The human body likes stability. It goes to great lengths
to keep your body temperature within a narrow range
(hovering around 98.6°F) at all times, and the same can be
said for your blood sugar levels. Your entire circulating
plasma volume (about five liters of blood) contains just one
single teaspoon of sugar at any given time. This may cause
you to look at your food in a different light, perhaps
thinking twice before reaching for that glass of orange juice,
which contains six times your body’s circulating blood
sugar in just a single cup. Or that delicious cranberry muffin
beckoning you from the office kitchen, containing
seventeen times the amount of sugar—dumped nearly
instantly into your bloodstream upon consumption.
Okay, so what? Eat the sugar, insulin gets it out of the
bloodstream—no harm, no foul, right? Wrong.
The Rising Tide of Sweet Stickiness
Sugar is sticky once it’s in your body, akin to the stickiness
of maple syrup on your fingers—with the important
difference that once sugar sticks to your insides, it can’t be
washed off. On a molecular level, this is called glycation,
and it occurs when a glucose molecule bonds to a nearby
protein or the surface of a cell, thereby causing damage.
Proteins are required for the proper structure and function of
all organs and tissues in your body—from your liver to your
skin to your brain. Any food that elevates blood sugar has
the potential to increase glycation, and any protein exposed
to glucose is vulnerable.^8