For years, science has highlighted the usefulness – in terms of health – of a healthy diet. On the other hand, sugar should never be totally eliminated, if anything reduced. And by halving the doses, you can get several health benefits. These improvements seem to be much more evident in the case in which several diseases are present. Sugar, especially the extremely refined one, has been repeatedly accused of causing various damage to our body: from cancer to cardiovascular diseases. Here are 3 diseases that could benefit from a reduction in sugar. Cardiovascular disease and sugar
Recent research has shown that cardiovascular diseases are more related to the consumption of sugar rather than fat. Dr. Nancy Appleton, author of the book Lick the Sugar Habit, has compiled a list of 77 harm that sugar can cause to health. One of these was highlighted thanks to a research conducted by the Research Fellow in collaboration with the Otago Department of Human Nutrition. According to scholars, sugar has a direct effect on risk factors for all heart disease, and a major impact on blood pressure and blood vessels. It seems that the damage of sugar on the cardiovascular system was known since the 70s but hidden until a few months ago, era when Dr. Cristin Kearns and her colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco published a revealing paper on PLoSBiology. This contained an analysis of documents found in the archives of the Sugar Research Foundation. “The sugar industry – explains Kearns – spent a significant amount of money to investigate the effects of sugar on health, but was only interested in publishing the results that exempted sugar.” The study that was the subject of the scandal was called Project 259 and commissioned by the Sugar Research Foundation. It was conducted by the University of Birmingham which, thanks to the modest sum of 190 thousand dollars, should have highlighted the role of this ingredient on the intestinal microbiota. The researchers would then have (theoretically) to deny the negative effect exerted on the organism. However, PLoS Biology states that “the preliminary results of Project 259, if confirmed by the completion of the research and published, would have supported the thesis of a ‘triglyceride increase’ effect of sugar”. In reality, no one knows why this massive study was never made public.Non-alcoholic steatosis , sugar and sweeteners
Many call it fatty liver, and it’s a fairly common condition among people. Contrary to popular belief, however, it is not always caused by an excess of alcohol or fat, but also by other incorrect eating habits. One of these is the intake of foods that are sugar-based or, even worse, that contain fructose. This particular ingredient greatly promotes the accumulation of lipids in the body. More than the fats themselves can do. Recent research conducted by scientists from the Bambino Gesu Hospital in Rome has highlighted how consuming foods rich in fructose can damage children’s livers just like alcohol does. It is important to underline that fructose and the like (for example corn syrup or glucose) are present in the vast majority of industrial foods. Including organic ones. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Hepatology.Autoimmune diseases , sweeteners and sugars
According to Dr. Roberto Ceriani, head of the Hepatological Day Hospital and Interventional Hepatology at the Humanitas hospital, “the consumption of table sugar (sucrose) has increased dramatically in recent decades and is closely linked to the increase in obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and also non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Fructose is a component of added sugars and is distinguished from other sugars by its ability to cause intracellular ATP depletion, nucleotide turnover, and uric acid generation. These aspects of fructose metabolism explain why its intake increases the risk of metabolic syndrome ». But not only: Recent studies have highlighted how a high consumption of sugars damages the intestinal microbiota allowing the emergence of serious diseases such as autoimmune ones. To reveal the association with the disease was an Italian study published in Nature Immunology, which showed that alterations in sugar metabolism are associated with dysfunctions of the immune response: characteristics, for example, of multiple sclerosis and juvenile diabetes.
