Bread or Sugar - Which is Better For Your Health?

Which one is better for your health, sugar or bread?

The official dietary guidelines say that both are perfectly okay as long as you

limit your sugar to less than 10% of calories and half of the bread you eat

is whole-grain. But then there are others who say that that's not true that

complex carbs like bread is just another form of sugar. So which one is it? Today

we're going to talk about all the different factors that you need to

understand to make better decisions about sugar and bread, whether it's white

or whole-grain so that you can safely navigate in the oceans of myths and

misinformation. Coming right up.

Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss

anything. So the first thing a lot of people think of and people say that

carbohydrates are essential because of blood sugar that the body needs blood

sugar for energy and when the blood sugar is low the fastest way to bring it

up is to eat something sugary so let's talk about blood sugar there's something

called glycemic index and a lot of people say that well sugar has a high

glycemic index it raises blood sugar quickly but complex carbs are different

that bread especially whole-grain bread is very different it's much much slower

so let's look at the numbers the glycemic index of table sugar of sucrose

is 65 and the glycemic index of white bread is 75 so white bread is actually a

lot higher than sugar well how about whole-grain that's

supposed to be slower right well whole wheat bread is 74 so there's one point

difference between white and wheat and they're both about 10 points higher

than sugar so they raise blood sugar faster than pure sugar and these are

numbers from a place called health. harvard.edu you're gonna get different

numbers they're gonna be up or down five or ten points depending on whose study

you look at and we also want to understand about glycemic index that

it's a very rough estimate because it depends on the person it depends on

their insulin resistance it depends on their age on their activity level and it

depends on what else you ate together with it okay most people don't eat these

things by themselves but it still gives us a really good idea about how this

works so how can a complex carb have a higher glycemic index how does that work

so we need to understand just a little bit about how these look at as a

molecule so table sugar sucrose is a disaccharide it has two sugars two

monosaccharides two rings of sugar hooked together one is called glucose

and one is called fructose and the glucose has a glycemic index of a

hundred that's how they define glycemic index the hundred is the baseline so to

speak both fructose is much much slower it's only 15 so it takes a little bit of

time to split this up and then you sort of take the average roughly so that's

just a ballpark to give you an idea of how the body ends up responding at about

a level of 65 even though starches are complex they

are much much longer chain it doesn't take the body very long to

start breaking it up and the breakdown of starch starch consists of amylose and

amylopectin and the breakdown of these start already in the mouth we have

something called salivary amylase and that's an enzyme in the mouth that

starts breaking down carbohydrates starches in the mouth

even before we have swallowed anything so the breakdown starts very very

quickly and then once these long chains these complex carbs are broken down

which happens in minutes then they're broken off in little pieces of - they're

broken down in disaccharides the sugar is called maltose - glucoses fit

together is called maltose and then from there it doesn't take very long before

an enzyme called maltase is going to break up that disaccharide and now we

have two glucose molecules each which has a glycemic index of a hundred so the

response is not going to be a hundred because it's going to take a few minutes

to break this up and start the process but in the end that is why because it's

so fast to break these up that in the end the total result the glycemic index

of complex carbs can be higher than that of pure sugar so from a blood sugar

perspective both of these are disastrous because they raise blood sugar very very

quickly and when blood sugar goes up very very quickly it's gonna come down

very quickly so you're creating a blood sugar rollercoaster and the result is

very often hypoglycemia and this is when you feel weak and unfocused and

irritated and lack of energy and you get cravings and now of course you hear that

blood sugar is a good thing we gotta raise blood sugar and you go eat

something sugary or you go have a piece of bread and now you're back on that

roller coaster the next factor I would want to look at is about GMOs that both

sugar and bread today are very very unnatural cane sugar is okay it's not a

GMO but most other sugar which is the majority of sugar and high fructose corn

syrup in the world come from beet sugar and corn and those are both GMOs so most

of the sugars are going to be GMO today and even though we

per se isn't officially classified as GMO it's only because they didn't have

the sophistication of gene splicing of inserting individual genetic traits and

genetic sequences into the molecule so back when they were hybridizing when

they were developing wheat in the second half of the 1900s they didn't have that

technology but the end result is pretty much the same because what they did is

they hybridized them they combined different species of wheat different

strains of wheat and now they ended up with new products with new strains and

why is that important because thousands of years ago there was only one type of

wheat and by the time the Egyptians came around there were two types of wheat and

