Sugar - The Sweet Truth
Today we’re going to talk about sugar. This is something that’s very much in the public domain especially with things like Jamie Oliver's sugar tax, within articles in newspapers and within mainstream publications which are talking about the problems of increased sugar risk so today we’re going to look into it and see what the research says.
So today we’re going to cover the following -
The bad sides of sugar
We’re going to ask the question - Does sugar make you fat?
Is sugar toxic?
Is sugar bad for your health?
Sugar 101
There are a few different types of simple carbohydrates. As previously talked about in the Carbohydrates blog. Well if you remember, we have complex carbohydrates which take their time to be broken down and then there are ones which are called simple carbohydrates and these are more simple in nature and they are very quick to digest.
There’s two that I would like you to know about -
There’s glucose and this is something like Lucozade that you’ll find in sports drinks as well as in lots of foods that we eat like pasta, rice, bread and it doesn’t matter if it’s complex or if it’s simple, all carbohydrates will eventually get broken down into their most simple form which for most of them is glucose.
The role of glucose is fuel for the brain and the nervous system and it’s also where we store carbohydrate within the muscles in order to work hard when we’re exercising
The second type of sugar that we want to talk about today is fructose and this is mainly found in fruit. It helps to maintain our sugar levels so it’s processed in the liver where it’s stored and then if our body detects that our blood sugar is low we will release some blood sugar from the liver in order to help keep the blood sugar stable.
Table sugar which is known as sucrose is simply one part of glucose with one part of fructose so already you should be asking yourself this question of, well it’s in fruit and it’s in a lot of the foods that I already eat so is just combining these 2 things potentially very hazardous to me?
You may have heard fructose being bashed in some papers and in some media outlets simply because when we get a concentrated version of it called high fructose corn syrup which is usually in a lot of junk food, then we can potentially see some problems in people but often it comes down to overeating and that’s something that we’re going to talk about in a minute.
Lastly in this part of the blog, I just want to cover the following because there was a recipe which was done by Davina Mccall which was a sugar-free pudding and it still contained up to 90 grams of sugar because sucrose which is our table sugar, well just because it’s table sugar-free, doesn’t mean that it’s free of sugar because you’re still getting sugars from forms of glucose and forms of fructose from many other different ingredients. For example - Davina used lots of dates in this dessert which were dried so this is quite a high concentration of sugar within those dates and to be honest, once they’re broken down your body has no idea if it’s come from snickers, a mars bar, cakes or a fruit so therefore just because it’s table sugar-free doesn’t mean that it’s sugar-free.
What are some of the potential downsides to Sucrose (table sugar)?
Well firstly it’s hyper-palatable and this is very simple meaning that it tastes good and when something tastes very good it means that it’s very easy to overeat it especially when it’s combined with fat so if we think of junk food that we might gravitate towards, for example, foods like ice cream, chocolate, cakes etc. Often this is a combination of high sugar and high-fat foods that are very rewarding to the brain so the brain says give me more of that and it’s a double-edged sword as not only is our brain craving more of it, it has very little impact on terms of how satiating or how filling it is so it kind of overrides or short circuits our body’s ability to tell how much we’ve actually eaten, so we have this food that our body craves because it’s super tasty but also has very little impact on how hungry we are so, therefore, it’s very easy to overeat especially when in liquid form.
Secondly, your appetite is tasted specific so as you’ll of often heard ‘I’ve still got room for a dessert and that’s because we can get full on a certain type of taste but then introduce a new flavour and we’ve still got room for more so for example, if you’ve been out and you’ve had steak and chips, you might be stuffed full but then the dessert menu gets put in front of you and well because it’s a different taste, maybe it’s sweet or salty, well then your body will actually still have an appetite to consume more calories over a different variety. We can see this again when we go back to eating that bowl of rice as well this is the same again, as we said about if we had a complete bowl of plain white rice which is quite bland, well before long you’ll get quite full before you want to stop eating however if we introduce something that’s a bit sugary like sweet chilli sauce which is also a slightly different sensory-specific taste, then all of a sudden you’d be able to eat more because you have changed the taste that is specific to the appetite.
Most of us that are not diligent about our diet may actually do well with eating a little bit less sugar because it means fewer calories.
We live in an alien environment for our biology so we as human evolved as hunters and gatherers in a world where calories/food was hard to come by so if you found a large bee’s nest for example and there was lots of honey in it or if you found a carcass and you could consume lots of meat and fat, you would get as much in you as possible because that could be the difference between surviving a winter or not, however, now we have got the same biology in a world that is calorie abundant as we live in a world where we can go to the corner shop or to a supermarket and for very little money we can buy large amounts of calories and so for a lot of us there’s a good chance that we just tend to overeat on hyper-palatable foods and we end up eating more than we actually should. For a lot of us, just being diligent and cutting out some of this added table sugar may just mean fewer calories.
So does sucrose (table sugar) make people fat?
If this is inherently fattening then we should be able to put 2 people or 2 groups of people on exactly the same calories so remember this is our second tier on our pyramid so calories in calories out. If we put them on the same calories but 1 is on higher sugar intake well then if sugar is inherently fattening then the higher sugar group should gain weight right?
The studies show the following -
Study 1 - This study was done by West and De Looy in 2001. The study took two groups of dieters and they put them on the same 600 calories per day deficit, let’s say that they were maintaining weight on 2,600 calories and all of these participants was now eating 2,000 calories so they’re in a deficit by 600 calories per day and it will differ slightly depending on their size and how many calories they need but 600 calories a day deficit.
Group 1 was on the low sugar diet which was 5% of their calories so let’s say these people we’re on 2.000 calories a day, 5% of that would be 100 calories per day coming from sugar.
