My very special raw chocolate birthday cake was absolutely fantastic, despite the fact that the staff at the restaurant still didn’t really understand why it was raw and what the matter was with me. But this too shall pass 🙂
I was happy I could eat cake that didn’t make me feel ill, and went straight for a drink of vodka lemonade after. Jeez, it wasn’t an easy decision, I don’t even like alcohol. The vodka lemonade has always been the only thing I could tolerate taste wise, yet at the same time I knew I wouldn’t tolerate it health wise anymore. But then it was my 30th and it was supposed to be fun. Maybe I should be grateful to the others who simply weren’t interested in clubbing, so it stayed with this one little glass of vodka lemonade, after which I went to bed and was more or less okay the next morning.
While sipping timidly on my drink, awaiting the result of the simple sugars of alcohol and lemonade to take hold of my body cells, I remembered what a friend had said earlier in response to my minor reaction to the little surprise sugar birthday cake: “How much do you think your psychological response plays a part in your reaction with sugar?”
This is surely a very good point. In a way I am on a good way to developing a food anxiety, which could be detrimental if not recognized early enough. For example, if I say I am feeling light-headed and have a heightened heart rate after consuming sugar, is this an anxiety response because I fear that I will feel ill, or is it actually really the sugar itself that causes these symptoms?
When looking for evidence on the www, I found others who also reported a raised heart beat after food that they were intolerant or allergic to. Another article suggests that it is the rapid spiking of insulin after intake of sugar that leads to an equally quick drop in blood sugar levels called reactive hypoglycemia. This in turn releases hormones that attempt to counter-regulate and stimulate the autonomic nervous system, which can result in sweating, a rapid heartbeat, nausea, shakiness and anxiety…
Furthermore, on the study day including the sugary birthday cake, we had a diabetic specialist talking to us, who clearly stated that we all need sugar for our body to function. There were cheers and sighs of relief in the group that it wasn’t at all bad to eat all those sweets because here was a specialist who said that the body actually needs it.
I really had to bite my tongue once I had decided it wasn’t the right place to discuss cane sugar and it’s possible damaging effect on our body. But I also understood what the specialist meant. He meant that we need glucose for energy, which the body gets from all kinds of food after digestion.
In the book “Pure, White and Deadly” by John Yudkin, it explains that sugars are actually all digestible carbohydrates, compared to the indigestible carbohydrates, namely fibres. Glucose, sucrose, fructose, lactose, maltose and galactose are all sugars, but glucose is the main source of energy for both, plants and animals. What we refer to as “blood sugar” is actually the level of glucose in the blood.
Sucrose, the “common refined white sugar”, is made up of two units of glucose joined to one unit of fructose and John Yudking suggests that it might be the fructose part that causes the negative reactions in some people. Maltose is formed during the digestion of starch before it is transformed into glucose. Fructose is mainly found in fruit and lactose is made up of glucose and galactose and only occurs in milk and is another sugar which commonly causes intolerance. Read more about it on one of my earlier blogs.
An interesting fact I learned recently while watching Eddie Izzard’s research into his ancestral lines, is that apparently there were two babies born when our early ancestors left the African continent and reached Arabia. One travelled on to reach Australia, the other set off towards Europe and developed a tolerance for milk!
1. This proofs that we are not naturally milk digesters.
2. It would be an explanation why humans began to consume and distribute milk.
3. Considering that we are nowadays cross-world travellers and pair up with people that we wouldn’t have been able to reach some hundred years ago, it would explain to me that another reason for the recent increase in milk intolerance across the globe is the mix-matching of different genetic predispositions.
It is also evident that humans didn’t start agriculture and farming their food for purpose instead of grazing until 10.000 years ago. This is apparently not enough for our bodies to adapt. And the sudden rise in sugar consumption over the past years certainly hasn’t had a chance to settle, hence it has a negative influence on us, because our bodies simply can’t handle it.
So when I told a friend about the development of milk tolerance in humans over many thousand years, she asked cheerfully:” So if we keep eating sugar, we will soon adapt to it?”
Another question: Apparently, blue eyes, which were just as much a mutation as milk tolerance, are slowly diminishing, overridden by the stronger gene of brown eyes. These come mainly from African and Asian ancestors, who are also mainly the one’s with lactose intolerance. Assuming that blue eyes die out because of the stronger gene, does it also mean that at some point humans will have reverted back to lactose intolerance? Then what are the milk producers going to do?
Isn’t science just beautiful? 😉
Love
Anna
The Cycle Of My Life 