Sugar 🍩 & Your Nervous System 🧠

I tell people I don't eat sugar. That's not quite true 🤔

As a general rule, I tell people I don't eat sugar. But that's not completely true 🤔.

What I mean is that every day, I make a conscious decision not to eat any. And when I say sugar, I'm including most carbohydrates with that, so bread, rice, oat milk, that kind of thing. I tell myself I'm not going to touch it, knowing full well I probably will at some point because I'm only human 🫣. But the mindset matters, because even with the slip ups, what I end up eating is still well below what the World Health Organisation recommends, and a fraction of what the average person gets through.

It's the same way I tell myself I'm going to exercise every day. If you asked me whether I actually do, I'd say no, I only manage three days a week 😵‍💫. But the intention is there, and if I have any spare time, I'll go and train. So it's more of a mindset 🧠 than some religious rule I'm trying to uphold.

Why I refrain from sugar in the first place

I won't bore you with too much of my personal life, but I have chronic low grade inflammation 🚨. What that means in practice is that my body's alarm system is constantly going off at a low level, telling my immune system (my bodies defence system) there's something to deal with, which keeps it working harder than it needs to and creates a kind of chronic (low-grade) stress situation in the background. Sugar amplifies ☄️ all of that MASSIVELY. In the past I've found that when I eat it freely, I get sick very quick, I'm often lethargic, and I pick up injuries far more often than I should.

A few years back I decided to actually check my inflammatory markers, and sure enough, they came back high 🥵. From that point on, my strategy has been to do everything I reasonably can to bring inflammation down 👇🏽. Cutting sugar was one of the first and most obvious moves. I also don't have whey protein, because for whatever reason it spikes my inflammation personally.

And this is worth saying out loud. Not everyone responds to sugar the same way I do. Some people genuinely tolerate it better, some far worse. Genetics, gut microbiome, stress levels, sleep, training load, all of it plays a part. But the general direction of travel is the same for all of us, which we will get into shortly.

What I actually eat (for context)

I won't pretend it's easy. Zaccy and I both love red grapes 🍇, and the two of us can polish off a box in minutes. Another thing people might find strange about me is that I'm a bit of a cereal fiend 😁. I love a bowl of Crunchy Nut 🥣. The thing is, I don't actually eat it as often as you'd think, because I love it so much I treat it like a proper indulgence, maybe once a week or once a fortnight. The rest of the time, if I'm having any kind of cereal, it's a protein granola, and yes, I appreciate that still has sugar in it, but again, nowhere near every day and nowhere near what the average person eats.

When I actually sit down and work out what I get through in a typical week, it looks something like this 👉🏽. I'll have one skinny milk latte a day ☕️. Every three or four days I might have a sourdough chicken baguette. Once a week, sometimes twice if I'm being honest, I'll have eggs, beans on toast (as Zaccy LOVES it), so a tin of baked beans with three slices of sourdough. And on the weekend, Laura and I will share a bag of chocolate nibbles. (Don't let her tell you she doesn't eat any.)

When you add all of that up, I'm getting through somewhere around 80 grams of carbohydrate a day on average. The average adult in the UK eats closer to 250 grams a day, so I'm sitting at about a third of that. And when you look at free sugars specifically, which is the bit the World Health Organisation actually flags 🚩 as the real problem (and we'll get into what "free sugars" means in a future post), they recommend keeping it under 50 grams a day, ideally under 25 ⬇️. I'm well inside that, probably under 10 grams a day (max).

And here's the proof it's working

The reason I'm sharing all this with you, in this much detail, is because I want you to see what the actual numbers look like in real life. When you eat a bag of chocolate nibbles on the weekend with your partner, it can feel like a lot. It can feel indulgent. But when you zoom out and look at the broader picture across a whole week, it's actually very, very little, and well inside what your body can safely handle.

I know that because every time I get my blood 🩸 work done, my inflammatory markers have come down again. They've been steadily decreasing year on year. So whatever I'm doing, including the chocolate on the weekend and the cereal once a week, is clearly not enough to push my body into the inflammatory response I used to live with. My body is telling me, through the only language it really has, that this level of intake is well within my tolerance.

That's an important point to sit with, because the conversation around sugar is usually all or nothing. Either you're cutting it out completely or you're a sugar addict ruining your health. The reality is far more nuanced than that, and it's that nuance I want to walk you through.

The reason I go to all this effort is because of what I learned a long time ago about what sugar actually does inside us. And it is worth you knowing too. So now you have the context, let me share with you the discussion we had on our Teacher Training on Sunday.

🍫 Sugar's Silent Assault on the Nervous System 🧠

As I mentioned before, our nervous system, the brain and its corresponding "cables", is a remarkable product of millions of years of evolution, finely tuned by our ancestry and genetics to thrive in environments where simple sugars were scarce and seasonal.

Early humans and our primate ancestors relied on occasional ripe fruits 🍇 or honey 🍯 for quick energy, with our taste receptors evolving to detect sweetness as a signal of safe, calorie-dense food during times of scarcity. Genetics played a role too (adaptations in fructose breakdown helped store fat for famines) but the modern abundance of refined, added sugars represents a profound mismatch.

