’Tis the Season to be Sugar Free

Author

Hal Cranmer
December 11, 2024

We all love the holiday season. Everyone gathers around the dining table to celebrate. And eats until it’s hard to push ourselves away.

Unfortunately the holiday season also usually means the cold and flu season.

A lot of people attribute this to people being inside more.

Gathering closer together.

Lack of sunshine and Vitamin D.

What a lot of people don’t see is the link between infections and the foods they eat.

Remember Covid-19? I know..I know..I’m trying to forget it as well.

Back then there were a lot of news stories and studies linking bad outcomes and comorbidities. Especially diabetes and obesity.

They wonder why so many of us have lost faith in public health and yet they had giveaways of sugary/high carb food for proof of vaccination:

  • Krispy Kreme donuts

  • Budweiser beer

  • ‘Fudge-dipped’ dessert on a stick at White Castle

There’s a lot of evidence that high insulin resistance can lower your immune system performance.

Some scientists were interested in metabolic health and Covid during the Pandemic. In 2021 they published a paper that was a review of other literature.

The paper discussed how people with poor metabolic health (high insulin resistance and diabetes) are more susceptible to infections of all kinds.

They also found that infections help push people into contracting diabetes, especially if you already have pre-diabetes.

Here’s the results of some studies they reviewed:

“A landmark prospective study from primary care institutions followed up 6.712 T2D patients and 18,911 controls for one year and investigated susceptibility to infection. The authors showed that T2D patients had a higher risk of lower respiratory tract infections urinary tract infections, bacterial infections of skin and mucosa and fungal infection. In 2011, a meta-study of 97 prospective cohort studies was published in which 123.205 cause-specific deaths were reported among 820.900 people. This revealed that T2D is associated with a significant increase of infection-related death when pneumonia was excluded and also of pneumonia itself.”

Among the elderly (my kind of people), the prevalence of urinary tract infections happen much more with people who are diabetic.

Here’s the basic  breakdown of how diabetes and insulin resistance affects your immune system:

Now I’m not trying to be this guy:

However, you might want to consider laying off the sugar this holiday season.

I know at our homes we have had far fewer UTI’s, colds and flu cases since we implemented ketogenic and carnivore diets.

Because what you eat and drink may very well determine if you will be merry for Christmas.