Sugar is often one of those things we’d swear we couldn’t live without. After all, it makes everything we like taste that much better, right? Plenty of people have to swear off of sugar for medical reasons and yet they still try to find substitutes that maintain that distinctly sweet taste that we all end up craving so much. There’s a reason humanity loves sugar so much. Our bodies know that anything sugary is packed full of energy just waiting for it to us. The end result is our bodies telling us to eat more sugar because it will give us energy for in the future when such a nice food isn’t available. Unfortunately, this impulse best served us back when humans were still hunter-gatherers where finding something sugary would have been a treat rather than how readily available it is now. That overabundance can end up hurting our body more than we know.

Blood Sugar and Food
Sugar’s problems are directly related to its concentration in our blood. Our blood sugar levels give a rough idea of how concentrated sugar is in our body. These levels naturally ebb and flow over the course of any given day as we eat, fast, and snack. Each thing we eat puts a bit of sugar back in our body as it processes the more complex food down into its base components. Candies, cakes, and other sweet treats are all responsible for massively spiking blood sugar in the aftermath of eating them. The body can, of course, handle spikes to one degree or another. After all, it is used to regulating the standard ones from just eating. These larger scale spikes are a bit harder to control though and tend to last longer. That’s where the problems for our body begin to creep in. Those spikes actually end up damaging our body in broad yet meaningful ways if we’re too fond of sugar.

Sugar and Skin
Those spikes caused by eating sugary things quickly begin to impact the skin. The primary way this happens is through the low level of inflammation that blood sugar spikes cause within the body. They increase the body’s susceptibility to things as it is busy reacting everywhere to try to prevent problems. For your skin, this ends up leading to situations where your skin has increasing trouble responding to various kinds of damage and becomes susceptible to being irritated easier than usual. The loss of an ability to heal itself as effectively ends up leading to a situation where the damage of the day begins to accrue. Wrinkles deepen, sun spots darken, and each little thing we work against with skincare gets a little worse. The extra inflammation from within your body also makes your skin more prone to flare-ups of chronic issues such as eczema. Overall, this isn’t good for your skin aesthetically or health-wise as each of these problems will feed back into one another if they aren’t stopped.

Sugar and The Body
That low-level inflammation we highlighted as affecting the skin does end up causing more effects throughout the body. The exact mechanisms are overall uncertain, but the inflammation is suspected to contribute to age-related issues in addition to various inflammatory conditions. This makes it difficult to pin down any one thing that is definitely responsible even though the effects are there to be seen. For instance, too much sugar results in the body have excess “energy” that it then needs to store. Fat deposits begin to increase and we gain weight. The body can become desensitized thanks to the increased levels of sugar and eventually have difficulty with processing it. This, in turn, leads to diabetes. You also begin to experience overall metabolic issues as increasing weight and excess sugar contributes to an increasingly erratic metabolism. Your kidneys and heart also begin to suffer from the overall inflammation in such a way that it may contribute to the development of disease in each. Too much sugar is always a bad thing.

There’s no denying that sugar tastes wonderful and helps to make the food we eat just that much more delightful. It does need to be enjoyed in moderation though or our bodies will begin to have problems. The complex systems that work together to keep us alive are only capable of taking so much of any one thing. Sugar is no different. So consider this a friendly warning to eat a balanced diet. Don’t skip dessert by any means, but don’t forget that there is more to food than sugary delights.