NOT ALL SUGARS ARE CREATED EQUAL:
Sugars For Health And Wellness
By Gary D. Anderson, Ph.D
Dr. Anderson was on the Faculty of Medicine at McMaster University for
over 33 years. The last 18 years were part-time (without salary)
allowing him to dedicate the majority of his time to other interests.
During these later years, he successfully built and presided over a
company that included a clinical research organization involved in the
evaluation of new drugs for the Canadian pharmaceutical industry.
When we hear sugar mentioned in the title of a
nutritional article, our natural tendency is to ask, “What is going on
here?” As we all know, the big problem associated with so much sugar in
our diets these days is the fact that sugar, from table sugar or sweet
drinks, is pure calories with absolutely no nutritional value. Too much
sugar elevates our blood sugar levels and ends up stored as fat. Sugar
also uses up our calorie allowance without providing any of the vital
nutrients we need to build and maintain healthy cells in our body.
However, there are about eight biologically active ‘sugars’ (specific
carbohydrates or monosaccharides) that are being called ‘nutrition’s
latest discovery’ and ‘medicine’s next frontier’.
There are about 200 different sugars, or carbohydrates,
found in nature, made through the process of photosynthesis in plants.
Carbohydrates provide the ‘fuel’ that we use to run our bodies.
Carbohydrates are converted, in our cells mitochondria, into the energy
that allows our cells to function and carry out the tasks that allow us
to live, think, work and stay healthy. Until recently, it was thought
energy creation was the only role that carbohydrates played in our
body. In the last few years, however, a very different picture has
begun to emerge. It has been determined that eight of these 200
carbohydrates are essential to life for an entirely different reason -
they are the basic building blocks of all biological communication.
Everything from communicating the information contained within our DNA
that tell the mechanisms in our cells how to do their jobs, to the task
of allowing our immune system cells to determine the identity of an
enemy bacteria, is communicated through combinations made up from these
eight basic monosaccharides.
The study of these eight sugars and their role in human
biology is called Glycobiology. Since the initial discoveries in the
early 1970s, which led to the 1999 Nobel Prize in Medicine for Dr
Gunter Blobel, the field of Glycobiology has become one of the fastest
growing areas of biology today. This area will become, I believe, the
most active of all areas of medical research over the next decade.
Here are a few examples of recent publications that
illustrate how important glycobiology is becoming as an area of medical
research: The March 23rd 2001 issue of Science Magazine featured a 50
page series of articles on Glycobiology and Glycoproteins. On October
5th, 2001 The San Diego Union - Tribune, published an article by Jeff
Ristine entitled, “$34 Million Sweetens Area’s Research Coffers”. This
article reported that the National Institute of Health awarded the
Scripps Research Institute San Diego a five-year, $34 million “glue”
grant. With these funds, the Consortium for Functional Glycomics, a
group of 54 investigators around the world, will coordinate and
facilitate research “to understand how cells use sugar compounds to
communicate, which is important to research on disease.”
Also in October 2001, Erika Jonietz in Technology
Review, MIT’s Magazine of Innovation, in an article entitled
“Glycomics”, writes, “But even as doctors and drug companies struggle
to interpret and exploit the recent explosion of data on genes and
proteins, yet another field of biology is waiting to break out:
glycomics.” This emerging discipline seeks to do for sugars and
carbohydrates what genomics and proteomics have done for genes and
proteins - move them into the mainstream of biomedical research and
drug discovery. So what does all this mean for you, for me and for our
families today in terms of improving our nutrition and achieving better
health and wellness?
It means that the eight sugars or monosaccharides that
are at the heart of all this recent excitement in the scientific and
medical communities are intended to come into our bodies through the
foods we eat, just as all the other nutrients we need. In other words,
just as each of our cells expect to get the essential amino acids from
proteins we eat, the essential fatty acids from omega 3, 6 & 9 oils
we take in and the essential vitamins and minerals from fruits and
vegetables we eat, it also expects to obtain these eight essential
sugars in the same way. The difficulty is that, just as with omega 3
oil and the vitamins and minerals we need, our over-sweetened and
over-processed foods do not supply them to us in sufficient quantities
to avoid deficiencies in our bodies. In addition, research shows that
when our bodies are under stress from disease or just from a rough day,
our cells can benefit from more of these sugars than we could ever get
in our diet.
Dr. Tom Gardner, in his paper entitled “Increased demand
for glycoconjugates during stress” writes, “As key components of
cell-cell communication systems, glycoconjugates are essential for the
various complex biological systems to interact and function properly to
prevent damage, initiate repair, and clean up debris resulting from
virtually all types of cellular stress. Thus, the importance of
maintaining good glyconutrition in order to supply the glycoconjugate
sugars and oligosaccharides necessary to meet the increased demands for
glycoconjugate synthesis during stress is obvious. This is especially
important, since dietary glycoconjugate sugars, such as mannose, have
been shown to be preferentially utilized in glycoconjugate synthesis.”
In 1996, Mannatech Incorporated, a nutraceutical company
based in Coppell, Texas, began marketing a product called Ambrotose, a
patented supplement of all eight of these sugars. This supplement was
developed as the result of research that began in the early 1980s with
the discovery of the active ingredient in the Aloe Vera plant. Aloe
Vera has had a reputation throughout recorded history as the great
healer, but no one understood why. Dr. Bill McAnalley discovered that
the reason was, in fact, mannose (one of the eight essential
monosaccharides).
Once identified, Dr. McAnalley then learned how to
stabilize the inner leaf jell from the Aloe Vera plant to avoid the
breakdown of this mannose compound by an enzyme in the plant
immediately after harvesting. Once his team had a stable compound, they
made great progress in developing and testing healing products using
this compound while working within Carrington Labs throughout the 1980s
and early 1990s.
During this long period of research and development, Dr.
McAnalley’s team realized that the rather amazing health effects they
were witnessing using this mannose compound were not pharmaceutical
effects (or treatment effects) at all, but were, in fact, nutritional
effects.
In 1996, Dr. McAnalley realized mannose was just one of
eight sugars absolutely fundamental to human nutrition. He then set out
to identify sources to create a supplement of these eight sugars and
immediately applied for worldwide patents on the resulting compound,
Ambrotose. In the seven years that Ambrotose has been available on the
market as a food supplement, it has been shown to have nutritional
benefits in supporting the human body in many areas which include:
- Lowering cholesterol
- Increasing lean body mass
- Decreasing body fat
- Accelerating wound healing
- Easing allergies
- Reversing auto-immune diseases
- Helping the body fight off all kinds of bacterial as
well as many viral infections
- Assisting the body in overcoming the debilitating
symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and Gulf War
syndrome
- Mitigating the toxic effects of radiation and
chemotherapy in cancer patients.
It is my sincere belief that the widespread application
of glyconutritional supplementation will have a profound effect on the
general state of health and wellness of our population.
Along with ensuring a sound diet adequate
in omega 3 oil, food source vitamins and minerals, phytochemicals and
necessary plant sterols, I believe we can drastically improve our
overall general state of health and well-being. I further believe that
if we are to save our economy from being bankrupted by the rapidly
escalating costs of the present health care system, we must move
aggressively in this direction.
