Deadly Sugar

Moneylife Digital Team 21 November 2017

Life

Is there any nutritional benefit from having sugar? Most studies have conclusively established that there is no benefit. And, yet, wherever you look, there is sugar. There is sugar not only sweets but also in most bakery products, breakfast cereals, salad dressings and, of course, in almost all the bottled beverages. Sugar consumption contributes to weight gain, increased risk of type-II diabetes, heart disease and even prevents healing of chronic conditions. Of course, the sugar lobby is so strong that it would want you to ignore all these risks. For many years, it got away with murder. The blame for rising lifestyle diseases and chronic diseases fell on fats and then carbohydrates.

Way back in 1972, John Yudkin, a British professor of nutrition, had written a book called Pure, White, and Deadly in which he said: “If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.” But sugar remained pure, white and deadly, while Yudkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists who believed in the prevailing orthodoxy of fat being the villain, collaborated with the food industry to destroy his reputation. Yudkin died in 1995, a forgotten man.

Over the past 20 years, though, dietary sugar has come under increasing scrutiny and has slowly been identified for what it is; experts are increasingly recommending less sugar. For instance, the 2015-20 dietary guidelines for Americans included a limit on added sugar to less than 10% of total daily calories. The same limit was also previously recommended by the World Health Organization in 2015. The American Heart Association has recommended that children and teens consume less than 25 grams, or six teaspoons, of added sugar per day. Some countries have imposed taxes on sugary drinks.

But apologists for sugar are not giving up. In February this year, in a review published by the Annals of Internal Medicine (AIM), Jennifer Erickson, Behnam Sadeghirad, Lyubov Lytvyn, Joanne Slavin and Bradley C Johnston say that the advice against sugar is “based on low-quality evidence.” The authors also conclude, “There seems to be no reliable evidence indicating that any of the recommended daily caloric thresholds for sugar intake are strongly associated with negative health effects.” It would not be a surprise to know that many such research studies are funded by the sugar lobby. By the way, an average American consumes 22 teaspoons of added sugar per day.

Are Statins Overrated?

Statins are a group of drugs that lowers the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in the blood. LDL cholesterol is, often, referred to as ‘bad cholesterol’. It appears that statins can cause muscle damage and do not extend the lives of low-risk patients, according to a new study, originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr John Abramson, a specialist in healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, has reviewed the study and found that 217 patients would need to take the drug to prevent just one non-fatal heart attack, while 313 people would need treatment with statins to prevent just one non-fatal stroke. Meanwhile, at least one in 21 statin users suffers muscle damage and one in 204 develops diabetes. The study reviewed the results of 22 leading trials of statins, all but one of which were sponsored by drug companies.

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