Yoga Health Secrets

A healthy vegetarian diet for Yoga

Many people do not know that granulated sugars, syrups, treacles, and molasses are artificial sweets. Still fewer people know that they are also powerful stimulants, drugs which are actually habit forming. So used are people to taking them as an everyday commodity that they have come to regard them as harmless, pleasant, and nourishing. I assure you that they are neither harmless nor nourishing though no doubt many would protest that they are pleasant.

The sweets that 1 have mentioned are manufactured by a process which destroys all their nutritive elements. In the case of granulated sugar the sugar crystals that are formed after the cane juice is treated with the fumes of burning sulphur or heated with bisulphide of lime, are sterile and devitalized. It is just this fact which makes sugar a commodity that will keep almost indefinitely which is a distinct advantage from a commercial point of view but hardly from a health one.

Sugar granules, in their final, highly concentrated form, are powerful stimulants. When they reach the human stomach they oxidize violently upon their contact with oxygen, which produces an explosive effect upon the digestive system and causes an increased activity in the internal organs. White sugar can be compared with a highly combustible fuel that violently ignites, burns with a fierce intensity, and as quickly dies down.

Can you imagine the shock treatment all this activity has on the digestive and nervous systems? And because of this fast dying down the body is aware of a hunger for more and more sugar. It is this fact that makes people often eat as much as a pound of sweets or chocolates at one sitting. The desire for ‘just one more’ becomes a compulsion, and the more poorly nourished a person is the more susceptible he will be to sugar addiction. For that is what it is, an addiction, no less. That sugar, in the last analysis, can cause serious malnutrition is proved by the fact that although like alcohol, it is a quick source of energy the effects do not last and as the body becomes more and more dependent on these ‘quick lifts’ it becomes less inclined to eat nourishing food.

To sum up the case for honey and the case against sugar I would say this. That artificial sugars must be broken down by the digestive tract into simple sugars before they can be utilized by the body, and thus they put an undue strain upon the system. The use of honey presents no such problems as it consists entirely of natural sugars that do not have to be oxydized by the digestive tract. Honey is absorbed at once without excessive stimulation or shock to the system and it does not result in a craving for more. Sugar is no substitute for honey as, chemically, it is of an entirely different nature. So why be dictated to by the heavy hand of commerce?