Sugar itself is not the enemy.
Sugar is not bad.
It is the high amounts of sugar we consume causing long-lasting harm.
And the elevated frequency with which we overindulge on it only deepens the problem.
Sugar is not the villain we often make it out to be. It is simply a substance, neutral, inert, waiting for intention to give it meaning. It is merely energy.
At the molecular level, sugar forms tiny crystals, orderly, rigid, almost beautiful in their microscopic geometry. Yet beauty can cut when multiplied without restraint. Picture these crystals not as enemies, but as travelers: countless sharp‑edged grains moving through the narrow highways of our blood, our veins and arteries.
In moderation, they pass quietly, like a few cars gliding down an open freeway. But in excess, the lanes clog. Traffic thickens. Friction rises. Collisions become inevitable. The damage is not caused by the nature of the cars, but by the congestion we create.
So the lesson is not to fear sweetness, but to understand it. To recognize that even the gentlest substance becomes harmful when we ask it to bear more than the body’s roads were built to carry.
Blood sugar does not recognize diagnoses or labels. The body does not negotiate with categories like “diabetic” or “non‑diabetic.” It responds only to reality: to the concentration of sugar moving through its biological highways.
A level of 150 mg/dL is not a moral threshold or a rule written for a small subset of people. It is simply a point at which the body begins to strain, a universal limit woven into human physiology, a reminder that every system has a capacity beyond which it falters.
As sugar rises, the blood subtly transforms. It grows denser, more viscous, less like a flowing river and more like slow‑moving syrup. What once streamed freely now drags its feet. The currents thicken. The channels turn congested. Movement becomes effort.
And because blood is the courier of life, carrying oxygen, nutrients, signals, and repair, any slowdown echoes through every nanometer of the body. From the clarity of the mind to the warmth of the toes, from the large freeways leaving the heart, to the single-lane streets arriving at the kidneys, every part feels the weight of that sluggish tide.
Thus, the sweetness of sugar dissolves into a sharp, piercing bitterness within the body.
The body is always speaking, always signaling when its balance is tipping. Blood sugar level is simply one of its languages, a measure of how smoothly or chaotically the inner roads carry the work of being alive.
If we imagine sugar as pure fuel, the logic becomes almost mechanical. A furnace that receives more wood than it burns will choke on its own abundance. A battery that is constantly overcharged will degrade faster. A river that receives more water than it can carry will overflow its banks. A gasoline tank receiving more fuel than it can contain will overflow that fuel into places it was never meant to be.
The human body is no different.
When energy intake surpasses energy use, the surplus must go somewhere. It settles into tissues, slows metabolic currents, and burdens systems that were designed for flow, not accumulation.
The high frequency of sugar in our lives does more than wear down our bodies; it erodes the quiet agreements our organs once held with us. Each overindulgence seems small, almost innocent, yet constant repetition turns sweetness into a slow‑moving tide that reshapes us from within over time.
What begins as pleasure becomes a pattern, and the pattern becomes a kind of traffic jam in the bloodstream, a ceaseless gridlock of molecules jostling for passage, each one a reminder that excess always demands a toll.
The worst offenders are the sugary drinks, the ones that slip past our defenses with a smile. They don’t merely enter the body; they flood it, pouring into our inner highways at a pace our blood vessels were never designed to handle. Within five minutes of drinking a sweetened drink, sugar rushes through our vessels like the sudden daily exodus from our workplaces into the city streets and highways, every molecule merging onto the roads at once. The same happens with diet drinks and their artificial colorings, artificial flavorings, artificial sweeteners, and their multitude of chemical ingredients.
It becomes rush hour inside us: lanes clogged, signals overwhelmed, the quiet order of the bloodstream replaced by a frantic scramble for passage.
My plea to those who are reading these words or listening to my voice is simple: set aside sweetened and diet beverages. To remove them is not deprivation; it is a return. A return to tasting water as water, to letting thirst speak honestly, to allowing the body to rediscover its own equilibrium without the ceaseless tug of sweetness in its natural or artificial form.
So the question becomes beautifully straightforward: How do we clear excess energy? By adjusting the balance between what enters and what leaves. Consume less energy. Burn more energy. Or, in the most harmonious scenario, do both. This is not punishment or austerity, it is alignment. It is the body returning to the rhythm it evolved for: a rhythm of intake matched by movement, of nourishment matched by expenditure. When we restore that balance, sugar stops being a threat. It becomes what it always was, fuel for a life in motion.
Sugar is simple.
We complicate it.
Ultimately, it is not the rare small indulgence that burdens the body, but the high, relentless influx of excess sugar, those countless loaded trespasses that accumulate like sand against the gears of our organs. The multitude of constant minor aggravations. The frequent internal lacerations. It is the high quantities and the repetition that wear us down, the steady chorus of minor insults that, over time, become a kind of internal erosion.
We have allowed sugar to drift from its rightful place, no longer a simple spark of energy but a constant companion in high amounts, demanded rather than appreciated. To heal, we must return to the way humans used sugar in the past: as a fleeting source of fuel, not as a perpetual overabundant presence.
What harms us is not sugar itself, sugar is not bad. What harms us is our excess, our forgetting of proportion, our drift away from balance.
Our gluttony.
Byron Batz, Ph.D.
© 2026 Byron Batz. All rights reserved.
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