Tue, Sep-18-18, 01:50
|
 |
|
|
Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
|
|
Here's what's going on inside your veins after you drink a soft drink
Quote:
From The Sydney Morning Herald
17 September, 2018
Here's what's going on inside your veins after you drink a soft drink
Half an hour after finishing a can of soft drink, your blood sugar has spiked.
So you’re probably feeling pretty good. Your cells have plenty of energy, more than they need.
Maybe that soft drink had some caffeine as well, giving your central nervous system a kick, making you feel excitable, suppressing any tiredness you might have.
But a clever new study, published Monday, nicely illustrates that while you’re feeling good, strange things are going on inside your blood vessels – and in the long run they are not good for you.
For this study, 28 obese or overweight young adults agreed to sit in a lab for a whole day while having their blood continuously sampled.
The volunteers ate a normal breakfast, lunch and dinner. At morning tea and afternoon tea, researchers from Melbourne's Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute gave them a can of soft drink.
Their blood samples revealed exactly what happened next.
Sugar from, say, a chocolate bar is released slowly, as your digestive system breaks it down.
With a can of soft drink, almost no break-down time is needed. The drink’s sugar starts to hit your bloodstream within about 30 minutes. That’s why you get such a big spike.
Your body responds to high levels of blood sugar by producing a hormone called insulin.
Insulin pumps through the bloodstream and tells your cells to suck in as much sugar as they can. The cells then start burning it, and storing what they can't burn.
That quickly reduces the amount of sugar in the blood, and gives you a burst of energy. So far so good.
But the sugar keeps coming. High levels of blood sugar will quickly damage your blood vessels, so the body keeps making insulin.
In fact, just having two cans of soft drink meant the volunteers’ insulin stayed significantly higher than usual - all day.
After lunch, and another soft drink for afternoon tea, their sugar and insulin levels spiked again.
And, once again, over the next few hours blood sugar dropped but insulin levels stayed stubbornly high – right through to late afternoon, when the study finished.
The study demonstrates that two cans of soft drink is all it takes to give your pancreas – the crucial organ that produces insulin – a serious workout, says Professor Bronwyn Kingwell, the study’s senior author.
“If you did this day in, day out, your pancreas would be under considerable stress – and this is how diabetes can develop,” says Professor Kingwell. “Having a little can of soft drink in the morning is going to have lasting effects throughout the day.”
If your diet has too much sugar in it, forcing your body to keep your insulin high all the time, eventually your cells will grow insulin-resistant. That forces the pancreas to make even more insulin, adding to its workload. Eventually, it will burn out.
But something else interesting is happening inside your body as well.
Insulin tells your body to burn sugar. But it also tells it to stop burning fat.
Normally, the body burns a little bit of both at once. But after a soft drink, your insulin stays high all day – so you won’t burn much fat, whether you’re on a diet or not.
One of the study’s participants, Michelle Kneipp, is now trying as hard as she can to kick her soft-drink habit.
She’s switched soft drinks for flavoured sparkling water. “It still tastes like soft drink, and it’s still got the fizz,” she says.
“But it’s hard, because sugar’s a very addictive substance.”
|
https://www.smh.com.au/national/her...915-p50403.html |
Linear Mode