Group 2 - They doubled the amount of sugar that they had compared to group 1 as group 2 had 10% of their calories from sugar so in this instance it would have been 200 calories per day coming from sugar.
As said before if sugar is inherently fattening and even though they're eating the same amount of calories, one group should lose more weight than the other right?
Well, it concluded that there was no difference in weight loss so both groups lost the same and I know that you could look at the showings here -
which say that the lower group lost 2.2 pounds of fat and the higher sugar group lost 3 pounds of fat so actually according to these results that actually weren’t significant, the higher sugar group actually lost slightly more weight than the other group but realistically in what we call significant they both lost the same amount of weight but we can’t just look at one study so before we move on to the next I will just get to the conclusion for this one which is the following -
“These results provide no justification for the exclusion of added sucrose in weight- reducing diet” so as long as you’re in a weight-reducing diet (calorie deficit) you don’t need to remove sugar.
We’re going to look at another study now which is by Surwit Et Al in 1997. This study is slightly more compelling so that’s why I’ve put it second.
They put 20 overweight women on a 6 week diet and they all had the same protein, carbohydrates and fats so they all had the same calories.
Group 1 - 43% of their calories came from sugar so they had on average 120 grams of added table sugar per day to their diets, that’s 480 calories.
Group 2 - They had only 4% of calories so this time we’re not just looking at 5% or 10%, we’re looking at a really big disparity. There was 11 times more sugar in group 1 as opposed to group 2.
So what were the results?
The results were that both diet groups showed equally significant reductions in weight and percentage body fat so they both lost nearly 7 pounds over the course of the 6 weeks. There was also no difference despite one group eating 10 grams of added sugar and the other group eating 120 grams of added sugar a day so when calories we’re matched there was literally no difference in weight loss.
The authors concluded the following - “We therefore conclude that the use of sucrose (sugar) in a weight-loss regime is unlikely to cause problems for the average patient, as long as total energy intake is restricted (a deficit) “.
This basically means that as long as you’re in a calorie deficit you can enjoy some sugar as part of your diet.
Is sugar toxic?
Sugar doesn’t appear to be inherently fattening but is it toxic?
For sugar to kill an 180 lb man you would need to be able to consume thoroughly 6 lbs of table sugar so nearly half a stone of table sugar, now if we compare that to something like salt we’d need to eat as little as half a lb of salt which would be enough to kill a man and just as a little side note here as well, if you are exercising regularly then you don’t need to worry about your salt intake.
The devil is in the dose so for people to say that sugar is toxic, well realistically I don’t know of anybody who's going to be able to sit down and eat 6 lbs of pure table sugar.
This also goes back to that point about Davina’s dessert that I mentioned before, that fruit sugar, table sugar, aloe vera, agave nectar or whatever they’re trying to market it as, it’s still sugar. It will still get broken down into glucose, fructose etc into your bloodstream. Whilst one might come with slightly more micronutrients (vitamins) for example fruit, they will still be treated in the same way within the body however we know that just table sugar or very sweet foods etc it may cause us to overeat but from a biological basis sugar is sugar so don’t get sucked into the idea that it’s sugar free just because it doesn’t have any added table sugar in it.
Is sugar bad for health?
We’re going to look at a meta-analysis and meta-analysis for those of you who might not know, it is where we take a lot of studies and put them together which gives us a stronger overarching view so we can zoom out and get the bigger picture.
The authors concluded that the potential for overconsumption of sugars in the form of sugary foods and drinks makes targeting sugars, as a source of excess calories, a prudent strategy. Let’s break that down a bit here.. So for a lot of people there’s a chance that they over consume sugars and if they do then reducing your sugars because it allows you to reduce your calories could be a great strategy. However, sugar content should not be the sole determinant of a healthy diet. There are many other factors within the diet - some providing excess calories while others provide beneficial nutrients. Rather than just focus on one energy source, we should consider the whole diet for health benefits. As always it’s not just one factor, one source of food, one macronutrient that is going to cause us to be overweight. Often times it’s targeting excess calories so if you are overconsuming sugars then it might be a very good reason to cut some down, however if you’re not then they can still be included as part of your diet.
The second meta -analysis that we looked at here where they’d actually looked into lots of the different determinants of sugar intake on health so they looked at the link between sugar and the following -
Energy-regulating hormones
Obesity
Cardiovascular disease
Diabetes
Accumulation of liver fat
Neurological responses
It was concluded that the data from all of these sources do not support linkages between sugar consumption at normal levels within the human diet and various adverse metabolic and health-related effects.
It is far more unhealthy to be overweight than it is to maintain your weight by eating in your calorie budget and including some sugar.
The takehomes from sugar
Sugar is neither bad or good however I wouldn’t give sugar a free ride here either because beyond providing calories and tasting good it has little nutritional value
High sugar items taste good but they are relatively poor at making us feel full meaning that it’s easy to overeat them and if they do cause you to overeat then you will gain fat
Sugar can be consumed but within moderation but for some of us we can’t do moderation as we have certain trigger foods and if you do have them in your home that cause you to overeat then I’d say to remove them so for example, are you the type of person that can’t have a small piece of cake and you have to have half of the cake or you can’t just have a biscuit as you have to have half of the pack of biscuits or you can’t have a small bowl of ice cream so you have to have the whole tub instead because if that’s the case then you would need to remove any chance of giving into those impulses as willpower is a limited resource so take that decision out of your hands and do not have those trigger foods within your house
Many of us would do well with replacing some of the sugar in our diet for more filling and satisfying food options so if you are consuming lots of sugary drinks or if you are consuming lots of processed foods then maybe replacing some of that for more fruits, vegetables, proteins, whole grains etc, this may actually be more beneficial for you
When it’s consumed within your calories budget sugar can be enjoyed as part of your diet