Many people don’t realize these days that the sugar you eat in your diet eventually ends up stored in fat cells. These same people don’t understand that the carbohydrates they eat are nothing more than unbroken down sugar. To truly figure out the amount of sugar there is in anything you eat, you have to subtract the amount of fiber from the amount of carbohydrates and then add that to the sugar added and this will equal the amount of sugar you are actually eating. For example; a can of Grillin Beans has 33 grams of carbohydrates and 4 grams of dietary fiber with 14 grams of sugar added. So we take the 33 and subtract the 4 and we get 29. We then add that number (29) to the 14 and we get 43 grams of sugar. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), the maximum amount of added sugars you should eat in a day are no average 7 teaspoons: Men: 150 calories per day (37.5 grams or 9 teaspoons) Women: 100 calories per day (25 grams or 6 teaspoons). So if you eat a 1/2 cup of baked beans you are not allowed to eat anymore sugar.
Your body doesn’t know or care, how the sugar gets into the body, it just knows what to do when it gets there. So high glycemic foods that spike the blood sugar levels is bad for many reason. First; when your sugar levels spike after eating a high glycemic index food, the insulin will chase the sugar levels up and once the insulin gets to an appropriate level the sugar levels will nose dive. The problem with is, the insulin levels don’t retreat as fast, because it is a hormone and it is harder to eliminate them from the blood stream than the sugar. One of functions of insulin is to prevent the release of sugar from fat cells and to store any sugar in the body in fat and we will discuss that in a little bit. When your blood sugar drops fast, you become hungry again and so you go and grab a donut or something else with a high carb/sugar content, which in turn spikes the sugar again. Now the insulin has not had time to go back down to its normal levels so when the sugar levels rise, this once again pushes the insulin back up. This becomes a vicious cycle and the blood levels of insulin remains elevated.
When your blood sugar rises it not only causes the insulin to go up but your body releases a greater numbers of pro-inflammatory molecules called cytokines (IL-6, IL1β and TNF-α).In addition, high blood sugar levels cause your body to produce molecules called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. These are destructive molecules that trigger inflammation.
When you have high blood sugar, your cells become insulin resistant. This means that they refuse to accept insulin and its cargo of sugar. As a result, this sugar gets stored as visceral fat. Visceral fat, in addition to giving you an unsightly belly, produces more pro-inflammatory chemicals. If this is not bad enough, the fat cells then creates more inflammation, which in turn raises the insulin levels in the body. This as mentioned before then stores any available sugar in the body in the fat cells. The insulin resistance will also eventually lead to diabetes.