Eliminating sugar good for gut health

The article makes a great case for eliminating added sugars from a person’s diet.

If added sugar is likely causing inflammation in the gut, what happens to your gut when you remove added sugar from your diet? Dr. Bulsiewicz says many people experience balance. “If you eliminate foods that we know are damaging to the gut, like sugar, and what you’re left with is foods that we know to be good for the gut, that will bring more balance to the gut,” he says.

When the gut is balanced, this means the good bacteria is thriving; a gut imbalance is when there is more bad bacteria in the gut than there should be, which then can cause a variety of health problems such as digestive issues in the short term and cognitive decline and chronic disease in the long term.

wellandgood.com

But it falls short by recommending people that might live in food desserts to try to stick to US Dietary Guidelines because of the lack of real food in their neighborhoods. I think the advice should remain the same regardless. It may be more difficult in those areas to cut out added sugar because of processed foods but the elimination should still be the goal.

Instead of making a goal to cut added sugar completely, it may make more sense to aim to stick within the recommendations U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. These guidelines advocate for keeping added sugars at 10 percent of daily calories.

10% of daily calories is still a lot of sugar. In a 2,000 calorie diet 200 calories of sugar is about 52 grams of carbohydrates. You cannot stay on a low carb diet consuming that much sugar every day. Period. End of story. The reason it is unlikely is there are carbs in most of the other foods your eating. I think it is preferable to try to eliminate all added sugars as the goal.

Image by jan mesaros from Pixabay

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