To the little babies that haven’t broken out yet, that is.
My gal’s sister was making the comment that when she was pregnant, that her kids would be very calm until she took a drink of something with sugar in it, and then they would become active and start kicking.
Never having been thru something like this before, I was in no position to disagree, but it sounded suspicious. Have there ever been any studies to show that sugar (I’m not talking about crack or any other drugs) causes the babies to start dancing.
From low carb circles (my own interpertation):
Sugar acts just like a drug. Sugar is broken down very quickly if eaten alone into glucose and absorbed by the stomach. The blood glucose level (BGL) rises. The body dumps insulin into the blood stream to counter - and often overshoots. This causes the BGL to crash. You now feel week and hungry as you don’t have enough glucose in your blood and want to eat again (the adictive part of sugar).
Also refined sugar and other refined ‘sweets’ (corn syrp) has most nutrients stripped away and actually rob nutrients from your body to digest them. because of this sugar is know (again in low carb circles) as an anti-nutrient.
What exactly was she drinking? If it was a soda, it may also have been the caffeine.
From the my point of view, yes, too much refined sugar has a nasty side effcte. It triggers a migraine. I don’t eat candy that is basically just flavored sugar (like Skittles or candy corn), because I will get a migraine. I watch what I eat otherwise, too, in regard to sugar.
Most of the “bad” effects of sucrose have been pretty well debunked by the medical community in recent years, especially the phantom diagnosis of hypoglycemia and sugar causing hyperactivity in kids and some adults. It is nothing but pure calories (or energy), but it does not strip your body of important nutrients. And any carbohydrate will cause the same insulin-releasing response in the pancreas as sucrose. Granted, if you eat lots of veggies you get lots of fiber, and the carbs you take in will be more slowly absorbed, but if you eat a cup of all-bran with a can of coke you get the same effect.
So. Sugar. Quick energy. If you don’t burn it off the body turns it to fat. If you get fat, you may get insulin-resistant diabetes. But sugar itself doesn’t cause diabetes.
Yes, babies do get more active after the mother eats something, especially something sweet. In the latter weeks of pregnancy you are supposed to count movements a couple of times a day and one recommendation if the baby isn’t cooperating is to drink a glass of orange juice.
The problem with attributing all those nasty side effects to sugar is that they would also have to apply to white bread, potatoes, pasta, rice, as well as to a tablespoon of sugar. From your body’s perspective, all of these substances introduce the same amount of glucose into the system (over almost essentially the same time frame). Withing twenty minutes of so of ingesting bread, potatoes, pasta, etc. they have all been digested and absorbed as glucose.
It is true that table sugar contains nothing but empty calories. There is no associated fiber, vitamin, etc. But there is nothing plausibly bad about sugar per se. Its use simply squanders calories that could have provided better overall nutrition and not just the calories. Table sugar is simply potatoes already chewed, so to speak.
For the doubters among you, one place to start is by doing a web search of the “glycemic index”. This concept is used to explain what I’m trying, but not terribly well able, to describe.
OK that’s why I made the point (2x) that what I stated was from a low carb viewpoint. The glycemic index is used to predict the associated insulin responce. Some of the more complex carbs do take longer to break down and don’t enter the blood quite as fast (but pretty fast anyway) as sugar. Also eating carbs with protien and fat will slow their absorbtion.
From the low carb viewpoint they do. This thread was about sugar, so I stuck to the topic.
I might point out that everything is toxic if given the right dose. The question is where that right dose is. There is bound to be some positive effects of injesting sugar and some negitive. The positive effects (in general) usally start in the low end of consumption, hit a peak and either stay there and/or fall off. The neg effects usally start out small and/or non-existent then continue to grow. Now I know the poster is nowhere the leathal dose.
Sugar is a vegetable (or comes from them). If not refined it has more nutrition. It is important as a source of dietary carbohydrate and as a sweetener and preservative of other foods.
As a carbohydrate it produces body energy, so sure them babyies can dance.
The only complication I could think of would be from a constantly sugar rich environment. This would generally only come from gestational diabetes. This would allow the mothers BGL to constantly be at a high state. In this sugar rich environment the fetus would have the opportunity to grow larger than a “normal” child. This could lead to birth complications if the child is larger than the mother is able to give birth to.