LGR Holistic Wellness

If you ask most people what their comfort food is, you would probably get an answer resembling that of a sweet treat or greasy fried food. Foods like chocolate, cakes, desserts, and ice cream are particular favorites for the sweet tooth, and chips or fries and fried foods are popular favorites for the savory eater.

The reason foods appear to be comforting is their ability to trigger our brain’s reward system. Foods that are high in fat and sugar are the foods that do exactly that. However, high-fat, high-sugar foods are only a short-term fix to stress, which may come with long-term consequences to our health.

Sweet and sugary foods may be pleasant to our senses (especially to our taste buds), but they are not pleasant for our bodies. These types of foods are linked as contributing factors to a multitude of diseases such as type-2 diabetes, fatty liver, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases.

This doesn’t mean you have to cease taking all sugars altogether, although your body would love you if you ceased eating the refined sugars. There are two types of sugars – simple sugar and refined sugar. Simple sugars are those naturally found in fruits, vegetables, and grains, and come with nutritional benefits. So cutting these sugars out can mean missing out on their nutrients as well.

Refined sugar on the other hand, like those added sugars in cakes, chocolates, cookies, and other high-fat comfort foods, is the type of sugar that’s responsible for inflammation. Just taking steps to moderate your sugar intake could massively help avoid the onset of diseases such as diabetes, heart problems, and cancer.

How Sugar Affects the Gut Microbiome

The extent to how much sugar affects the gut microbiota still largely remains undetermined. However, sugar can cause inflammation in the gut microbiome. Sugar can affect our gut health by causing spikes in blood sugar and by disproportionately propagating certain types of bacteria to grow, which alters the healthy gut microbiome ratio.

The gut microbiome plays a crucial role in keeping the body functioning optimally. You may have noticed that if you have pain in the stomach, you feel lousy overall.
Some of its key operating functions have to do with the body’s immune system, metabolism, and overall protection against the invasion of pathogens that are carriers of disease.

By ensuring a healthy-functioning and well-balanced gut microbiota, we are prioritizing overall health and doing the best we can to keep disease at bay. In the proper ratios, the bacteria in our gut help keep the body functioning smoothly, and the delicate balance in the ecosystem is crucial for our health.

This is where the saying “you are what you eat” makes huge sense because our diet will largely define the state of our gut. Eating refined sugars or added sugars is taking in zero nutrients for the body. Instead of doing any good for your body, instead, it over-feeds the types of bacteria that in large numbers are undesirable for maintaining good health.

While sugar in moderation may not be entirely disastrous, when sugar becomes a staple food in our diet it increasingly creates an imbalance. This imbalance within the gut microbiome propagates the bad bacteria to grow and increase over the good bacteria. Over time, the microorganisms that thrive on a sugar diet will increase more and more.

They will negatively influence all aspects of health, including vitality and mood. As a result, it can increase our risk for inflammation, which further leads to problematic issues in the digestive system such as Crohn’s disease and inflammatory bowel syndrome, just to name a few.

The intake of too many refined sugars can inhibit the production of a certain protein that aids in the propagation of good bacteria. This type of good bacteria enables us to process nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables, so in its lack or absence, it can disrupt our body’s natural ability to process healthy foods for our body’s nutrition, when they are eaten.

In Summary

Remember there is a delicate balance in this ecosystem of bacteria. Eating too much refined sugar can cause the gut microbiome to become severely affected.
Fruits, grains, and vegetables that contain simple sugars also have some of the nutrients that our body needs. They aid in the maintenance of a healthy gut microbiome.

Food, indeed, is our medicine, and it wouldn’t hurt to make healthier choices by being more mindful of the kind of sweet foods we add to our diet.