White sugar isn't all THAT bad, is it?

I am cross posting this off a forum I frequent. It bears paying attention to! NOW I know why all those kids act that way! Get rid of sugar!?! My family will kill me. What will we ever use for sweetener? That other stuffs too expensive! There are plenty of options out there: honey maple syrup agave nectar un-bleached sugars stevia Yes, yes they are all more expensive, but sometimes for the sake of your families health, you gotta make a sacrifice. One thing you can do is start cutting sugar in your recipes in half. Bet no one will notice. Use 100% fruit juice instead. All the jams and fruit I can is done with fruit juice. Are you a city dweller with a maple tree in the back yard? Tap for syrup. Free sweetener! For mental illness/depression Ive run across this. Some folks swear by it. The following are various excerpts from website's about the book Sugar Blues. This refers to refined sugar. At the end there is a link to a lengthy article on nexus magazine that has a lot of info in it. ---------------------------------------------------------- In the book, Dufty makes the case that sugar is an addictive drug, that it is extremely harmful to the human body, and that the sugar industry conspires to keep Americans addicted to sugar. The book's central argument is that a small dietary change, eliminating refined sugar, can make a huge difference in how good one is able to feel physically and mentally. Dufty even goes so far as to suggest that eliminating refined sugar from the diet of those institutionalized for mental illness could be an effective treatment for some. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Blues ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Why kick sugar? Refined sugar is not a food, regardless of how much more "natural" it is than the packaged chemical substitutes. The process sugar cane is taken through to produce that white stuff we Americans are so addicted to is the same process that opium poppies are taken through to produce heroine. This is not a food; it is a drug. Sugar picks you up and lets you down ("sugar blues"). It interferes with clear mental processing, natural energy, and normal body rhythms. It is unquestionably linked as a cause of diabetes (along with refined flour). It is addictive! http://preparetoeat.blogspot.com/200...gar-blues.html -------------------------------------------------- In the Dark Ages, troubled souls were rarely locked up for going off their rocker. Such confinement began in the Age of Enlightenment, after sugar made the transition from apothecary's prescription to candymaker's confection. "The great confinement of the insane", as one historian calls it,10 began in the late 17th century, after sugar consumption in Britain had zoomed in 200 years from a pinch or two in a barrel of beer, here and there, to more than two million pounds per year. By that time, physicians in London had begun to observe and record terminal physical signs and symptoms of the "sugar blues". Meanwhile, when sugar eaters did not manifest obvious terminal physical symptoms and the physicians were professionally bewildered, patients were no longer pronounced bewitched, but mad, insane, emotionally disturbed. Laziness, fatigue, debauchery, parental displeasure-any one problem was sufficient cause for people under twenty-five to be locked up in the first Parisian mental hospitals. All it took to be incarcerated was a complaint from parents, relatives or the omnipotent parish priest. Wet nurses with their babies, pregnant youngsters, retarded or defective children, senior citizens, paralytics, epileptics, prostitutes or raving lunatics-anyone wanted off the streets and out of sight was put away. The mental hospital succeeded witch-hunting and heresy-hounding as a more enlightened and humane method of social control. The physician and priest handled the dirty work of street sweeping in return for royal favours. Initially, when the General Hospital was established in Paris by royal decree, one per cent of the city's population was locked up. From that time until the 20 century, as the consumption of sugar went up and up-especially in the cities-so did the number of people who were put away in the General Hospital. Three hundred years later, the "emotionally disturbed" can be turned into walking automatons, their brains controlled with psychoactive drugs. Today, pioneers of orthomolecular psychiatry, such as Dr Abram Hoffer, Dr Allan Cott, Dr A.Cherkin as well as Dr Linus Pauling, have confirmed that mental illness is a myth and that emotional disturbance can be merely the first symptom of the obvious inability of the human system to handle the stress of sugar dependency. In Orthomolecular Psychiatry, Dr Pauling writes: "The functioning of the brain and nervous tissue is more sensitively dependent on the rate of chemical reactions than the functioning of other organs and tissues. I believe that mental disease is for the most part caused by abnormal reaction rates, as determined by genetic constitution and diet, and by abnormal molecular concentrations of essential substances... Selection of food (and drugs) in a world that is undergoing rapid scientific and technological change may often be far from the best."11  http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/sugarblues.html (12 of 16)1/4/2006 6:09:02 PM