Natural
sugar refers to sugars that occur naturally in foods while refined sugar refers
to sugars that have undergone an extraction and purification process, often
turning the finished sugars into crystals that are easy to add to foods. Simple
sugars are very quickly broken down by your body and create spikes in your
blood sugar, unlike natural, which take longer to process.
While it's been
widely noted that excess sugar can increase the overall risk for
heart disease, a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Heart Association
displayed strong evidence that sugar can actually affect the pumping mechanism
of your heart and could increase the risk for heart failure.
