Get the Sugar Facts – It May Be Sabotaging Your Health and Energy Levels

Learn important sugar facts for better health! Do you know how much daily sugar is safe for your body? For every extra 150 calories from sugar you consume per day, your risk for diabetes increases by 1.1%. Your daily sugar habits may be affecting your body more than you realize. Knowing about sugar facts can extend your life and improve your days. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition warns that processed sugars trigger the release of inflammatory messengers called cytokines that can harm the way your body operates. Science shows that it takes just 30 minutes or less to go from a sugar rush to a full-on sugar crash. This sugar spike-and-crash sets you up to want more sugar—a vicious cycle. Plus, sugar has been shown to be an addictive substance for many people. The American Heart Association gives recommended sugar levels per day, per age group to help keep you in a healthy range. Many Americans don’t know their sugar intake or if they are at risk for prediabetes or diabetes. We offer a full nutritional assessment at our facility to help you know your nutritional needs and what your body has too much or too little of. These nutritional assessments have shown to be successful in changing lifestyles of our patients and providing them with the help and motivation they need to be healthier, feel better, have more energy and even lose weight. If you want to know more about your body and specific health needs, we can help you!

Shocking Sugar Facts

Sugar goes by many names. Learn how to read food labels and look out for any word ending in “ose,” (e.g. fructose or sucrose) on ingredient listings. Other names include cane sugar, molasses, maltose, corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup, honey, fruit juice concentrate, corn sweetener and raw sugar itself. All of these will be some form of sugar and your body will recognize them as sugar. Each gram of sugar contains 4 calories as well, so a candy bar with 22 grams of sugar will end up being 88 calories from just the sugar alone. According to The American Heart Association (AHA), the body does not need sugar to function properly and it contains zero nutrients that our body needs or can use. The AHA’s recommended sugar limits (per day) are: 6 teaspoons for women (25 grams); 9 teaspoons for men (36 grams); and 3 teaspoons (12 grams) for children. For reference, a can of soda generally contains up to 12 grams of sugar. A single slice of whole wheat bread contains up to 2 teaspoons of added sugars. Sugar can hurt your heart, cause obesity and weight gain, be toxic to your liver and can even age your cells. We recommend receiving a nutritional assessment to know where you stand when it comes to sugar and the associated problems it can cause.

Problems from Nutritional Deficiencies

Knowing your sugar facts is one big step towards healthier living, but incorporating change takes extra steps. Lifestyle and diet usually become habits over time. If your diet isn’t very healthy, or involves many processed and sugar-filled foods, you could develop serious health problems, especially if these habits continue over the course of years. It will be hard to maintain weight and will be difficult to healthily combat problems such as diabetes. So how can you tell if your diet is poor? One of the biggest symptoms you might feel is fatigue. Other symptoms may include constipation or diarrhea (depending on how your body processes food), fluctuating blood sugar levels, changes in mood, irritability, depression, headaches or migraines, dizziness, brain fog, frequent heartburn, aches and pains, obesity and weight gain, and even an impaired immune system that might make you sick more often. All of this from your diet! Luckily, a diet can be corrected without skipping all the foods that you love.  Understanding the sugar facts doesn’t mean you can’t have sugar at all. The key is moderation, a diet plan and an exercise plan (even if it is a light exercise plan). We know that a healthy body leads to a healthy mind, and we want to do all that we can to ensure you’re on the road to optimum health and a life without negative symptoms.

Benefits of Nutritional Assessments

Nutritional assessments are one of the important services we provide to our patients. Nutritional deficiencies could be a sign of disease or conditions that the patient may not even be aware of, or they could be causes of pain and symptoms such as food intolerance and allergies, and what we listed above. We offer complete blood testing to identify nutrient deficiencies such as iron, vitamin B12, calcium, etc. We can also test your blood sugar levels and make sure they are in a healthy range. For those who are prediabetic or diabetic or simply need a change, we can recommend nutritional counseling to get your health back on track and prevent and treat symptoms you are already experiencing.

Call for a Nutritional Assessment and Diet Consultation

Among our numerous nutritional testing methods, we use a device with electrical impulses that can provide an accurate depiction of fat deposits in your body. Food tracking, knowing your sugar facts along with nutritional counseling can help you pinpoint areas of your diet that could be destructive to your health and to weight loss. At Texas Spine and Sports Therapy Center, we like to be thorough in our assessments, so we will look into pre-existing conditions, medications, lifestyle and more so that our treatment can be effective and worth your time. A healthier you can be achieved in much less time than you think, and you’ll soon reap the benefits of a healthier body with improved energy. Call us today at (512) 806-0015 to see how much a nutritional assessment can benefit you!