This article originally appeared in Time Magazine. It’s well worth checking out their website version of the article, which includes many more vintage sugar ads as well as a video about sugars effects and a quiz to test your knowledge of comparative sugar content between different foods. Good info as we head into the Thanksgiving Holiday!
This Is What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Sugar
David Zinczenko with Stephen Perrine, Time Magazine Online, Oct 2015
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 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.”
