Sugar and aging - ew

I certainly have lots of info on sugar and its evils. What first caught my attention in regards to sugar was an infomercial on PBS on Nicholas Perricone in early 2003 ... he was selling his skincare and discussing health related topics and mentioned ... SUGAR CAUSES WRINKLES!  Whaaa? Seriously, that was the first reason I found to stop eating sugar, and I did.  I lost 6 lbs in 6 weeks and was amazed.  Then I learned about starch and ... that's another post.

And of course, I'm still concerned about aging ... although I forget about it sometimes ... here is a comment from Dr. Mercola on sugar and aging:

Sugar Accelerates Aging

The harmful effects of too much sugar extend even beyond their impacts on insulin, and are two-fold, as Dr. Ron Rosedale, who is widely considered to be the leading anti-aging doctor in the United States, explains.

“We know sugar increases insulin, but even by itself sugar is bad for you … Glycation is the same as oxidation, except substitute the word glucose. When you glycate something you combine it with glucose. Glucose combines with anything else really; it‘s a very sticky molecule.
Just take sugar on your fingers. It‘s very sticky. It sticks specifically to proteins. So the glycation of proteins is extremely important. If it sticks around a while, it produces what are called advanced glycated end products (A.G.E.s).
That acronym is not an accident. If you can turn over, or re-manufacture, the protein that‘s good, and it increases the rate of protein turnover if you are lucky. Glycation damages the protein to the extent that white blood cells will come around and gobble it up and get rid of it, so then you have to produce more, putting more of a strain on your ability to repair and maintain your body.
That is the best alternative; the worst alternative is when those proteins get glycated that can‘t turn over very rapidly, like collagen, or like a protein that makes up nerve tissue. These proteins cannot be gotten rid of, so the protein accumulates, and the A.G.E.s accumulate and continue to damage.
Glycated proteins make a person very pro-inflammatory, so we age and, at least partially, accumulate damage by oxidation. One of the most important types of tissues that oxygenate is the fatty component, the lipid, especially the poly-unsaturated fatty acids, and they turn rancid and glycate.
The term for glycation in the food industry is carmelization. It is used all the time to make caramel. So the way we age is that we turn rancid and we carmelize. It‘s very true, and that is what gets most of us.”

So eating sugar will not only increase your insulin levels, which in turn will contribute to premature aging, it will also increase the formation of AGEs in your body, which also contribute to chronic disease and aging.