Once shaped primarily by this evolutionary blueprint, our NS is now heavily influenced by nurture: diet, lifestyle, and environment. Among these, sugar stands out as the single biggest factor we can control that damages and harms the nervous system long-term (read that again 😵‍💫). Excessive intake of added sugars disrupts blood glucose regulation, triggers chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, impairs insulin signalling in the brain 🧠, and accelerates nerve damage 🤯. Effects that compound over years and contribute to cognitive decline, mood disorders, neuropathy, and even support for diseases like cancer.

Unlike genetics or ancestry, which we cannot change, dietary sugar is modifiable.

Whole-food sources of natural sugars (intrinsic sugars in fruits, vegetables, and dairy) come packaged with fibre, antioxidants, and nutrients that slow absorption and can mitigate harm. So when I talk about sugar, I am not talking about an apple or a handful of berries. Fruit is a different conversation entirely, the fibre and nutrients change the game completely.

That said, I still personally choose to eat very little fruit. Not because it is bad, but because I do not feel I need that sugar hit daily. The grapes with Zaccy are a treat, not a habit. And that is the distinction I want you to sit with throughout this blog. There is a difference between something being safe and something being necessary. Fruit is safe. A daily sugar hit, even from fruit, is not necessary for most modern day adults in developed countries 🤨

The sugars we really need to target are added sugars (or "free sugars" per WHO definitions): monosaccharides and disaccharides added during processing or preparation, plus those in honey, syrups, and fruit juices. These include sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, and glucose syrups found in sodas, processed foods, baked goods, and sweetened drinks.

What we also discussed was the relationship between sugar and cancer. Although sugar does not cause cancer outright, it creates the perfect environment for cancer cells to thrive. Cancer cells are greedy 🍰. They burn glucose at a frantic pace to fuel their rapid growth, a quirk known as the Warburg effect. A diet packed with added sugar gives them an all-you-can-eat buffet. High insulin levels also switch on growth signals that help tumours expand and spread, while the constant low-grade inflammation that sugar drives weakens your immune system's ability to spot and destroy abnormal cells. It is a vicious cycle: inflammation feeds cancer, and the same inflammation damages nerves and the brain.

“Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.”

- Otto Warburg

So how and why are these cancerous cells so clever? It comes back to evolution. The earliest forms of life on Earth existed long before oxygen filled the atmosphere, and they survived through a process called fermentation, pulling in glucose from the surrounding ocean and breaking it down without needing oxygen at all. Billions of years later, our cells still carry that ancient survival programme written into our DNA, a backup setting that kicks in whenever oxygen runs low. Cancer cells essentially hijack this old machinery and run on it permanently, which is why they are so hungry for sugar.

The most striking proof of how powerful this backup system can be is the story of Henrietta Lacks. Cells taken from her cervical cancer in 1951, without her consent, kept dividing in the lab long after she had passed away. They are kept alive in a simple nutrient broth, essentially sugar, salts, and amino acids, at body temperature, and they just keep multiplying. More than seventy years on, her cells are still growing in research labs around the world and have powered countless medical breakthroughs, from the polio vaccine to modern cancer research. I was gobsmacked when I read the book about her, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot. Well worth a read if you ever get the chance.

So from everything above, you get why I say I do not eat sugar. The truth is, I do. But I make the conscious choice to default to zero, and some days that is genuinely true. Today is one of those days as I write this blog. I fasted this morning and had my first meal at 1.30pm: a whole avocado, two cooked chicken breasts, and more than a little cheese. Tonight, another full pack of chicken thighs in the air fryer with cheese again.

I might pop over to see my mum later though. And if she offers me a roti, come on bro, I am only human 😵‍💫. I will absolutely go to town. But if I do not go, I will know that today was a zero sugar day. Because here is the part that sounds odd: we do not actually need to eat glucose. That is very different to saying the body does not need glucose.

The body absolutely needs glucose, but it can manufacture its own through a process called gluconeogenesis, which literally translates as "the making of new glucose". So we do not need to eat it for the body to have it.

Archna at our teacher training did raise a good point though. Fibre. And I get that completely. Which is why I enjoy my tin of baked beans once a week, and I do occasionally have veg and spinach, usually the leftovers after cooking for Laura 🥦.

And before I close, one honest reflection on cravings. They do not really disappear. I still love grapes 🍇, I still love that bowl of Crunchy Nut. What changes is your relationship with the craving. You stop being controlled by it.

The biggest nuance though is with kids. The conversation around carbohydrates changes entirely for children. As adults we can survive comfortably without them, with the right supplementation (vitamin C, magnesium, and sometimes potassium and fibre supplements) to cover the nutrients we would otherwise miss. But kids genuinely need carbs for growth, brain development, and energy. So I absolutely see the nuance there.

Closing thoughts

If there is one thing I want you to take from this first blog on sugar, it is this. Your nervous system is the most sophisticated piece of biological technology on the planet. It carries every thought, every breath, every movement on the mat, every feeling you have ever had about your kids, your partner, your purpose. And the single biggest controllable threat to it is sitting in plain sight on every supermarket shelf.

You do not have to be perfect. I am not. But the question worth pondering with is this. What would change in your life if you treated sugar with the same respect you treat any other substance that affects how your brain works? Not with fear, not with restriction, but with more awareness.

The body is endlessly forgiving when you give it half a chance. My inflammatory markers are proof of that. So is every student I have watched transform over the years. Small, consistent choices, made repeatedly, are how the nervous system heals.

Namaskar,

Zahir Akram

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