The Body Temple: Sugar Time
by Jack Hoehn | 22 January 2025 |
Living things move. (That is why this magazine is called “Adventist Today”—because living faiths have to keep moving too.) Living plants and animals are not only moved by gravity, but they move against gravity. Movement is work and requires energy. Mechanically the combustion of the sun’s energy hidden in wood, charcoal, peat, coal, dung, or ancient hydrocarbons such as gasoline, diesel, ethanol, and kerosene can provide the heat to move steam engines, turbines, pistons, jets, or rockets.
What a mercy that our bodies do not require matches or the sipping of kerosene, but do quite well when fueled with orange juice.
H-O-C
This hydrogen (H)- based cosmos has produced a water (H2O) environment on the chemical Earth in which carbon-based life (CH4, etc.) has flourished. Animals consume plants and digest the carbohydrates from plants down to a trinity of monosaccharides we call sugars—
- glucose (Greek for grape juice. Glucose is found in raisins and grapes—also confusingly called dextrose)
- fructose (Latin for enjoy; hence, enjoyable fruit)
- galactose (Greek from milk).
These are the three sugars our body can absorb from our digestion. Once in the body, they all turn into glucose, so when your blood sugar is tested it is the glucose level that gets reported.
- If we let bees predigest carbohydrates for us, we get honey, which is mostly fructose and glucose.
If we let factories prepare carbohydrates for us from cane, beets, or corn, we get table sugar or sucrose, equally glucose and fructose.
- If we let our mothers (or cows) prepare carbohydrates for us, we drink lactose, which is galactose and glucose.
- And of course, ripe and sweet fruit has fructose and glucose.
When eaten whole—not made into juice—fruit from trees or vines or vegetables also has fiber, vitamins, and health benefits not available in factory or bee sugars, and especially not in sodas. Something bad has happened to human health since “high-fructose corn syrup” has become the cheap sweetener of choice for factory-made foods. Don’t give this to people you love. Even honey is a treat, not a health food.
Too little
With too little sugar, or “hypoglycemia,” in the blood, as the American Diabetes Association says,
“The brain does not get enough glucose and stops functioning as it should. This can lead to blurred vision, difficulty concentrating, confused thinking, slurred speech, numbness, and drowsiness. If blood glucose stays low for too long, starving the brain of glucose, it may lead to seizures, coma, and very rarely death.”
Glucose from sugar is not a poison. It is a vital energy food. But it is best taken as an ingredient along with proteins, fats, and starches, or as it comes with fiber and vitamins in natural fruits, berries, or vegetables. But it is not wrong to sweeten fruits that are not quite ripe enough.
Should we eat candy? Of course, every year on our birthdays. Or one small piece a day when you have been very good—you know how good you should be to treat your sweet tooth! And one or two modest wedges of pie on Sabbaths.
Too much
Too high blood sugar, or diabetes, was a terrible disease before the discovery of insulin.
“Youngsters with diabetes generally died within a year of diagnosis, and it was a miserable death. The only way to reduce sugar levels in the body and extend lives even slightly, was to keep victims right on the edge of starvation. [Before the discovery of insulin] one twelve-year-old boy with diabetes was left so hungry that he was caught eating birdseed from the tray of a canary cage. Eventually the child died [as all victims of type 1 diabetes then died] famished and wretched. The [12-year-old] child at death weighed thirty-nine pounds.”[1]
The insulin miracle
That the pancreas gland chemical insulin controlled the body’s energy machinery was discovered by Canadian family doctor Fredrick Banting and his American-born assistant Charles Best in the late 1920s by first experimenting with dogs. When applied to humans, the results were miraculous.
“Listless, skeletal patients who could barely be called alive were swiftly restored to full vibrancy… the closest thing to resurrection modern medicine had ever produced.”[2]
Insulin greed
100 years later the miracle of insulin in the United States has been hijacked by human greed into extorting from patients, as former President Joe Biden explained in his 2024 State of the Union speech. Companies making insulin that cost them $10 to $13 a vial have charged patients up to $200 to $380/vial. Biden capped Medicare/Medicaid cost at $35/vial and wants to nationalize this cap for every diabetic person. Selling at $35 is still a 200% profit on every vial sold. The pharmaceutical giants ought to be able to scrape by. Using Costco’s 28% markup, they should be able to sell a vial for about $16.79 and still be reasonably, if not obscenely, profitable.
