Oct. 27, 2015
Sugar
affects your brain as well as your body
Here’s a quick question: How many
spoonfuls of high-fructose corn syrup did you eat yesterday?
Oh, you don’t recall slurping down
any of the hyper-sweet corn extract? Well, you did—about eight teaspoons’
worth, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In fact, the average
American consumed 27 pounds of the stuff last year.
But while 8 teaspoons of
artificially manufactured syrup may seem like an awful lot, it’s only a drop in
the sugar bucket. The USDA’s most recent figures
find that Americans consume, on average, about 32 teaspoons of added sugar
every single day. That sugar comes to us in the form of candies, ice cream and
other desserts, yes. But the most troubling sugar of all isn’t the added sugar
we consume on purpose; it’s the stuff we don’t even know we’re eating.
In recent years, the medical
community has begun to coalesce around a powerful new way of looking at added
sugar: as perhaps the number one most significant health threat in America. But
what exactly is “added sugar,” and why do experts suddenly believe that it’s
the ISIS of nutrition?
When they talk about “added sugar,”
health experts aren’t talking about the stuff that we consume from eating whole
foods. “Added sugars are sugars that are contributed during the processing or
preparation of foods and beverages,” says Rachel K. Johnson, PhD, RD, professor
of nutrition at The University of Vermont. So lactose, the sugar naturally
found in milk and dairy products, and naturally occurring fructose, the sugar that
appears in fruit, don’t count. But ingredients that are used in foods to
provide added sweetness and calories, from the much-maligned high fructose corn
syrup to healthier-sounding ones like agave, date syrup, cane sugar, and honey,
are all considered added sugars.
That’s because naturally occurring
sugars, like what you find in an apple, come with their own health posse—fiber,
which slows the digestion of the sugar and prevents it from spiking insulin
response and damaging your liver, two serious side effects of added sugar.
“It’s almost impossible to over consume fructose by eating too much fruit,”
says Johnson. Consider this: You’d need to eat six cups of strawberries to get
the same amount of fructose as in one can of Coke.
Fortunately, giving up added sugar
has been shown to have several dramatic and rapid impacts on your health. In a
newly released study, children who cut added sugars from their diets for just 9
days showed dramatic improvements in cholesterol and blood sugar levels.
On the flip side, adding sugar to
your diet can quickly put your health into a spiral: People who consumed
beverages containing high fructose corn syrup for two weeks significantly
increased their levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol (the “bad”
cholesterols), plus two proteins associated with elevated cholesterols and
another compound, uric acid, that’s associated with diabetes and gout. So found
a 2015 study in the American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition.
In fact, in a 2014 editorial in the journal JAMA Internal
Medicine, the authors made a bold statement: “Too much sugar does not just
make us fat; it can also make us sick.”
The editors of Eat This, Not That!
took a look at the most recent research and discovered just how much harm added
sugars are doing to us:
· Added sugar makes
eating healthy almost impossible
The more added sugar that sneaks its
way into your diet, the less healthy food you’ll eat the rest of the day.
That’s the finding of a 2015 article in Nutrition Review, which looked at dozens of studies
conducted between 1972 and 2012. The researchers found that a higher intake of
added sugar was associated with poorer diet and a lower intake of
micronutrients.
That’s in part because of how sugary
foods retrain our taste buds and mess with our bodily systems. When even tomato
sauce is laced with sweetener, we then need greater and greater doses of sugar
in order for the flavor to register. That leads us to seek out candies and
baked goods at the expense of real food.
But it’s not just a matter of taste.
A sugar rush creates an overflow of insulin into the system to try to manage
the toxic substance. Because it can create an overreaction within the body—too
much insulin pulling too much sugar out of the bloodstream—it can lead to crash
that sends us seeking another immediate sugar rush, the kind that no whole food
can satisfy.
The most powerful effects, however,
aren’t on our bodies. They’re on our brains. In one study, researchers measured
the levels of oxytocin, a feel-good hormone that helps us feel satiated, in the
brains of rats. When rats that ate a low-sugar diet were given a meal high in
sugar, their oxytocin levels didn’t change. But when they were given the
high-sugar diet regularly, their brains began to show lower levels of oxytocin
activity. In other words, the more we’re bombarded with added sugars, the more
chronically unsatisfied we feel, and the more we need to eat. An editorial in JAMA
Internal Medicine asked, “Why are we consuming so
much sugar despite knowing too much can harm us?” The answer: “The high
prevalence of added-sugar consumption…is very likely influenced by and a result
of addictive behaviors incited by reward system activation after overeating
highly palatable foods.”
· Added sugar causes
your body to store fat around your belly
Within 24 hours of eating fructose,
your body is flooded with elevated levels of triglycerides. Does that sound
bad? It is.
Triglycerides are the fatty deposits
in your blood. Your liver makes them, because they’re essential for building
and repairing the tissues in your body.
But when it’s hit with high doses of
fructose, the liver responds by pumping out more triglycerides; that’s a signal
to your body that it’s time to store some abdominal fat. In one study,
researchers fed subjects beverages sweetened with either glucose or fructose.
Both gained the same amount of weight over the next 8 weeks, but the fructose
group gained its weight primarily as belly fat, thanks to the way this type of
sugar is processed in the liver.
What’s unique to fructose is that it
seems to be a universal obesogen—in other words, every creature that eats it
gains weight. Princeton researchers recently found that high-fructose corn
syrup seemed to have a unique impact on weight in their animal studies.
“When rats are drinking
high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re
becoming obese—every single one, across the board,” psychology professor Bart
Hoebel, a specialist in appetite and sugar addiction, said in a report from the
university.
