If sweet is sweet then what is sugar? Diabetes, cancer, dementia, depression, acne, infertility, heart disease. Doesn’t sound too sweet.
The WHO used to recommend that you get no more than 10% of your daily calories from sugar, but now they're considering lowering that to 5%.
For an average, healthy adult, that would mean 25 grams, or about six teaspoons of sugar per day. (That's a little less than what you'd get from 10 Hershey's Kisses. A single can of Coke has 39 grams of sugar.)
1. Added Sugar Contains No Essential Nutrients and is Bad For Your Teeth:
Added sugars (like sucrose and high fructose corn syrup) contain a whole bunch of calories with NO essential nutrients.
The connection between sugar and cavities is perhaps the best established. "Tooth decay occurs when the bacteria that line the teeth feed on simple sugars, creating acid that destroys enamel," Anahad O'Connor explains at The New York Times.
2. Added Sugar is High in Fructose, Which Can Overload Your Liver:
Because of the unique way we metabolize fructose, it creates a stress response in the liver that can exacerbate inflammation. High doses of sugar can make the liver go into overdrive.
That's one reason excess fructose is a "key player" in the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, where fat accumulates in the liver in the absence of alcohol abuse.
For people who are inactive and eat a Western diet, large amounts of fructose from added sugars get turned into fat in the liver.
3. Sugar Can Give You Cancer:
A handful of studies have found that high-sugar diets are associated with a slightly elevated risk of pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancers.
The link may be because high-sugar diets are associated with obesity and diabetes, both of which increase the likelihood someone will develop pancreatic cancer.
4.The Insulin Resistance Can Progress to TypeII Diabetes:
One study that followed 51,603 women between 1991 and 1999 found an increased risk of diabetes among those who consumed more sugar-sweetened beverages - that's soda, sweetened ice tea, energy drinks, etc.
And a massive review of previous research involving 310,819 participants supported this result, concluding that drinking lots of soda was associated not just with weight gain but with the development of type 2 diabetes.
5. Sugar is a Leading Contributor to Obesity in Both Children and Adults:
Not surprisingly, people who consume the most sugar are by far the most likely to become overweight or obese. This applies to all age groups.
"The complexity of our food supply and of dietary intake behavior, and how diet relates to other behaviors, makes the acquisition of clear and consistent scientific data on the topic of specific dietary factors and obesity risk especially elusive," concluded one 2006 review.
Still, a more recent review cautioned, "we should avoid the trap of waiting for absolute proof before allowing public health action to be taken."
6. Due to its Effects on Hormones and the Brain, Sugar has Unique Fat-Promoting Effects:
Not all calories are created equal.
Different foods can have different effects on our brains and the hormones that control food intake.
Studies show that fructose doesn’t have the same kind of effect on satiety as glucose.
In one study, people drank either a fructose-sweetened drink or a glucose-sweetened drink.
Afterward, the fructose drinkers had much less activity in the satiety centers of the brain and felt hungrier
7. It Ain’t The Fat… It’s SUGAR That Raises Your Cholesterol and Gives You Heart Disease:
Studies show that large amounts of fructose can raise triglycerides, small, dense LDL and oxidized LDL (very, very bad), raise blood glucose and insulin levels and increase abdominal obesity… in as little as 10 weeks.
Conditions associated with excess sugar consumption, like diabetes and being overweight, are also already known risk factors for heart disease, and recent research suggests that eating too much sugar might stack the odds against your heart health - especially if you are a woman.
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