Sugar definitely is toxic, finds new study

If there’s one major food villain of the past few years, it’s sugar.

As rates of sugar-related disorders including obesity, heart disease and diabetes continue to climb, so does the message that we need to stop consuming so much sugar.

However, until recently it has been difficult to categorically prove that the rise of chronic diseases is linked to eating excess sugar. In a paper published in the journal Obesity, Dr Robert Lustig from the University of California has demonstrated what he believes is evidence that sugar “is toxic”.

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Lustig’s research focuses on adolescents, aged eight to 18 of Hispanic or African-American descent. Collecting detailed information about what each participant eats per day, his team then designed a special menu for each for nine days that matched the total number of kilojoules they would usually eat.

The difference was that most of the sugar consumed was replaced by starch. Children weighed themselves daily and if losing weight, they ate more of the provided food in order to keep their weight the same.

Despite the fact that their weight remained relatively unchanged, all other health markers improved. Some went from being insulin resistant, a precursor to diabetes, to being insulin sensitive. On average, fasting blood sugar levels dropped by 53 per cent, along with the number of insulin in their bodies. Their heart-health also improved, with triglyceride and LDL ‘bad’ cholesterol levels declining, and there was less fat around their livers.

The main difference in both diets was that in the assigned eating plan; their total dietary sugar was reduced to 10 per cent of their total daily energy intake. Overall, there was no change in a child’s weight or the number of kilojoules consumed.

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Although some children lost weight, Lustig believes that because those who didn’t lose weight had similar improvements, the change is not due to a small amount of weight being lost. “Up until now, there have been a lot of correlation studies linking sugar and metabolic syndrome,” he said. “This is causation.”

That’s not to say that if you need to lose a few kilos, you shouldn’t. Both a healthy diet and weight loss can bring about good metabolic changes – it’s just that reducing excess sugar consumption may make a dramatic improvement too.

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