Diabetes

When sugar is used in large quantities, as is likely to be the case when it is taken in its free form, so great a quantity is sometimes carried to the liver that it is unable to retain as large a portion as is necessary, and more than the usual amount escapes into the blood. The blood normally contains only two or three parts of sugar in one thousand parts of blood. When the amount of sugar is more than three parts in one thousand, the kidneys whose function it is to regulate the condition of the blood, separate the excess of sugar, throw it out of the body in the urine, so as to protect the blood corpuscles and other delicate issues of the body from the injurious effects certain to follow an excess of sugar in the blood. When sugar is thus habitually present in the urine, the patient is said to be suffering from diabetes. It is a well-recognized fact that although diabetes may be a disease of the pancreas, or even have disordered nerve centres as a cause, yet it is more frequently produced by an excessive use of sugar, or saccharine substances, than by any other cause. The liver apparently becomes exhausted in its effort to retain the excessive amount of sugar taken in, and lets a portion pass through into the blood.

Sugar Biliousness. Liver Destroys Poisons

(3) The destruction of ptomaines and poisons of animal or vegetable origin, and the prevention of auto-intoxication or self-poisoning, is the specific province of the liver - in other words the function of the liver is life-saving in character. These are very important and interesting functions of the liver. When a man takes alcohol, nicotine, morphine, strychnine, or in fact any other poison, a part of them is taken into the liver, which destroys what it can of the poisonous substance, allowing only a portion to escape into the body. Poisons are constantly produced in the alimentary canal which the healthy liver is able to destroy, wholly or in part, thus protecting the body against their injurious effects. When the liver becomes disabled as the result of excessive consumption of sugar, so that it is no longer able to perform these important and delicate functions efficiently, systemic poisoning appears as the result of the accumulations of the tissue poisons and the absorption of those formed in the alimentary canal by decomposition of the food under the action of germs. This poison is increased when the liver is in a state of disease. When the bile becomes vitiated or diminished in quantity, its antiseptic power is lacking, and the intestinal contents, specially those of the colon, undergo decomposition to an unusual extent by throwing into the blood great quantities of intensely poisonous substances. Biliousness is a true auto-intoxication or self-poisoning process, which accounts for the disgust for food, nausea, vomiting, constipation, depression of spirits, high colored scanty urine, with weight and soreness in the region of the liver, jaundice or muddy skin.

Persons with disabled livers are much more subject to injury from alcohol, tobacco, and other poisons which may be taken into the body, than are those who are in a normal state. For this reason, meat, cheese, oysters, and other foods especially likely to contain poisonous substances, or to encourage their development within the body, may be injurious in such cases.

Obesity. Sugar Makes Fat

(4) Excessive Fat Production. - All the sugar used as food must be utilized in the body in one of three ways, - for heat production, for force production, or for the production of fat. When a larger amount of sugar is taken than can be utilized in connection with the other elements of food in heat or force production, if not eliminated by the kidneys as sugar, it may be deposited as fat; thus the use of sugar tends to obesity. Fat accumulates about the heart, overburdening this organ so that it cannot perform its functions properly. The general accumulation of fat throughout the body imposes a burden upon the muscles which may be so exhausting as to seriously interfere with a person's usefulness, and it is not an uncommon thing to find very fleshy persons weighing fifty per cent more than they should, or even twice their natural weight. There is no substance more capable of producing a rapid accumulation of fat than is sugar. It should be noted that sugar of commerce is physiologically different from the sugar element as it naturally exists in sweet fruits. Sugar is the concentrated juice of the sugar cane; hence many times stronger than when in its natural condition. The addition of sugar to starchy foods, as cakes and other sweet pastries, and to grains, is not only wholly unnecessary, but physiologically inexcusable, since starch itself is by the process of digestion converted into sugar; so that, in adding sugar to starch or starchy foods, we are practically adding sugar to sugar, the sugar not only making a double dose, but at the same time interfering with the digestion of the starchy foods. The less sugar taken in its free state, the better for digestion.