Too much sugar & cooking with high heat help cause aging....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 3-14-2013

If you create damage all over your body and cause parts of you that should be flexible and pliable to get hard and dysfunctional you’ll look older.  You’ll be older.  And you will get harmful and life threatening diseases.

Something called glycation does exactly that to you and your body. 

People who have very little of it look younger and have far fewer wrinkles as they get older.  I just read of a study that proved that is so.

A researcher named David Gunn knew that too high blood sugar was harmful.  And it occurred to him to see if people who had high blood sugar might look older and be more wrinkled as a result.

He was literally able to show that the higher the blood sugar a person had, the more wrinkled and older the person looked.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg.  The glycation that causes this result is far more damaging than just the harm it does your skin.

But what is glycation and how can you avoid it? 

Glycation is when sugars attach to lipids (fats in your blood stream) and to proteins.  In particular, this harms proteins such as collagen and elastin which produces the aged and wrinkled look in your skin.

But that's far from all.  Glycation also harms and stiffens the insides of your blood vessels and helps cause heart disease, atherosclerosis, and high blood pressure.

In addition, nerve cells only work well when they have pliable and flexible outsides.  So glycation causes direct nerve damage and aging.  And, glycation is one of the known causes of Parkinson's disease.

But there's even more.  When glycation attaches sugars to LDL recent research found that makes your LDL blood vessel harming and capillary destroying spiked particles. The effect is quite literally like pouring sand into an engine. 

How do your avoid glycation?

One way is to avoid eating or drinking the things that reliably produce excessively high blood sugar.

THE worst thing to be most careful to avoid is high fructose corn syrup which research shows produces more glycation in part because it’s both extra sweet and doesn’t turn down hunger when you consume it. So you tend to consume more. The free fructose that’s in it also is thought to be more effective at producing glycation.

Plus it’s often in soft drinks and foods made out of refined grains which also boost the dickens out blood sugar levels plus have no fiber to slow down or buffer the effects.

So completely avoiding foods made of refined grains also helps prevent glycation.

Your body, if you eat foods with fiber and exercise can process real sugar a few times a month.  But when you consume it several times a day, this is no longer true.  So avoiding excessive sugar intake prevents high blood sugar and glycation.

In addition, vigorous exercise done most days of every week gives the sugar in your blood somewhere useful to go and lowers high blood sugar.  Effective strength training and burst style interval or variable cardio both work and doing both works best.

But there is an additional source of glycation in your body too.

If you eat glycated fats and proteins, that will also do it!

Fats and proteins subjected to high heat or too high a heat for too long become glycated.

So one would guess that people who eat foods fried at high temperature or for long period and food grilled at high temperatures would be damaging to your health in these ways.

BINGO!  Research does show precisely that.

So, fast cooking like using a Wok or slow cooking from boiling or poaching or using a Crockpot or slow cooker or sautéing at low moderate temperature would produce the best health results.

Eating some foods raw also works.

Again research does show this is accurate.

So avoid high glycemic foods and drinks as close to totally as you possibly can and eat raw or gently cooked foods only 95% or more of the time.

Tobacco smoke also causes this extra wrinkled older look over time so it very likely also causes glycation. So avoiding as close to ALL tobacco smoke also helps avoid glycation.

So if you avoid the things that cause glycation and do the things that avoid or minimize it, the positive impact on your health and rate of aging will be profound!