The Story of Glyconutrients – Are they missing from your diet?

By Welldec | March 14, 2008

Do you know that a deficiency in certain sugars could be causing illness? How can that be true? We all know that too much sugar is bad for us… It was only quite recently that scientists discovered a family of ‘nutritional’ sugars. Sugars that are found in plants, sugars that play an important part in the functioning of our immune systems, that boost kidney function and help prevent disease.

Scientists know that there is a direct link between disease and diet. The human body, an amazing machine, can heal itself of disease if it is given the proper nutrition as fuel. If, however, there is a lack of appropriate nutrition in the diet, the body is left defenseless and susceptible to disease.

There are so many health problems today that can be attributed to dietary deficiencies. Fast foods and processed foods, which are lacking in nutritional value, make up a large portion of our diets today.

Many of our foods are so processed that they contain no essential nutrients to feed the body’s immune system. As a result our immune systems get weaker and lose the ability to combat disease. Packaged foods tend to be loaded with additives designed to give them an eternal shelf life. Fruit and vegetables are mostly picked too early and often gassed to ripen.

Let’s now go back a little in time. It had been known for a long time that the aloe vera plant had remarkable healing properties. It seemed though, that once the aloe was processed commercially, it did not show the same health benefits as did the fresh, newly picked aloe.

A group of interested people, back in the early 1980s, were attempting to isolate the medically active ingredient from the aloe vera plant. They hired a research pharmacologist to find what caused the unique benefits of the fresh aloe vera gel and to determine why these benefits disappeared after processing.

It was discovered, after lengthy research, that the active ingredient in the aloe vera gel was a long chain carbohydrate made up predominately of a sugar called Mannose. It was noticed that within a day or two of the aloe leaf being picked, this long-chain sugar molecule rapidly began to disintegrate, causing the gel to lose much of its effectiveness. A new process was then developed and patented that protected this long-chain sugar from being destroyed. This new stabilized aloe extract was then made available to the public in the form of a juice, and the testimonies began to flow in.

Many people who tried this new product were reporting great benefits to their health and it was soon realized by the scientists that this was a significant discovery.

Carbohydrate structuring was a brand new science at that time and was only being taught at one or two universities in the world. Soon, however, researchers the world over began to study carbohydrates and by 1990 there had been around 4000 papers published about this science of Glycobiology, as it became known. An article appeared identifying carbohydrates as essential for immune function, and glycobiology as one of the ‘hottest’ new fields of medical research. Harper’s Biochemistry, 1996, devoted a chapter to reviewing the sugars necessary for cell-to-cell communication.

It was found that of the 200 carbohydrate monosaccharides, or sugars, found in nature, there were eight biologically active sugars (glyconutrients) that gave our cells their structural support network and were critical for cellular communication. These glyco or sugar forms work to keep our hormones in balance, fight off disease invaders, enable blood to clot and create a complex cellular messaging system. Reason enough to include them in our diet?

Find out more about why you should be adding glyconutrients to your diet and consider carefully which other supplements are important and how to make the correct decisions when selecting them.
Click here to get your own unique version of this article.

Article kindly provided by UberArticles.com

Topics: Nutrition | Comments Off

Comments are closed.