For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Health Issues page and our Food Safety Resource Center page.

Egged on by  massive food-industry marketing budgets, Americans eat a lot of sugary foods. We know the habit is  quite probably wrecking our bodies, triggering high rates of overweight and diabetes. Is it also wrecking our brains?

That’s the disturbing conclusion emerging in a body of research linking Alzheimer’s disease to insulin resistance-which is in turn  linked to excess sweetener consumption. A blockbuster  story in the Sept. 3 issue of the UK magazine  The New Scientist  teases out the connections.

Scientists have known for a while that insulin regulates blood sugar, “giving the cue for muscles, liver and fat cells to extract sugar from the blood and either use it for energy or store it as fat,”  New Scientist  reports. Trouble begins when our muscle, fat, and liver cells stop responding properly to insulin-that is, they stop taking in glucose. This condition, known as insulin resistance and also pre-diabetes, causes the pancreas to produce excess amounts of insulin even as excess glucose builds up in the blood.  Type 2 diabetes, in essence, is the chronic condition of excess blood glucose-its  symptoms include frequent bladder infections, kidney, and skin infections, fatigue, excess hunger, and  erectile dysfunction.