I reached for a can of orange soda in the fridge the other day and looking at the back, I noticed that the sugar content was 57g. Wow! I remember when sugar in soda was 32g, several years back, but it seems to be increasing.

It’s hard to realize how sweet something is until you’ve weaned yourself off of sugar for a period of time. I didn’t realize that the sweet products in America contain way more sugar than products in certain countries in Europe until I lived in Spain for a few months and came back to my country. In Europe, the chocolate covered donuts were my favorite. The first thing I noticed about it was that it was not as sweet. When I moved back to my country and had soda or chocolate donuts or anything else with chocolate, the difference was clear, there’s way more sugar in food products in America.

Diabetes is no stranger in my family, my Mom, Aunts, Uncles, almost all have ended up with it, which makes it easy for me to go down that same path. I used to put at least five packets of sugar in my coffee and drank a bottle of grapefruit juice every morning, later finding out that it had 28g of sugar. When I came across a website that had a list of one-hundred some reasons why sugar is bad for the body and other supportive health sources, I decided to fast from sugar. That fast continued for three months, but at the end of that time, I did not have the temptation to go back to eating or drinking anything with as much sugar. I didn’t go back to the five packets of sugar, rather not using sugar at all, nor did I go back to the grapefruit juice. The first day I stopped drinking the grapefruit juice, one of the first clear differences I noticed was that I was not a sleepy or sluggish as usual and that continued as I stayed off of it. My body had adjusted to not taking in sugar.

Interestingly, cancer, parasites and candida in the body thrive on sugar and can cause sugar cravings. When I found about about this, I went to a vitamin shop and bought one of those small boxes for cleansing. I did the parasite cleanse first, then candida. The first two days, my stomach was going crazy. At the end of both cleanses, I noticed that I didn’t have as much of a sweet-tooth, not the usual sugar craving that I used to have. I’ve seen two very dear people who passed from cancer and one of the transitions that happens in the body that I noticed in both situations is that the appetite disappears for all food except for sugar. One of the ways to kills more cancer cells when going through chemo is to starve the cells for a period of time, then introduce sugar shortly before treatment.

Sugar can be like a drug, an addiction, sometimes a comfort in hard times. It may be that one packet of sugar is not enough, then one turns into three. Sweet becomes not sweet enough. I remember when a friend from class was having a break down from all the stresses of school work, I bought her a chocolate frosty from Wendy’s. While tears were falling from her eyes, she took that first scoop and instantly she was smiling, it was if all her problems just went away. Oh! The comfort of dessert. Like a drug, it can be hard to withdraw from sugar if the body is very accustomed to taking in a lot of it everyday, but after a few days, it gets easier.

Fake sugar in the body may be worse because it’s unnatural. I read a book called, The Seven Pillars of Health, written by Dr. Colbert. He mentions that he had a patient that started having back pains and it happened to be linked to fake sugar that he started taking. Unfortunately, fake food is a huge industry. Although many harmful to the body, it seems, will always be sustained through demand.