then it took thousands of years before they had anything more they were called

Emmer and Einkorn but then when they started hybridizing these things so

humans had thousands of years to get used to a very very limited number of

wheats where the proteins were the same over

and over and over and over it was the same type of food we were exposed to but

then from 1950 and on they hybridized it thousands of times and each time they

hybridize it they bring in the parent strains and they create a new strain

then the offspring can have 5% of the proteins that neither of the parents had

so for every generation of hybridization we can get 5% new proteins and in one

study they found 14 new kinds of gluten proteins from a single hybridization and

have they done this thousands of times and that means that the protein types

have virtually nothing in common with the grains with the wheats

that humans have been exposed to for thousands of years so whether those were

okay or not they have virtually nothing in common with the type of wheat

that we're eating today today the wheat has about 12% protein whereas the

ancient wheats like Einkorn had about 28% so we've changed they've hybridized

it to make white bread to make fluffy bread to give it shelf stability and to

increase the yield and one of the greatest reasons that they've worked so

hard on hybridizing was that it was a staple for a starving world so they have

indeed solved a lot of feeding the world problems by developing wheats

with a higher yield but it came at the cost of not ever testing to see if this

was safe and doing it at breakneck speeds and developing all these

different proteins that we don't really know how humans react to and today what

we see is that one of the most common allergies that there is in mankind is

that two wheat so both sugar and wheat are very very foreign to what was on the

planet thousands of years ago and we don't really know yet we we know that

people get sick quite a bit but we really have no idea how far-reaching

these effects are next is vitamins and sugar is a pure crystallized form of

carbohydrate it has nothing else in there it is 100% carbohydrate crystals

which means it has no B vitamins it has no minerals and vitamins and minerals

are necessary for us to metabolize these okay so when you eat sugar you get

calories in order for you to convert that sugar into energy it requires B

vitamins and minerals and if it doesn't come with the sugar that you eat the

body has to borrow it it has to steal it from someplace else so you have a little

bit of B vitamins and you have some minerals in the body from a time when

you ate some real food and you have a little bit of reserves

but every time that you eat sugar you steal from those reserves and you're

depleting yourself so this is one of the primary mechanisms for nutritional

deficiencies much the same thing holds true for bread but here is one of the

main differences that bread is not as bad as sugar when it comes to vitamins

and minerals because bread does have some now in white bread they

pretty much strip all the nutrients away but then they add some of them back they

do what's called fortified and one way of thinking about that is like if you

give me a dollar and then I give you a penny back then I have fortified you so

that's kind of what they do they take away hundreds of nutrients and they put

back a few and the once they put back our synthetic they're isolated forms

they're not the complex versions that nature put there in the first place so

even if it's fortified it's still going to be deficient and here's also the

primary difference between whole wheat and white bread because even if white

flour is a little bit better than sugar whole wheat flour is a lot better than

white flour because it does have not just the starchy portion but it has the

fiber and it has the germ which contains some good essential fatty acids some

natural complex E vitamins and some minerals and so forth the next factor we

want to look at is how does it affect immune function so both sugar and bread

both sugar and starch because starch breaks down very quickly into sugar they

both feed all the enemies in your body so anything that you don't want in your

digestive tract such as yeast fungus bacteria and parasites they live

primarily off sugar they don't do nearly as well on protein and fat so when you

eat sugar or starches then you're selectively feeding the bacteria all

life-forms that you don't want and that starts upsetting your biome your gut

flora the population of bacteria in your gut and when that gets imbalanced now

you're more likely to get gas and bloating and leaky gut and allergies and

so forth and then there's the issue of immune reactions to the food itself so

technically it's basically impossible to have an immune reaction to the sugar

itself so in that sense the sugar is better than the wheat but you can still

have immune reactions to the enemies that you feed when it comes to wheat

however it is one of the most common allergens so not only are you feeding

the things that you don't want but you're also getting allergies and

sensitivities primarily from the gluten but there are other components in there

it's not just the celiacs there's today there's hundreds of different kinds of

gluten and celiacs is just one of those so even if you don't get the severity of

a celiacs reaction you can still have an immune reaction to all those different

types of gluten and here is also where there's a big difference between white

and wheat sugar of course has no fiber white bread has no fiber but whole wheat

bread does have some fiber and this fiber can actually be beneficial in

helping to balance because it doesn't just feed the the pathogenic bacteria it

also helps feed the beneficial bacteria and maintain some kind of balance there

so what about toxicity the sugar in itself isn't toxic high doses of sugar

makes it toxic but of course if we eat organic sugar then there is no toxin in

itself because it is a natural molecule it's just a concentration that makes it

toxic we still have to be concerned with pesticides if we don't eat organic and

of course like we talked about the GMO but when it comes to bread now there's

many many many things that make it not so great

first of all it's grown with pesticides things like glyphosate but then in order

to make it whiter to make it more luxurious and appealing they bleach it

and that also improves the texture of the flour and the baking properties but

then they go further and they add dough conditioners because they want the dough

really really sticky and elastic kind of rubbery because that makes for very very

