Sugar High Energy Drinks and Supplements
In our last article we discussed caffeine as an questionable ingredient in energy supplements. Now lets move onto sugar. While not as prevalent as caffeine for use in supplements, it is found more often in energy drinks.
The average American consumes an average of three pounds of sugar a week[1].
We must take note that a large percentage of the sugar we consume comes in the form of the processed foods we eat, not just the white table sugar we may use for our coffee each morning. You will find these sugars in various processed foods such as breads, cereals, ketchup, spaghetti sauce, and energy drinks.
Some of the other names sugar takes on are;
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Sugar (sucrose) - the refined crystallized sugar; a combination of glucose and fructose.
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Brown sugar - refined sugar coated with molasses or caramel.
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Raw sugar - a less refined sugar with a small amount of molasses remaining.
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Dextrose (glucose) - a simple sugar made of only one molecule. It is glucose sugar refined from corn starch. It is a sweetener and a readily available source of energy. Dextrose is produced by the enzyme conversion of corn starch and then refined by ion-exchange demineralization.
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Fructose - a simple sugar refined from fruit.
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High-fructose corn syrup - a highly concentrated syrup of predominantly fructose. This is mainly found in many of your soft-drink products.
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Lactose - simple sugar produced from milk.
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Maltose - simple sugar produced from starch.
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Maltodextrin - a manufactured sugar from maltose and dextrose. This loosely bond
glucose molecules that is rapidly absorbed in the body and has a very high
glycemic index.
These are all simple sugars, not the complex ones you will find in natural fruits and vegetables. Simple sugars are digested faster because there is less molecules to breakdown hence this is where they cause the high
glycemic index issue. Complex sugars are much more slowly absorbed by the body and therefore have a much lower glycemic index.
Glucose is the by-product of simple and complex sugar breakdown. Glucose is the most prevalent sugar in the human body and it is the only molecule that the brain can metabolize.
It is used as an energy source in most organisms, from bacteria to humans. Glucose eventually forms into CO2 and water after it is burned(oxidized), creating energy, mostly in the form of ATP[2].
Energy drinks and supplements are high in simple sugars and offer an instant energy boost because they are easily broken down in the intestinal track and flood the intestines and body with glucose. Some of these drinks can contain as much as 280mg of caffeine and/or 8 teaspoons of sugar[3]. High levels of glucose become toxic to the pancreas and kidneys because they lack the nutrients that allow for the proper slow absorption by our body.
Digestion of simple sugars start a negative cascading effect throughout our system. When blood glucose levels rise they signal beta cells in our pancreas to release insulin. High levels of glucose in body causes the pancreas to react by overproducing insulin and releasing it into the blood to remove the glucose as fast as possible. Insulin plays other important roles in the body, it helps guide the glucose and enter your cells to produce energy. It also reduces glucose production by your liver.
Glucose and insulin go hand in hand[4].
When your pancreas releases too much insulin into your bloodstream it is called
hyperinsulinemia
and your liver stops the release of glucose into your bloodstream[5]. Over time this excessively high level of insulin can cause the "insulin-receptors" in our cells to become less sensitive to insulin[6].
As the cells become resistant to insulin they accept less glucose. This forces the body to over produce glucose for our body's energy needs. The result of this is the pancreas over produces insulin.
The constant cycling from one extreme to the other typically leads to one of two results:
The pancreas wear out and our insulin production slows down to abnormally low levels and this results into the development of type 2 diabetes. On the other hand if they don't develop diabetes they can cause chronic obesity, high blood pressure, high levels of triglycerides, low HDL (good) cholesterol, heart disease, and possibly some cancers.
This is the plague of high sugar energy drinks.
There are much more effective and safer ingredients available to increase your energy levels such as CoQ10, essential oil and direct ATP supplementation. [1] http://www.cspinet.org/new/sugar_limit.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose
[3] The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 16 October, 2006
[4] http://forums.obgyn.net/pcos/PCOS.0102/1132.html
[5] http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/library/DS/00198.html
[6] http://www.annecollins.com/carbs-excessive-insulin-health.htm
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