White is NOT right when it comes to sugar (..and rice…and bread!)

We’ve probably all suspected it for a long, long time but there’s now growing empirical evidence that in the pursuit of perfect-looking white sugar and fluffy white bread rolls and rice, we’ve emptied these products of their original nutritional value and have, in the process, increased our risk of disease. Richard Weisinger of La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia has recently reported finding important nutritional health benefits in products that are removed when processing white sugar.

“When sugar is processed, the stuff that is thrown away seems to have a lot of polyphenols” he explained recently.

Polyphenols are natural plant chemicals that have powerful antioxidant properties and numerous potential health benefits. One of these potential benefits, suggests Weisinger, is to reduce the amount of fat our body retains after eating a fatty meal. Returning polyphenols to our refined sugar has the potential to reduce insulin resistance and diabetes.

In the experiments Weisinger used mice to test the benefits of polyphenols in sugar. He found that polyphenols reduced the amount of fat that mice stored in their bodies. The mice given the polyphenols did not get as fat as the ones without the polyphenols.

Weisinger explained that these benefits are specific to polyphenols from sugar cane which are different from those found in other food sources such as green tea. He hopes his research can be used to benefit individuals at risk of diabetes by reducing insulin resistance. Insulin is produced in the body (as we know by the pancreas). It removes sugar from the bloodstream and stores excess sugar as saturated fat. Insulin resistance, the cause of diabetes, leads to an inability to remove sugar from the blood.

Researchers are unsure precisely how polyphenols act in the body to reduce fat intake, but Weisinger has some ideas:

“Polyphenols increase energy excretion and make it more difficult to store fat, For example, instead of your body absorbing all of the calories from a meal, it will only keep 90% of the calories. The remaining calories are excreted in faeces.”

Weisinger goes on to explain that larger fat cells, that store a lot of fat, release certain hormones that are inflammatory – certainly not something that pancreatitis sufferers need! Any inflammatory inducing hormones could cause inflammation of the pancreas and cause a flare-up.

So, what’s the upshot of this research for the pancreatitis sufferer. Well, firstly as we’ve been reinforcing throughout previous articles, it is best to remove the need for additional sugar in the diet. Any additional blood sugar is going to put pressure on the pancreas to produce the insulin required to remove the sugar from the bloodstream. Everyone’s tolerance of sugar will be different, but if you are currently adding sugar-based products to your cooking or tea and coffee, then it will be best to use sugar cane products with the least level of processing. From the article I read about Weisinger’s research it wasn’t clear what alternatives to white cane sugar there might be. One could presume that raw can sugar would contain a higher number of polyphenols than the white.

There’s obviously a lot more research that needs to be done in this area, but I still tend to think that the pancreatitis sufferer will do well to continue to reduce his/her ‘sweetness habit’ and in the process use natural sweetners such as stevia.

Oh, some may have been wondering why we ever started removing the polyphenols from sugar cane. As Weisinger explains, “Polyphenols are bitter. People like white, beautiful and very sweet sugar”. Just reinforces our belief that we’ve become increasingly addicted to sweetness in our food and we must start to tame the sugar beast before it gets completely out of control! Colour in our food is a very good thing.

Till next time.

Bill

info@pancreatitis-advice.com