Sugar made headlines a few weeks ago as it was a key point of discussion in a New York Times article regarding the Sugar industry’s involvement in setting nutritional policy for our country. As you may or may not have read, in 1967 the sugar industry essentially hired a group of Harvard nutrition professors to write a review regarding the safety of sugar.
At the time, sugar had been implicated as a leading cause of heart disease, but executives of the sugar industry weren’t thrilled by the idea of their secret being found out, so in order to keep public opinion at bay, they decided to fund their own research. To recognize what went wrong in this research process, you need to understand how research is compiled into reviews that are used to make public health policy. Hang with me, the next paragraph is dense, but really important to understanding part of the reason we’re in the health crisis we have right now.
Sugar industry executives gave the
researchers hand-picked articles that
favored fats as the cause of heart disease
Traditionally when a group of researchers write a review of a certain topic, they will wade through the myriad of articles on a subject and select the best clinical trials that have the most direct evidence. Well, instead of letting the professors independently select the articles they would review, the sugar industry executives decided that they would help in the process and give the Harvard professors hand-picked articles to use in their review that favored fats as the cause of heart disease. This skewed the data and caused sugar to come out with a clean bill. The fact this group of Harvard professors were being paid and given grants toward their future research as payment to write this review leads to further suspicion of the outcome.
And what was their conclusion? Sugar is safe to eat and heart disease is caused by cholesterol. They suggested that instead of curbing our appetite for sugar, that we should instead cut down our fat intake. This review that implicated fats as our source of heart problems not only let sugar off the hook, but also shaped the research conducted on heart disease for the next 50 years.
Americans who get 17-21% of calories
from added sugar had a 38% higher
risk of dying from cardiovascular disease
Only recently has the obesity epidemic caused researchers to look for other culprits causing heart issues. Within the past 2 years, the Journal of American Medical Association Internal Medicine released a report that stated those who got 17 to 21 percent of calories from added sugar had a 38 percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared to those who consumed 8 percent of their calories from added sugar.
That’s pretty significant considering that as of 2010 the average American got 14% of their calories from added sugars according to a recent study released by the British Medical Journal. The recommended amount of added sugars we consume should consist of 10% of our daily calories. The 4% difference between what we actually eat and the suggested levels equates to a difference of 85 calories or just over 5 teaspoons of sugar more than we should be eating.
Although this might not sound like a lot, if you eat 5 extra teaspoons of sugar every day for a year, which is what most Americans do, it equates to 24 pounds of extra sugar consumed annually.
The average American eats
24 pounds more sugar
annually than is suggested.
And as you might guess, this excess consumption leads to obesity, diabetes and heart disease. So unfortunately the choices of a few professors from Harvard being swayed by sugar industry executives and shaping the public opinions and health directives of our country has lead us to this inconvenient situation we are currently in.
Luckily, you now have information that makes you empowered to change public opinion. Better yet, you can use this information to change how you eat today. You can decide to go to the grocery store or farmers market and get yourself some delicious fruit instead of picking up a soda or a pastry. Not only will fruit fill you up more because it has more fiber than foods that commonly have processed sugar, but it’s also packed with vitamins and minerals that you’re not getting from your soda.
You get to choose, but as for me, I’d like to not die early of cardiovascular disease. Now that I’ve shared sugar’s dirty secret, feel free to share it with others, or stay posted for more healthful hints for your everyday life.
Until then, stay well-informed and eat well!
Dr. Joel Dayton DC