How Sugar Jacks Up the Immune System and Your Hormones
Most people are not surprised by the fact that sugar is detrimental to your health. Sugar often wreaks havoc on your immune system and on your hormones. Therefore this can impact energy levels, the ability to sleep, lose weight, and even fertility. Dr Hayden and Dr Horsley dive into exactly how sugar effects your body so you can feel empowered to take control of your health.
Stay tuned over the next few days as we continue to send out short videos to help inform and inspire you to take control of your health during this time of uncertainty.
Transcript From Video on Sugar and the Effect on the Immune System
Dr. Horsley: We’re from the Hayden Institute and we wanted to just in on everyone and see how they are doing with this quarantine. Today, we noticed something we thought was very striking when we were doing some grocery shopping at Kroger, HEB, or Costco… we noticed that the produce aisle is just overflowing with wonderful fruits and vegetables and all the produce you could ever want, whereas the candy aisles and pop (soda) aisles , as well as the water and toilet paper was nowhere to be found. We thought it was very interesting that certain foods are flowing off the shelf whereas other ones are still in overabundance and how this may affect your immune system during this time.
Dr. Hayden: Obviously, some of these foods have longer shelf life than others, so that makes sense why we may go for the packaged things first, however, in the grand scheme of health, packaged foods typically are gonna have higher sugar content, more refined ingredients, and they’re technically not going to be nearly as good for what our bodies could do with them. If we were to eat something that comes fresh from the earth, like fruits and vegetables, or good animal proteins, that would have a much healthier effect on the body. This got us thinking about what the effect of sugar is on our bodies, because if we’re going around buying a bunch of refined breads and packaged goods, the sugar content is going to be high. So what does sugar really do to us and how might our body be negatively influenced by living off of packaged food for these next few weeks as we’re sitting around watching a bunch of Netflix and go to the pantry every 10 minutes.
Dr. Horsley: One of the first things I always like to talk about is specifically how sugar shuts down your immune system in high amounts. So some people may know that some of the active cells in your immune system are the white blood cells (WBC). Your WBC are something that can be evaluated in blood work, with a complete blood count. On this report you can see the levels of your lovely WBC. These are the active workhorses of your immune system, and they have little receptors on them that allows vitamin C to bind and activate them. That’s why we take a lot of vitamin C while we are sick, to simulate our immune system, and directly stimulate our white blood cells. A fun tidbit that most people don’t know is that sugar also shares those same receptor sites. Therefore, if you’re bringing in all that sugar at the same time you’re bringing in vitamin C, or you’re not bringing in vitamin C, you actually may be shutting down the effectiveness of your WBC. The more sugar that you eat, the more than you’re actually weakening your immune system.
Dr. Hayden: So there’s a competing aspect of it, so we’re basically saying that vitamin C and sugar are competing for the same spots.
Dr. Horsley: Exactly, so if you’re taking something like Emergen-C or these other vitamin C products while you’re also taking in sugar, it’s literally off to the races for the vitamin C and sugar. That’s why we highly recommending getting vitamin C from more whole food based sources as opposed to Emergen-C or some of the other synthetic derivatives of vitamin C.
Dr. Hayden: One of the other things that sugar does to our body, especially in larger amounts, is that it can create nutritional deficiencies – chromium, manganese, or zinc can become displaced due to the presence of sugars or simple carbohydrates. Therefore, if we’re consuming more than normal or sometimes any at all, depending on how sensitive our body is to sugar, it can create nutritional imbalances and this can result in imbalances in our vital organs, like liver or kidney function. Therefore, sugar does not only affect the immune system, it can also impact organs by displacing mineral and vital nutrients.
Dr. Horsley: So Dr. Hayden mentioned chromium and magnesium. Chromium is oftentimes huge for blood sugar balance. Magnesium is huge for reducing things like muscle spasms and helping with normal gut balance and helping with sleep. So that’s where you can see how taking something as simple as sugar can impact so many other aspects of overall health.
Dr. Hayden: One of the biggest detriments that sugar will have against hormones, is against the hormone producing glands called the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands regulate out stress response and they help regulate blood sugar activity and sleep patterns. When blood sugar becomes mismanaged and the adrenal glands become involved, our level of energy goes down a lot and can lead to weight gain, sluggishness, and fatigue issues.
Dr. Hayden: It really makes it harder for our body to just recover and repair. So in this situation, with quarantine and being in isolation, and all of the added stress that goes along with it- our adrenal glands are freaking out, our immune system is freaking out, and we’re eating poor quality foods, and it’s just a spiral that goes out of control. Therefore, something as simple as cutting back on the sugars and eliminating them from the diet, going back to those fresh fruits and vegetables are going to be a tremendously large influence on how our body has the potential to just function in normal everyday life.
Dr. Hayden: That was our biggest thing that we really wanted to leave you with on this short video – just while you’re in quarantine, there are more definitive things, stressors and fears. So when you are braving the crowds and going into Kroger and HEB, lets frequent that wonderful produce section so that we can help build our immune system during this time, as opposed to some of those other options. So we just want to thank you so much for joining us and tune in for next time, and after quarantine, eat all the sugar you can – just joking- don’t do it.
Blooper:
Dr. Horsley: The pop aisle and all of these things…
Dr. Hayden: We say coke down here in Texas
Dr. Horsley: That’s true! Sorry. Soda… coke…whatever. That’s my South Dakota kicking in.