By Lucine Avanesian
A sugar spoonful could make the medication go down. But, along with your chance of liver damage, obesity, heart disease and diabetes, it also helps blood pressure and cholesterol go up.
In reality, sugar and other sweeteners are so harmful to the human body that they should be controlled by governments around the world as strictly as alcohol, according to a commentary by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco in the current issue of the journal Nature (UCSF).
The researchers recommend policies such as regulating all goods and beverages with added sugar, restricting sales in or around schools, and imposing age restrictions on purchases.
Although the commentary can sound straight from the Journal of Ideas That Will Never Fly, the researchers quote various studies and statistics to argue that added sugar or, more precisely, sucrose, an even mix of glucose and fructose contained in high-fructose corn syrup and table sugar made from sugar cane and sugar beets, has been as detrimental to humanity as alcohol and tobacco.
According to the International Health Organisation, the obese currently outnumber the undernourished substantially globally. Obesity, in most nations, is a public health concern. And, according to the United Nations, chronic diet-related illnesses such as heart disease, asthma and certain cancers harm more persons than infectious diseases for the first time in human history.
The role of sugar in the pandemic of obesity and chronic diseases is little understood, and still debated. Sugar in the form of fruit was possible just a few months of the year, at harvest time, the UCSF researchers said, from an evolutionary perception. Likewise, honey was protected by bees and was thus a treat, not a culinary staple.
Still, in contrast to the normal sugars present in fruit, artificial sugar is frequently added to foods ranging from soup to soda. On average, Americans eat more than 600 calories of added sugar a day, equal to a whopping 40 teaspoons. The researchers write, "Nature made sugar hard to get; man made it easy,"
Sugar is seen by many scholars not only as "empty calories," but also as a compound that becomes harmful in abundance. The fact that glucose from complex carbohydrates, such as whole grains, is metabolised securely by cells in the body is at issue, but the sugar fructose factor is metabolised mainly by the liver.
The issue of taxing the liver, causing fatty liver disease, and eventually contributing to insulin resistance, the root causes of obesity and diabetes, will start here.
More so than the fructose in fiber-rich fruit, added sugar reaches the liver more specifically and can cause more harm in laboratory rats, anyway. However, some scholars have remained unconvinced of the facts of the harmful impact of sugar on the human body at existing levels of intake, as high as they are.
Some experts argue that the underlying cause of obesity and chronic illnesses is saturated fat, not sugar. Others argue that foods containing basic carbohydrates are highly processed. Others also assert that it is a lack of physical fitness. It might be a matter of all these problems, of course.
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