fluffy bread so then they add the bleach and the dough conditioners and there's a

number of chemicals like benzoyl peroxide and calcium peroxide, calcium

bromate potassium peroxide, potassium bromate and the list goes on and on and

on and all or most of these chemicals are banned in most other countries

virtually the entire Southeast Asia and the European Union as well as many other

countries have banned these substances but in the United States we still use

them because we like fluffy bread so much and when we talk about the dose we

also have to understand insulin resistance and while there are many many

different facets insulin resistance is probably the greatest single factor that

we have to be concerned with and there's two different ways that you can promote

insulin resistance with these foods the first one is the glycemic index anytime

that you raise blood sugar dramatically then you're gonna have a strong insulin

response and over time if you keep adding sugar after you keep having high

insulin responses when you don't have a famine period over the winter when you

keep having these foods 365 days a year three meals a day or more then you

develop insulin resistance so the blood sugar the high frequent blood sugar

promotes insulin and will drive insulin resistance but the other way is that

fructose like we talked about here it's 50% glucose

and 50% fructose and the fructose can only be metabolized by the liver so if

you eat the even just if you eat the recommended amount of 10% of calories

from sugar you're still getting 25 grams of fructose on top of all the other

stuff that you're eating and fructose can only be metabolized by the liver so

it's like force feeding the liver it's like over stuffing the liver and when we

talk about the dose then in small amounts

if you eat organic sugar and especially if you eat fruit sugar fructose in very

small amounts if you kept that under 5 or 10 grams then it would be a healthy

food because it wouldn't overwhelm liver and those are the kind of doses

that we would get just by eating seasonal vegetables and fruits but today

we change the rules when we concentrate them when we refine the foods now we're

getting many many many times more of that fructose and that's why fructose

which is sort of a natural thing does become a poison and this is also

why sugar seems to be the straw that breaks the camel's back when it comes to

developing insulin resistance and diabetes because the blood sugar itself

while it is a strong factor in developing insulin resistance and

diabetes it's not as strong as the fact that fructose clogs up the liver because

even though the glycemic index of grains is higher than that of sugar this by

itself grains by itself is not as strong a

promoter of diabetes a lot of populations will eat grains and rice and

bread until and they'll be fine until they introduce sugar and that kind of

tips the scale and they get insulin resistance and diabetes so there's two

factors and if you are instantly resistant we need to limit both

sugar if your insulin sensitive could be alright in very small doses if you ate a

teaspoon or two a day then you would probably be alright I

occasionally have one or two pieces of dark chocolates but I eat it somewhere

around 80% so I get about one gram of sugar per piece and if I have one or two

a day then that is not enough to really do any damage it's not enough to create

insulin resistance or to feed any enemies because it gets absorbed even

before it gets down there when it comes to wheat however then the dose sometimes

doesn't matter because if you are sensitive which more and more and more

people are then even one bite could set off an immune reaction a sensitivity

that promotes more inflammation that perpetuates the gut imbalances and the

leaky gut and the inflammation so sugar could be okay in small doses but if

you're sensitive then wheat is not okay in any amount so

these are the things that we need to understand when we talk about if sugar

or bread is good or bad because it's different for different people it's it

depends are you overweight are you insulin resistance how active are you

and do you have a sensitivity do you have a gut imbalance so it's not as

simple as just looking at the weight and the calories and the glycemic index we

need to understand a little bit more and then we need to put it into practice and

start noticing what's happening in our own bodies

personally I don't eat wheat I eat very very little sugar but if I were to go

back to eating bread at some point and if you decided to I would say if you are

insulin sensitive and if you know that you have a strong digestion that you

don't have a sensitivity to wheat then I would find some ancient wheats

I would go back and find some Emmer wheat and then I would find it organic

I would grind it myself I would bake it myself and I would eat the bread fresh I

would freeze the leftovers and I would avoid any of these pesticides and and

any of these issues that we have talked about if you enjoy this video you're

probably going to get a lot out of that one thank you so much for watching and

I'll see you in the next video