Sugar

My own preferred method of delivering unnecessary sugar into my system is chocolate. I know that strictly speaking, sugar isn't a component of chocolate, but I have tried the unsweetened product and you just want to get it out of your mouth, quickly.

I have a dysfunctional relationship with sugar. By sugar I mean the refined variety, sucrose.
I do like my choccie and alcohol, but I think of sugar as a fiend rather than a friend, like injecting Botox into your forehead, when done by an expert, it can smooth out your frownlines so that your face looks like a death mask, inexpertly done - kills you stone dead.

My mother and my aunt both suffered from late-developing diabetes and so could I. The way things are going, so could any of us. Then sugar becomes a diabolical invader, feeding bacteria and yeast, suppressing immune response, allowing yeast infections to proliferate throughout the body.

Right from childhood we are told about the associated dental problems. Gum disease, Decay.

And we decay.

Quoting from the e-diets webpage,
"[Sugar] even contributes to that telltale sign of ageing: sagging skin. Some of the sugar you consume, after hitting your bloodstream, ends up attaching itself to proteins, in a process called glycation. These new molecular structures contribute to the loss of elasticity found in aging body tissues, from your skin to your organs and arteries. The more sugar circulating in your blood, the faster this damage takes hold."

Lovely.

It causes mood swings by making blood sugar peak and crash, and when it crashes, stress hormones are released to try to raise the blood sugar level, but the stress hormones result in anxiety, irritability, shakiness.
And in children - hyperactivity.

And then there is the chequered history of the industry, the Slave Trade in America, Anglo-French Naval battles.

Sweet.

But none of that is news to anyone - well, maybe the ageing thing, I didn't know that until I read it. And yet...how often do we allow the incubus to seduce us? Not the once-in-a-blue-moon confection, but the regular, the everyday. Sugar in tea and coffee, full sugar soft drinks, the cake or doughnut every tea-break. Good things, fruit, nuts, coated in sugar.
The sweets that are just boiled or stretched, or boiled and stretched sugar.

I've been that person! I've had the mood swings, the irritability, the susceptibility to yeast and other infections, the continual dental visits. And it's almost as if, when you're in its grip, you can't see any of the damage it does.

Only now, having to get on top of the first signs of high blood pressure and drawing a little closer in years to the age when my mum developed diabetes, I am having to be aware and take care, limit my chocolate and look for the hidden sugars in ready-made foods.
I've never been a cake fan, nor sweets other than choccie, well, maybe occasionally liquorice, but then I found a non-sugar sweetened version of that.
And without it in my bloodstream, I can see the fiend for what it is.

And Sugar is also a lesbian-teen TV drama by Julie Burchill. But that's another story.