22nd Book of 2023
Well, in the series of reading books that are sitting in my shelf since a long time, I picked up another such book named “Sugar: The Silent Killer”. It is written by Damayanti Datta in around 200-pages. I remember it was around 2019 when I thought of getting a full medical check-up done for my family and I. The report showed a completely different picture about what I assumed about my health. It had many parameters which weren’t in the healthy range. After few years, the report showed that I even reached a stage where I can be termed as pre-diabetic. My mother is already a diabetic patient since a long time. Hence, I was quite curious to read this book and know how has author dedicated a whole book on this food-item which we consume abundantly without thinking of its consequences.
There are many health and diet related books in the market out of which I have read couple of them. They are quite straight-forward in terms of what foods are healthy and unhealthy for our body. The USP of this book is that author doesn’t directly start speaking about ill-effects of sugar and creating a panic about it among ourselves. She has tried to go back into the history and understand how the diet and eating preferences of human beings changed over the time.
She starts with discussion around how humans found their love for sweetness for the 1st time when honey was generated with the help of bees. Over-the-time, humans progressed and found sugarcane as another source which helped them fulfill their sweet-cravings. Gradually, sugar production began but along with time, commercialization came into the picture which gave birth to the refined white sugar – something that has been a source of worry since its effects have been identified.
Damayanti discusses the book written by Dr. Yudkin around 50 years back where he highlights the danger that sugar brings with itself. Unfortunately, everyone started protesting him which resulted in the book ban. But decades later, when diabetes started becoming a common factor in the regular patients, people acknowledged the words of Dr. Yudkin. Datta discusses many of his theories in the initial chapters which helps us understand how he studied sugar and what were his findings about it.
Authoress, then, further progresses and talks about how the human body functions. She explains how dopamine is generated not only through the activities we love doing but also through consumption of sugar which makes us eat more of it. Similarly, she talks about all the other chemicals that gets generated in the process which makes our addiction with sugar stronger and inseparable. She gives glimpses about the role of insulin and glucagon in terms of maintaining sugar-levels in our body.
Her research is quite evident in the way she explains about how sugar-levels can be identified and measured in our body through different parameters. Similarly, she has dived deeper into other factors such as what amount of sugar is needed in our body and if there’s an excess, along with diabetes, what kind of different diseases get associated with us such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, heart diseases etc. She helps us understand how sugar is named differently in the ingredients list of the packaged products which we purchase without even thinking of the amount of sugar we are supplied.
In the last few chapters, Damayanti emphasizes on the various methodologies and substitutes that can help us control our sugar levels. She speaks about the ketone-diet and intermittent fasting which can help us achieve our goals. She also discusses how carbohydrates are being excluded from our diets whereas why it is as much necessary for our system as much as proteins. She then takes a very interesting turn and starts quoting from our religious texts regarding what it suggested thousands of years ago and how its relevant even today regarding our eating lifestyle. Similarly, she talks about the kind of prasad which has been associated with major temples and shrines which doesn’t include sugar but still helps us with our quest of sweetness. It tells us about how health-focused they were/are in their conduct.
Overall, this book is not a piece of work which will scare you right from the first page. It doesn’t talk about the facts that you already read regularly but gives you completely new insights about sugar. It gives you a very balanced perspective of how diabetes is becoming cruel and why we need to take it seriously. The book is also not written like a dieting guide but as a finding of a very long experiment and analysis of sugar and its impact. It is recommended for everyone to read as most of us have already fallen into the trap of sugar-love and we need to come out of it as sooner as possible. I give this book 4.5 stars out of 5.
Thanks!
WRITING BUDDHA
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