Sugar

Not Always A Sweet Story

By Xavier Fox

Many of the articles that you find in BodyFitness discuss nutrition, because it is the ultimate determining factor in how your body composition ends up. The articles often contain in-depth examination of the effects of proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Sugars normally get mentioned as a side topic, and it is usually limited to how sugars cause your insulin levels to rise too quickly and promote fat gain, so you are basically just told to not eat sugars. However, from the time we are born we are introduced to sugars. The lactose in the milk we use for nourishment from the first day is a very sweet sugar. We start life being fed sugary food. Carbohydrates themselves are sugars; so let’s spend a little more time looking into the subject of sugar and how it affects the Bodybuilder.

If you take the time to read the nutritional labels on the foods that you purchase, you will see that the majority of foods that you purchase, even the completely organic foods, will have some amount of sugar in them. For example, a standard sized potato has 1-3 grams of sugar, a serving of green beans has 2g, a serving of lentils also has 2g, and a medium sized banana will have up to 19g of sugars. They are different types of sugars, and each will have different effects, but the point is, even eating very healthy foods will cause you to intake some amount of sugar during the day. Don’t be worried though, your body is made to use carbohydrates to create sugars to be used for energy. So, some intake of sugars will not be harmful. Like everything else, it is the amount and type that you consume which will determine the consequence on your system.
Before we get started, there is one sugar that has absolutely no nutritional or other value at all, and you should always avoid it. That sugar is high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is a combination of 55% fructose with the rest being glucose and other sugars. It is not too different from sucrose (common table sugar), which is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. As you already know, glucose is one of the most basic forms of sugar that is the building block for most carbohydrates. Fructose is a naturally occurring simple sugar found in fruits. However, even though fructose is found in fruits, consuming large amounts of it can be dangerous.
Unfortunately, high fructose corn syrup is used in a wide variety of foods and soft drinks. It is even used to sweeten many so-called “health foods”. By using high fructose corn syrup to sweeten the foods, the manufacturers can keep the food tasting good while eliminating fats. So, the unsuspecting consumer looks at the label, sees that the food is virtually fat-free, and they eat the food thinking they are getting health benefits. Well… a study performed on rats at the USDA, which had one group eating large amounts of glucose and the other eating large amounts of fructose, had some scary results. The glucose group did not show any detrimental results. The fructose group was a different story. The male rats did not reach adulthood, became anaemic, had high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy (their hearts enlarged – in some cases it was fatal), and they had delayed testicular development. The female rats in the study did not show as many physical ailments, but they were unable to give birth to live offspring.
Try not to get caught up in associating high fructose corn syrup with regular fructose sugar that is found in fruits. Fruits are very nutritious and contain many vitamins, minerals, fibres, and antioxidants that will help you stay healthy and strong. Fructose is a different animal when it comes to sugar and how it affects you. As most of you know, glucose will be stored as glycogen in the muscles. Muscles cannot break down fructose into glycogen so it can be stored in the muscles. When you consume fructose, it is broken down in the liver and stored there as glycogen there. It does not take a whole lot of glycogen to fill the liver’s stores completely, and once they are full, a signal is sent to the entire body that glycogen should be converted to fatty acids and stored as fat. This is how too much fructose can promote fat gain.
Unlike glucose, which causes the quick buzz because it hits the system quickly, fructose does not have this affect. As a consequence of this, many people think that fructose is not bad, because they think that since it does not get into the blood stream rapidly, it will not raise insulin levels and promote fat gain. What is actually happening is that the fructose that is not stored in the liver is released in the system as fatty acids, so there is not a rapid rise in blood sugar levels. There is no quick hit of energy, there is no rapid rise in insulin, but… there is a lot of fat being released in the blood. So the symptoms are not the same as eating a lot of glucose, but the end results of gaining body fat are.
This is not meant to deter you from eating fruit. The key is to eat moderate amounts of fruit and do not be fooled by the fact that fructose does not make you “fidgety”. Fruit should be included in your daily diet. For those of you dieting for a bodybuilding show, you may want to limit the amount of fruit that you consume in the 6-8 weeks before the contest.
Our past articles on carbohydrates have discussed how carbohydrates can be broken down into two categories, monosaccharide and disaccharides. These are also the two forms of sugars. Monosaccharide are single chain forms of sugar such as glucose, fructose, and galactose. Disaccharides are two monosaccharides chemically bonded together such as sucrose, lactose and maltose. The three main ingredients of all of these sugars are carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. When you consume sugars, they will be broken down into a monosaccharide once inside your small intestine, if they are not already one.
Once they are broken down, glucose will go into your bloodstream so it can get to the muscles, brain, kidneys and other important areas of your body. Some sugar will be directed to your liver to have a phosphate atom bonded to it. Glucose can also be manufactured in the liver from amino acids and glycerol from fat. That is why it is important to get enough carbohydrates throughout the day, because if there is not enough glucose to support energy needs, the body will break down proteins and use the amino acids to produce glucose. This means that the protein will not be available for muscle building and recuperation. Glucose will either be stored as glycogen in your liver and muscle tissue, or it will be transported in your bloodstream so it can be used for energy by other parts of the body.
