Acupuncture & Chinese Medicine ● Longevity Nutrition

agave

I will be traveling to Mongolia for a few weeks and don’t expect to have the ability to do any posts. With regards to my series on Sugar’s Contributions to the Evolution, Then Devolution of Humans.   I would like to leave you with a story that demonstrates why it has taken so long for our society to become informed about the adverse health effects of sugar.  Before I start, I would also like to add that when I was traveling through Ecuador a few months ago, every medicine man and shaman that I met said one of the best things you can do to keep your people healthy is to minimize sugar.  They understood that fruit sugar was the same as any other sugar. It’s amazing to me that they didn’t require any scientific evidence for this.  They simply understood.

A few months ago, our nurse practitioner was following a study that was supposed to show that fructose, specifically from agave, had no adverse health consequences.  At the time, she was admittedly hopeful about the outcome because she loves sugar and was convinced that fruit sugar, because it’s natural, couldn’t be that bad.  The study looked at healthy individuals as well as type 2 diabetics.  Each group consumed a controlled amount of agave syrup daily in addition to their regular diets. After just a few weeks the researchers had to abandon the study because the blood markers in both groups (fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C) continuously rose.  In the diabetics, the numbers reached unsafe levels.  Since the intention of the study was to show that fructose from agave was safe, nothing was published and this valuable information never made it into the scientific literature.

This is a photo of Intipaxi, a traveling healer, whom I met in Ecuador.  He would visit villages and teach the people how to use their local plants medicinally and how to keep themselves healthy. He continually talked about the importance of sunshine and walking barefoot on the Earth.

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