The scary side effects of sugar

Researchers from Tufts University in the US discovered that people who drink just one or more sugar-sweetened beverage a day, are at an increased risk of developing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Researchers analysed the dietary habits of 2,634 study participants who were asked in a questionnaire how often they drank sugar-sweetened beverages. Those drinks included caffeinated and caffeine-free soft drinks, other carbonated sugary drinks, fruit juices, lemonade, and other non-carbonated fruit drinks.

Participants then underwent a CT scan to measure the amount of fat in their livers. Researchers discovered a higher presence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in those who said they drank more than one sugary beverage a day compared to those who said they didn’t drink sugary beverages.

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"Sugars found in soft drinks in particular have been linked with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease," says William Carey, professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. “Many studies suggest that the high fructose corn syrup found in sodas is more likely to result in fatty liver than other forms of sugar,” he says.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is particularly bad because it affects multiple parts of your body, says hepatologist Kalyan Ram Bhamidimarri, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

“A lot of patients who have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can actually do okay,” he tells Yahoo Health. “But when the fat is associated with inflammation, patients will have non-alcoholic steatohepatitis…that is bad.”

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Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis is essentially a worse version of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, he says, and is linked with heart attack, stroke, cancer, and liver failure.“All this fat in the liver is merely a reflection of what else is happening in the body,” says Bhamidimarri.

Bhamidimarri isn’t surprised by the link between sugary drinks and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease since the sugars in those drinks add a lot of extra kilojoules. “At the end of the day, it all adds up to the amount of kilojoules you’re consuming,” he says.

Luckily, it’s possible to recover from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The liver is one of the organs in the body that has the highest capacity to regenerate, says Bhamidimarri, noting that when patients change their dietary and lifestyle habits, the fat in the liver, the inflammation, and the scar tissue regresses.

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Carey agrees that it’s possible to recover from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease with better diet and exercise, and notes that the Mediterranean diet in particular has been shown to reduce fat in the liver.

Bhamidimarri recommends cutting way back on sugary drinks for liver health: “You can live without it.”