Why is Sugar Bad For You? The Bittersweet Truth

Sugar, sugar everywhere

Whether your focus is on losing weight, healthy eating or just looking and feeling better, the chances are you know you should cut back on sugar.

But that’s easier said than done. Few of us are immune from a ‘deep, deep and ancient craving’ for sweet foods. While fruit and honey provided our pre-historic ancestors with essential fuel for survival, today, our sugar intake is blamed for a worldwide epidemic of obesity and heart disease!

But just how did natural human enjoyment of sweet foods become a health risk? Let’s take a closer look at sugar, what eating too much sugar does to the human body, and tips to reduce our intake.

Over-indulging in refined-sugary dessert

What is sugar?

Sugar, or more accurately sugars, are simple carbohydrates that our bodies need to function. Sugar is the fuel for the cells of the human body, brain and nervous system. The excess is stored in our body as fat.

Naturally-occurring sugars are found in fruit, vegetables, and grains together with healthy vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients water, and fibre. They are mainly glucose, fructose and sucrose.

Added or free sugars are those extracted from cane and beets, or already in honey, syrups, and fruit juices. These sugars may be added to food in a factory or in our homes to sweeten food and beverages. The main ones are sucrose and fructose. They have minimal nutritional value.

Naturally sweet and healthy root vegetables

Is one type of sugar better for your health than another?

Added sugars

Sugar molecules are chemically the same, whether found in fruit, or added in foods or beverages. All sugars break down in the small intestine and enter the blood as glucose. In this case, why does it matter whether you choose to get your energy from a banana, or a regular Oreo McFlurry?

One school of thought says it doesn’t matter. Firstly, this ignores the sheer quantity of sugar ingested in one go in a dessert like a McFlurry; a whopping 63 g of pure glucose, roughly double an adult’s daily recommended limit!

Secondly, without fibre and other nutrients to slow it down, the sugar in the McFlurry enters your bloodstream fast. This causes glucose levels to rise sharply, then plummet as the hormone insulin from the pancreas signals the cells of the body to open up and take in the glucose. Spikes like this in glucose levels in the blood can lead to mood swings, fatigue, and cravings for sweet foods.

Thirdly, the intense sweetness of added sugars literally lights up the pleasure/reward spots in our brain. As a result we tend to over-eat. As these foods provide largely empty calories of low nutritional value, we feel hungry again soon after eating.

Naturally-occurring sugars

On the other hand, a banana raises glucose levels slowly. Firstly, the various sugars take time to break down into glucose. Then fibre slows the rate glucose is absorbed.

Unlike the McFlurry, a banana is both rich in nutrients, and filling. What’s more, they are difficult to over-eat. Very few of us find eating bananas so enjoyable that we could eat 4 or 5 in one sitting for a McFlurry-style high (always exceptions- you know who you are!).

So while sugar molecules may all look the same under a microscope, in our bodies, the effect is quite different.

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Imagine a world without sugar

Sugar is so familiar and common that it is difficult to imagine life without it. Yet it is only in the last 250 years that it has become widely available; first as sucrose in table sugar, and later, as much sweeter (and cheaper) fructose and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Nowadays sugar is added to 75% of packaged foods and beverages in grocery stores.[1] Novel, man-made foods account for much of the incredible 120 lb/55kg of the sweet stuff many of us consume in a year (a 30-fold increase over 250 years[2]). From an evolutionary stance, it would be remarkable if a dietary change on this scale did not impact our health in some way.

Sugar doesn’t just make you fat, it makes you sick!

Chronic disease

In fact, a solid body of research now links rising consumption of added sugar to the epidemic of chronic, mostly preventable, diseases that most of us eventually die of (73% of global deaths in 2017)

Heart disease (No. 1 killer), obesity, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, Alzheimer’s, and certain cancers, have spread worldwide in parallel with the western diet of fast/processed foods, snacks and sugary drinks.

These ‘lifestyle’ diseases build up silently in our bodies over many years, only to reduce our healthy lifespan in mid-later life. Sadly, they are now appearing much earlier, in young adults and children.

Obesity

Above all, since 1975, obesity has tripled. Today a staggering 40% of the world’s adults are classified as overweight, and one third of those as obese[3]. Moreover, a major increase in overweight children and adolescents suggests that rates will continue to climb sharply.

Becoming overweight from over-eating is commonly viewed as the No. 1 cause of chronic disease. The argument that a ‘calorie is a calorie’, blames us as consumers for our greed and lack of control.

However, there is mounting evidence that a high sugar intake is a health risk factor independent of excess weight and calorie intake. Many scientists believe that sugar, fructose in particular, disrupts metabolism by raising blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol or triglyceride levels. As a result, this can trigger insulin resistance when cells in your muscles, body fat and liver start ignoring the signal from insulin to mop up glucose in the blood.

In turn, insulin resistance leads to the onset of many chronic diseases[4] including heart disease[5], diabetes[6], fatty liver disease[7], and dementia[8], even in people who are not overweight[9 ].

In other words, sugar can make you sick even if it doesn’t make you fat!

How much sugar are you actually eating every day?

It’s easy to under-estimate how much sugar you are consuming. As well as the obvious; cakes, pastries, chocolates, sodas and fruit juices etc, added sugars are hidden in processed foods, even those labelled ‘healthy’ or ‘natural’ such as breakfast cereals, granola bars and yogurts.

Eating these can often push you over the six teaspoons of added sugar a day (5% of total calories) that most experts and the World Health Organisation recommend as an upper limit. If you get 10–25% of your daily calories from sugar, you run a 30% higher risk of dying of heart disease. Moreover, the risk triples if, like many people, you typically get more than 25% of your calories (about 20 teaspoons) from sugar. [10].

Top tips for reducing sugar intake:

Chances are that having totted up your daily intake, you’ve realised that you regularly eat more than six teaspoons of added sugar a day. (Average consumption in the UK is 23 teaspoons; in the US 17-24 teaspoons, and is forecast to rise exponentially in the rest of the world as the price of sugar continues to fall).

Just as you want to avoid weight piling up inexorably over the years, so you want to prevent insulin resistance from building up silently. As we have seen insulin resistance is leading to a cascade of chronic health issues in increasingly younger populations.

If you do decide that the time has come to cut down, it may help to keep a food diary for a week or so and then settle on a date to start implementing some of these easy fixes:-

Stop drinking your calories in tea, coffee, soda, fruit juices, shakes and smoothies.
Read labels. Better still, eat mostly food without labels
Eat fruit topped with yoghurt, coconut and/or cacao instead of sweet treats
Experiment cooking with sweet vegetables like beetroot, pumpkin and sweet potato
Try healthier sugar substitutes, (our favourite, nutritious dates or date paste) when making desserts or baking
Bank your sugar allowance for special occasions and an occasional decadent indulgence.