As someone living low carb, I know sugar is bad for my waistline, but can it ruin your health to the point where it takes something like 15 years off your life? Are free radicals – the stuff in our body that make us believe that antioxidants are good for us – actually beneficial?
Maybe.
Check out this article titled Eating Fewer Calories and Less Sugar Could Boost Longevity
by Rallie McAllister, M.D., M.P.H. citing recent research on worms. Now, people aren’t worms (at least not all of them), but research on lower animals sometimes holds true for humans.
As if the take on sugar wasn’t enough, there’s also the assertion that the free radicals in our bodies that we fight by buying anything that slaps the word ‘antioxident’ on the label might actually be beneficial to our bodies to some extent. Read this article at Mercola.com – I don’t agree with everything this fellow is into, and his site registration process is obnoxious, but I find some of his material to be very interesting.
If that’s not enough, the article goes on to discuss the notion that calorie restriction can increase lifespan. If you don’t know about this research, you should. There is actually a group that call themselves the Calorie Restriction Society (www.calorierestriction.org) that provide guidelines on reducing your calories without hurting yourself so that you can extend your life.
There seems to be a connection that begs to be made here: if sugar shortens your life by as much as 15 years, is it possible that the folks restricting their calories suffer hunger needlessly – and could get a similar benefit of life extension by just reducing their intake of sugar and other simple carbohydrates?
It doesn’t stop there. Is it possible that Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Diverticulitis, Appendicitis, Heart Disease, and a boatload of other diseases can be traced to excessive carbohydrate consumption? I’m reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubs, and while it’s slow going because it is some very detailed and technical content, what I’ve read so far tells me that not only is a low carb lifestyle good for my maintaining my weight, but it might just protect me from a number of diseases – including heart disease.
Low Carb Confidential 
I just finished reading the book, it took about 3 weeks. I’m going to have to read it again, probably more than once, to get it all.