Mostly harmless?

I know my last post was long, sorry. I’m new to blogging :)

Ok, so sugar is addictive. Check. Is it bad though? Since I was initially impressed with the idea of going sugar free because I need to lose some weight, I want to look at whether sugar can be implicated in being overweight. This would definitely tip the scales (ha ha) toward sugar being bad, in my opinion.

Here’s what I used to think about how sugar affected my weight. To gain weight, you just need to eat more calories than you use (and to lose weight, you do the opposite, obviously). Sugar provides energy (adds calories), and because they are ‘empty’ calories (sugar doesn’t provide any other micronutrients that the body needs), by eating those jelly babies I am using up my precious daily allowance of calories on something that doesn’t have any nutritional value. Such was my understanding, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong, it’s just incomplete.

Sugar is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. These two parts aren’t processed in the same way by the body, and they don’t result in the same outcomes in terms of our weight. Research has shown that if you increase people's calorie intake with fructose, you get visceral adiposity- that’s a big tummy- which is a strong and well-validated indicator of risk for chronic diseases including cancers, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. This is why the Australian Government are trying to get you to Measure Up. (Just out of curiosity, I checked what the Measure Up site suggested I do about reducing abdominal fat- they suggest eating less. Thanks). You don’t get this dangerous fat when you increase the calorie intake with glucose instead of fructose. It’s not just about the calories.

Fructose is processed by the liver. The liver sends fat to the tum and triglycerides (fat again) into the blood (triglycerides are implicated in coronary artery disease- hurray, more to worry about!).  Let’s see what this does to rats. An Editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition summarises years of research nicely: 

experimental studies in animals have shown that fructose can induce most features of the metabolic syndrome, including insulin resistance, elevated triglycerides, abdominal obesity, elevated blood pressure, inflammation, oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction, microvascular disease, hyperuricemia, glomerular hypertension and renal injury, and fatty liver. These effects are not seen in animals pair-fed glucose or starch, which suggests that the mechanism is not mediated by excessive caloric intake.

Ouch. So, fructose makes rats not just fat, but really, really unhealthy. And this is not because it ‘adds’ calories. Yes, those calories (if not used) will be stored as fat whether the rat eats glucose, starch or fructose, but you don’t see the cascading, overwhelmingly bad outcomes, some of which directly impact on weight, for glucose or starch.

There is a growing body (ha ha) of research to suggest that fructose leads to these outcomes in humans as well as rats, including the study I mention above. It is messy, though. Some researchers flat out deny that there is evidence for a link between fructose and the types of symptoms (including weight gain) that are evident in rats. Others say things like “there is compelling evidence that very high fructose intake can have deleterious metabolic effects in humans as in rodents”  (emphasis added). Finally, there are people like Dr Robert Lustig who used to work for the American Heart Foundation (including co-authoring their sugar guidelines) and who now unequivocally believes that sugar is the main culprit behind overweight and other problems. This is a good summary of what he thinks.

They can’t all be right. We obviously have more to learn. David Gillespie (in the Sweet Poison Quit Plan) says that there are over 3000 studies which confirm that sugar makes you fat (I haven’t counted them myself but I’ll take his word). Some of these are on rats or other non-human subjects, but there are many on humans as well.

This isn’t the end of the story about sugar and weight by any means, but I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll put my hand up and say that I believe that sugar is more- maybe way more- than an empty calorie. I don’t pretend to know exactly what it does, but 8 days in, I feel fantastic and very positive about having cut it out of my life. I've lost over a kilo already. 

So, if sugar is an empty calorie, then my body won’t miss it: I never needed the Party Mix (I just thought I did). And, if it’s more sinister than that, then I’m much better off without it.