“Even when rats are fed a high-fat
diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain weight.” Fructose is the freak
show of fat.
· Added sugar makes you skip going to the gym
There are a lot of ways that added
sugar can make you gain weight, but the most bizarre may be the way it reduces
actual physical activity. In one study at the University of Illinois, mice that
were fed a diet that mimicked the standard American diet–i.e., one that was
about 18 percent added sugars—gained more body fat even though they weren’t fed
more calories. One of the reasons was that the sugar-addled mice traveled about
20 percent less in their little cages than mice that weren’t fed the sugary
diet. They just naturally…slowed…down.
· Added sugar is the number one factor in your risk of dying
from diabetes
The link between increased sugar and
diabetes risk is right up there with “smoking causes lung cancer” on the list
of immutable medical truths— despite what soda manufacturers are trying to tell
us. (You’ll read more about sugar-based hocus-pocus in the next chapter.) But
researchers at the Mayo Clinic have come right out and said that added
fructose—either as a constituent of table sugar or as the main component of
high-fructose corn syrup—may be the number one cause of diabetes, and that
cutting sugar alone could translate into a reduced number of diabetes deaths
the world over.
· Added sugar affects
your brain
“Reduce fructose in your diet if you
want to protect your brain,” announced Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, professor at the
University of California Los Angeles.
He and his team tested how well rats
recovering from brain injury learned new ways to get through a maze. They found
that animals that drank HFCS took 30 percent more time to find the exit. “Our
findings suggest that fructose disrupts plasticity—the creation of fresh
pathways between brain cells that occurs when we learn or experience something
new,” he says.
In an earlier study, researchers
found that a combination of sugar and fat could actually change one’s brain
chemistry. The brains of animals on a high-fat, high-sugar diet had decreased
levels of BDNF, a compound that helps brain cells communicate with one another,
build memories, and learn new things; decreased levels of BDNF have been linked
to both Alzheimer’s and depression.
One of the recent mysteries of
science is why depression, diabetes and dementia seem to cluster in
epidemiological studies, and why having one of these health issues seems to
increase your risk for the others. The answer: In a study in the journal Diabetologia,
researchers found that when blood glucose levels are elevated, BDNF levels
drop. That means that the simple act of eating sugar makes you instantly
dumber; the more you do it, the greater your risk of diabetes, and the greater
your risk of depression and dementia as well. In a 2015 study of post-menopausal women, higher levels of
added sugars and refined carbs were associated with an increased likelihood of
depression, while higher consumption of fiber, dairy, fruit and vegetables was
associated with a lower risk.
And, in a study of nearly 1,000 seniors (median age: 79.5),
researchers found that eating a diet high in simple carbs significantly
increased the risk of developing dementia. All of the subjects were cognitively
normal at the beginning of the study, and about 200 developed signs of dementia
over the next 3.7 years. The risk of mental decline was higher in those who ate
high-carb diets, and lower in those whose diets were higher in fat and/or
protein.
· Sugar doubles your risk of dying from heart disease
People who get 25 percent of more of
their calories from added sugar are more than twice as likely to die from heart
disease as those who eat less than 10 percent, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
One out of ten of us fall into that
category.
Now, if you’re an average American,
your daily sugar consumption is about 17 percent of calories, according to the study.
But that’s hardly a laurel to rest
on. People who ate between 17 and 21 percent of their calories from added sugar
had a 38 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared with people
who consumed 8 percent or less of their calories from added sugar.
At first, the researchers figured
that since those who ingest more sugar have poorer diets, that might be a main
cause. But even after making adjustments for the quality of one’s diet, the
link between sweets and cardiovascular risk remained the same.
The study found that the major
sources of added sugar in the American diet were:
- Sugar-sweetened beverages (37.1%)
- Grain-based desserts like cookies or cake (13.7%)
- Fruit drinks (8.9%)
- Dairy desserts like ice cream (6.1%)
- Candy (5.8%)
And sodas and other sweet drinks are
a major red flag: The researchers found that a higher consumption of
sugar-sweetened beverages was directly tied to an increased risk of dying from
heart disease. The impact is so great that you don’t need to be meandering
through middle age to see the impact: Even teenagers who consume food and
beverages high in added sugars show evidence of risk factors for heart disease
and diabetes in their blood, according to a second study in The Journal of Nutrition.
· · Added sugar raises
your blood pressure
In fact, sugar may be worse for your
blood pressure than salt, according to a paper published in the journal Open
Heart.
Just a few weeks on a high-sucrose
diet can increase both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Another study
found that for every sugar-sweetened beverage, risk of developing hypertension
increased 8 percent. Too much sugar leads to higher insulin levels, which in
turn activate the sympathetic nervous system and lead to increased blood
pressure, according to James J. DiNicolantonio, Pharm.D., cardiovascular
research scientist at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City,
Missouri. “It may also cause sodium to accumulate within the cell, causing
calcium to build up within the cell, leading to vasoconstriction and
hypertension,” he says.
· Sugar causes your
skin to sag
Your skin has its own support system
in the form of collagen and elastin, two compounds that keep your skin tight
and pump. But when elevated levels of glucose and fructose enter the body, they
link to the amino acids present in the collagen and elastin, producing advanced
glycation end products, or “AGEs.” That damages these two critical compounds
and makes it hard for the body to repair them. This process is accelerated in
the skin when sugar is elevated, and further stimulated by ultraviolet light,
according to a study in Clinical Dermatology.
In other words, eating lots of sugar
poolside is the worst thing you can do for your skin.