The pancreas gland itself is quite humble, and hidden safely behind the stomach and nestles next to the liver. It is also designed to efficiently multitask. First, it is an exocrine gland that secretes digestive juices into your meals to mix with the food (after the stomach sterilizes what you have eaten) with enzymes to break down fats to fatty acids (lipases) and proteins to amino acids (proteases) and carbohydrates into one of the three simple sugars (amylases).
But the pancreas also makes hormones that go into the blood to control sugar levels when they go too high (insulin) or too low (glucagon) or keep the stomach working (gastrin and amylin). One compact efficient gland to do multiple exocrine and endocrine functions for a common purpose of digestion and nutrition seems like a very highly engineered system. How could survival by random mutations happen adding one lucky function at a time? If the enzyme to digest carbohydrates into useful simple sugars happened first, but the control of sugars absorbed in the blood without insulin or glucagon was absent, what kind of survival could have happened while waiting for the next useful mutation to occur, or visa versa?
Alcohol shows design
Alcohol is quite damaging to both the pancreas and the liver, which share a drainage system for digestive juices. But proof that the liver and pancreas are not just one organ that split into two, but rather two unique functional organs that were designed to function in cooperation, is that the toxic mechanism of alcoholic fatty liver and cirrhosis is quite different from the toxic effects of alcoholic pancreatitis. These are two very different, very complex chemical factories that work together, but did not come from any common imaginary “ancestral organ” just because they lie side by side and share a common drainage system for their exocrine digestive chemicals. Each was uniquely and carefully designed. Both are damaged by alcohol, but in completely different ways, showing each was uniquely, purposefully designed.[3]
“God has put beauty in the world as a trap for us.”
More than necessary—fun!
But let’s now circle back around to the beginning. Unlike flossing our teeth or making our beds in the morning, fueling our body is not only necessary and practical—eating is also very pleasurable. And although salt and umami are great, how much of the pleasure and excitement of a meal comes to us from galactose, fructose, and glucose consumption?
- That we must have fuel is physics.
- How we use the fuel and regulate its levels is physiology.
- That fueling gives us joy and nourishes not only our bodies but also our friendships and loves is a profusion of pleasure.
Simone Weil wrote, “God has put beauty in the world as a trap for us.” [4] Perhaps the sweetness of sugars in our favorite fruits is just another one of his stealthy traps!
All illustrations for this article are public domain sources.
[1] Adapted from Bill Bryson, The Body—A Guide for Occupants (2019), page 138.
[2] Ibid, page 139.
[3] Function, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2021, zqab008.
[4] From David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist–The Life and Thought of Simone Weil, (1990), p. 209.
[This is #17 in a series on worship with science in the body temple. (# 16 Digestion is here) (#15 Breath) (#14 Brain) (#13 Blood) (#1 is here) Jack is also known as Dr. John Byron Hoehn, MD (Loma Linda University), CCFP (Canada), DTM&H (London).
Jack’s book Adventist Tomorrow—Fresh Ideas While Waiting for Jesus in its second edition continues to be the most popular book Adventist Today has published. At a time when our relationship with faith is being re-evaluated, isn’t it worth taking time this year to seriously review our heritage? Great for personal enrichment, even better for a small group study with friends.
Jack’s wife, Deanne, has published a delightful book called Loving You—I went to Africa, about their 13 years as medical missionaries. Readers say: “What a beautiful story. Completely drew me in and I read every word.” “Great storytelling, great read, hard to put down.” “What a treasure.” “Wanted to read all day, didn’t want it to end.”
These books and others are available at SHOP in the menu at the top of the page in both print and Kindle versions. All sales go to support Adventist Today.]
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