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Sugar is everywhere. It is found in many — if not most — of the foods we eat, including breads, soups, pasta sauce, salad dressings, and even ketchup. You don’t have to eat a big bowl of ice cream to top out your sugar consumption for the day.

While all this sugar may taste delicious, it is very bad for our health. You likely already know how excess sugar consumption can lead to health risks like diabetes, but you probably don’t know some of the more subtle and insidious ways sugar can disrupt your health and your quality of life. Here are just a few reasons why you should stop eating sugar:

It Makes You Fat

For a long time, we believed that fat made you fat, and the low-fat diet craze ensued. But more research has shown that too much sugar can actually make you fat by disrupting your body’s insulin response and triggering you to overeat. The more sugar you eat, the more resistant your body becomes to insulin, and the more fat your body stores.

It Ages You

You can use all the expensive creams and moisturizers you want, but if you keep eating too much sugar, your skin is going to look dry, wrinkled and saggy. Sugar contributes to the aging of your skin by destroying the cells. You don’t need a makeover: You just need to cut sugar out of your diet to start seeing a healthy glow and firmer, smoother skin.

It Makes You Sick

Diabetes is only one health consequence of eating too much sugar. This sweet poison can also contribute to heart disease, weaken your immune system, and impair memory and other cognitive function. It can also disrupt your hormonal balance, which can lead to metabolic deficiencies and infertility. Some research has even suggested a link to cancer.

While sugar is a delicious treat, the consequences of eating too much of it are potentially severe. Though you may be thinking that you don’t eat “too much,” sugar is lurking in most commercially made processed foods, so it can be hard to monitor how much you are eating each day, making it easy to quickly consume too much. The best approach is to cut it out of your diet except as an occasional treat.

The next time you need a sweet fix, reach for a banana or other piece of fruit instead.

Have you cut sugar out of your diet? Tell us about the improvements you noticed in the comments!

Tara Spenser is currently the resident writer for workingcapital.org, where she researches small business loan requirements. In her spare time, she enjoys blogging, swimming and being a mom.