Wonderfulworld – To your question:
"how do you function ok without sugar? Every time I've had a good try at a low sugar diet I 'crash' with low blood sugar....."
I suspect that your 'crash' was due to too much insulin rather than too little glucose in your system. The resulting symptoms are much the same in both conditions.
The human body functions perfectly well with fats as the energy source. Glucose is not the only possible energy source; glucose is not absolutely necessary; fats are. This is a generally accepted fact today and has been stated in many places:
Several years ago there was successful treatment of children with seizures at Johns Hopkins. The treatment was a ketogenic diet (diet high in fats and protein-- NO direct glucose source) and did control the seizures. The brains of the children could function just fine on ketones – glucose was not necessary for brain function.
In the 1920s anthropologist-turned-Arctic-explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, spent a decade among the Inuit, eating nothing but meat, no vegetables or fruit. His observation was that those who lived on this diet were among the healthiest imaginable. His observations contradicted conventional wisdom at that time that a varied diet was essential for good health. "It is a misconception that the brain and central nervous system require dietary glucose to function." See pages 319-325 of
Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.
A few months ago, 1-18-11, on the TV program, The Dr. Oz Show, Dr. Joseph Mercola stated that ketone bodies serve as an alternative fuel source to glucose: about 4:20 in the video at
http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/alternat ... versy-pt-2
I believe in my case my pancreas continues to pump out insulin in response to the slightest bit of glucose in my system and in response to even a sweet taste in my mouth (such as from the sugar alcohol – sorbitol, xylitol, mannitol, erythritol, etc. – in toothpaste, mouthwash, some chewing gum, even fish oil capsules). Insulin is a caustic substance; I think it damages the villi in the small intestine (resulting in poor absorption of vitamins and minerals) and once it is absorbed into the bloodstream, it damages the inside of the blood vessels, and it thickens and stiffens smooth muscles (Smooth muscles compose the walls of blood vessels, the human urinary bladder, and sphincter muscles.). Insulin passes through the blood brain barrier, able to damage myelin on nerve cells.
So goes the insulin hypothesis!
