We all want to keep our immunity strong these days, and if you’ve been around Beyond Health for long, you know that means staying away from sugar. Sugar hammers your immunity in two ways. First, it competes with vitamin C to get into your cells. Immune cells cannot function without vitamin C, and they need lots of it—in an infection, your need for C can multiply by a factor of ten or more. But taking extra vitamin C isn’t going to help if you can’t get it into your immune cells. Too much sugar in the bloodstream blocks C’s entry into the cells, creating an artificial vitamin C deficiency. Second, sugar can create dramatic blood sugar spikes followed by deep dips. Your immune system also needs oxygen, and an erratic blood sugar level can weaken your immunity by preventing oxygen from getting into your cells. Wouldn’t it be nice, then, to have a sweetener that didn’t compete for with vitamin C or affect blood sugar levels? Well, there is such a s…

Fructose is a form of sugar found naturally in fruits and vegetables. It’s also a component of refined table sugar, or sucrose, which is half glucose and half fructose, and of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which has a ratio of 55% fructose to 42% glucose.When it was discovered that fructose, unlike glucose, didn’t raise blood sugar levels or insulin and was significantly sweeter than glucose, it was hailed as a boon to all diabetics who could now satisfy a sweet tooth with impunity.But then a dark side of fructose came to light. Scientists discovered that while the body can handle reasonable amounts of fructose from fruits and vegetables without serum fructose concentrations rising to dangerous levels, it can be overwhelmed by large quantities of fructose, especially refined (man-made) fructose. Unfortunately, our steadily increasing consumption of refined sugar and HFCS seems to have done just that.In the 19th century, average refined sugar consumption was about 7 pounds per year p…