Your body normally only has enough glycogen and blood glucose to support energy production for a little less than two hours. If you continue working out past that time, you won’t burn much fat. Weight lifting requires energy too fast for fat to be broken down, so it needs carbohydrates. Your body stores 80% of its glycogen in the muscles, so when your muscles are too tired to continue lifting, it is time to stop. Oh… that 80% is spread out all over every muscle group, so the glycogen stored in one particular group will be much lower. It normally only takes a few intense sets to deplete a muscle of most of its glycogen stores.
Pushing a muscle after its glycogen stores are depleted will only cause the muscle tissue to be broken down to create energy. You will need to stop training that muscle group and make sure you consume enough carbohydrates to replenish glycogen stores. The process normally takes one or two days. Pounding two potatoes down your gullet right before you train will not have too much of an effect on your glycogen stores. If you try to train a muscle group before all of the glycogen can be stored, you will find that you tire quickly and cannot train very intensely.
If you want a pre-workout meal that will do you some good, eat some low-glycemic carbohydrates to get some glucose in your bloodstream. This will help you have some energy readily available in your system. Do not eat sugary carbs (high-glycemic), because they will cause an insulin spike, and then your blood glucose levels will actually drop as a result. You want to keep your blood sugar level before you hit the weight room. In addition, it might be a good idea to consume a small amount of carbohydrates (in liquid form) during your workout… about ten grams at most. It will not only provide blood glucose to keep you going strong, but it will also inhibit cortisol production. If you are doing a strictly aerobic workout, you may not want to consume carbs while training, because your body will burn the carbs instead of fats for energy.
At the completion of the workout, you will be at the only time during the day when it is good to have high glycemic carbohydrates. The quick absorbing form of carbohydrate will act like a simple sugar and get into your system right away. Since your system will be starving for carbohydrates, it will suck up the high glycemic carbohydrates right away to start replenishing glucose and glycogen. This will keep your body from having to break down muscle tissue and proteins. If you eat protein along with your high glycemic carbohydrates, the amino acids in the protein will work with the insulin spike from the carbs to drive the sugars into the muscles faster and in higher amounts… up to 30% more. Many studies show that almost all carbohydrates consumed immediately following a workout will go towards replenishing glycogen, which means they will end up in your muscles instead of around your waist.
In past articles, you may remember BodyFitness authors discussing glycolysis. This is the process that the body uses to break glucose down into energy and waste. In one part of the process, pyruvate is created and goes through what is known as the Krebs Cycle, where it is oxidized and transported into the mitochondria (the energy producing cell within muscle tissue) so it can produce ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and NADH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) to allow the capacity to produce energy. The other process will create lactate, and this is the waste acid that gives your muscles the burn they feel during your workout. The energy cycle must happen much too quickly to use oxygen when weight lifting, so lactate ends up being created as a waste by-product, so it can be directed back to the liver and hopefully turned back into glucose.
As mentioned earlier, having too few carbohydrates in your system will cause proteins to get used for energy, but having too many will cause glycogen stores to become full, and then excess carbohydrates will be stored as fat. So… sugars in your blood will be used for instant energy, they will be stored in the muscles to replenish glycogen, or they will be stored as fat. Luckily for you though, the body is made to burn carbohydrates for energy in preference to fats and proteins. As long as you remain very active and do not completely overdo the consumption of carbohydrates, you should be able to burn most of it off. Even when carbohydrates and fats are consumed together, the body will still prefer carbohydrates as the main energy source. Remember, carbohydrates are broken down in to glucose to fuel the function of the brain and other organs too, so the sugars in your system are constantly at work. Just don’t get too overzealous when it comes to eating carbohydrates.
If you consume a lot of carbohydrates and they are quickly broken down into sugars that hit your system rapidly, your body will release insulin to counter the sudden blood sugar spike. Although insulin is the most anabolic hormone in your body and is great for building muscle, if it is consistently at high levels in your body, then it will cause your body to store fat more readily. If you want to maintain your body’s ability to oxidise fats optimised, keep your intake of high glycemic carbohydrates and simple sugars to a minimum, so that your insulin levels will remain steady and in healthy concentrations.
In addition to raising insulin levels, sugar also has another negative affect on your body: it releases chemicals in your body that interact with dopamine and create a sensation of being happy or peaceful. Have you ever noticed how women like to eat chocolate when they fell depressed about something? Your body begins to relate sugar with feeling good, and that causes some people to crave it at a subconscious level. They end up eating more sugar than they should over time. The sugar makes them happy, but then they become overweight from eating too much sugar, and that makes them sad.
Here is another little titbit of information about eating too much sugar: staying away from sugars will actually reduce your risk of heart disease. The amount of triglycerides (a glycerol with three fatty acids bonded to it) that flow in your blood has been linked to heart disease, and the amount of sugar you consume can determine how much triglycerides are in your blood. It is not fat that increases triglycerides in the blood, but it is sugar and alcohol that do. Sugar will raise blood triglycerides 60% more than starches do. When blood triglycerides are at high levels, they will be converted into the dangerous low-density lipoproteins that have been directly linked to heart disease. So keep your sugar intake low and also make sure that you exercise to keep blood triglyceride levels minimal.
So… although your body uses sugars for energy to fuel your intense workouts, you want to consume them as complex (low-glycemic) carbohydrates and let your body break down those carbs into simple sugars in your body. Leave the table sugar on the table. And as for high fructose corn syrup… it is a definite no-no. Consuming sugars will spike insulin levels and lead to high low density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, and will also eventually lead to a layer of fat that covers your hard-earned muscles. Sugar sure is sweet, but being too fat to step on stage is not.