangers of too much sugar
“Don’t eat too much sugar” is often the first diet rule children learn from their parents. And rightly so. Excessive sugar consumption causes diseases and makes you fat. Tooth decay, obesity and diabetes are the most well-known health consequences of excessive sugar intake. If you want to live a healthy life, nutrition experts and doctors advise that you should ideally avoid foods with added sugar altogether.
Sugar has long been known as a health villain among foods. In addition to the temptingly sweet fattening food, there is a whole range of other foods that are sometimes even more dangerous to your health than sugar.
1. Salt
The human body needs salt, or rather sodium chloride. The table salt that we use to taste and season our food consists largely of sodium chloride. In order for our nerves to transmit signals and bones to build up properly, we need to consume around 4 to 6 grams of table salt per day. However, the actual salt intake among adults in Germany is twice as high on average. Women consume an average of 8.4 grams of salt per day, and men often consume more than 15 grams. This is clearly too much.
Excessive salt consumption is associated with health problems and diseases . Researchers now agree that too much salt can promote high blood pressure. In turn, people with high blood pressure have a higher risk of suffering a stroke or heart attack. The risk of stomach cancer is also said to increase as a result of excessive salt intake, as does the risk of being overweight. Salt as an appetite stimulant ensures that we snack more and more often and eat past feelings of fullness.
2. Transfer
Healthy fats such as omega-3 or omega-6 fatty acids play an important role in a healthy diet. Fish oil or vegetable oils from flaxseed, sunflower, canola or olive should be consumed regularly to enable normal metabolism and healthy bodily functions. So what are trans fats and why are they more dangerous to your body than sugar?
Trans fats are also known as unsaturated fats. If vegetable oil is exposed to particularly high temperatures or repeatedly heated, its molecular structure changes and what should actually be a healthy oil becomes an unhealthy trans fat. Such trans fats are used in the fast food sector and in the industrial multiple processing of food. Fried foods and ready meals such as pizza, burgers or chips as well as some baked goods are high in trans fats.
The problem with unhealthy trans fats is that they raise LDL cholesterol. This type of cholesterol causes harmful deposits on the vessel walls of the arteries. The consequences are blood flow constrictions, blockages and an increased risk of strokes and heart attacks.
3. Industrial dyes
The eye eats with you. And our eyes especially like to see their fill of bright and intense colors. In the food industry, people like to use their bag of tricks to spice up the color of food that is actually inconspicuous. Cheese, ice cream, lemonades and spreads are particularly often reworked with food coloring . In many cases, the food colors used are completely natural and harmless to health.
However, you should keep a closer eye on artificial dyes. Such dyes are listed in the EU with so-called E numbers on the list of ingredients of a product. The group of azo dyes is particularly dangerous here. These include tarttrazine (E 102), azorubine (E 122) or quinoline yellow (E 104). Researchers consider these artificial dyes to be particularly hazardous to health and are associated with intolerance diseases. The development of asthma, skin rashes or hives can be favored by such artificial colorings. In children who consume a lot of foods with artificial coloring, the extent to which attention deficit disorders or hyperactivity are caused by azo coloring is also being investigated.
4. Processed meats and sausages
It’s no secret that highly processed foods have a negative impact on our health. However, foods such as sausages, meats and cold cuts that are smoked, aged, salted and otherwise industrially modified have a particularly detrimental effect on your health. A meta-study by researchers from the Harvard University School of Public Health, in which almost 1,600 individual studies on the topic of “health risks from processed meat” were evaluated, was able to confirm that just eating 50 grams of meat products per day reduces the risk of heart disease by 42 percent rose.
But not only the heart suffers from too much meat and sausage consumption. In particular, the risk of developing stomach and colon cancer is significantly higher in sausage eaters. The World Health Organization (WHO) finds clear and unequivocal words here: According to WHO research, processed meat is carcinogenic in humans.
5. Maissirup (High Fructose Corn Sirup)
Corn syrup is made from the starch of corn. In the US, artificial sugar is known as High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Depending on the majority of the sugar used, the terms “glucose-fructose syrup” or “fructose-glucose syrup” are common according to the German Sugar Types Ordinance. Corn syrup is used as an artificial sweetener, primarily in soft drinks, and is suspected of sending insulin levels on particularly dramatic rollercoaster rides. This makes food cravings more likely. Food such as corn syrup also promotes the development of diseases that result from regular and excessive sugar intake, such as diabetes or fatty liver.
The extreme sweetening power of corn syrup with a high fructose content is particularly dangerous. Foods with HFCS are many times sweeter. This sweetness is taste-defining, those who regularly consume foods with corn syrup get used to the sweetening power and tend to reach for very sweet foods more often.
