Download Cutting Sugar Improves Children`s Health in Just 10 Days

Cutting Sugar Improves Children’s Health in Just 10 Days
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 27, 2015
Obese children who cut back on their sugar intake see improvements in their blood pressure,
cholesterol readings and other markers of health after just 10 days, a rigorous new study found.
The new research may help shed light on a question
scientists have long debated: Is sugar itself harming health,
or is the weight gain that comes from consuming sugary
drinks and foods mainly what contributes to illness over the
long term?
In the new study, which was financed by the National
Institutes of Health and published Tuesday in the journal
Obesity, scientists designed a clinical experiment to attempt
to answer this question. They removed foods with added
sugar from a group of children’s diets and replaced them
with other types of carbohydrates so that the subjects’
weight and overall calorie intake remained roughly the
same.
After 10 days, the children showed dramatic improvements, despite losing little or no weight. The
findings add to the argument that all calories are not created equal, and they suggest that those from
sugar are especially likely to contribute to Type 2 diabetes and other metabolic diseases, which are on
the rise in children, said the study’s lead author, Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the
Benioff Children’s Hospital of the University of California, San Francisco.
“This paper says we can turn a child’s metabolic health around in 10 days without changing calories and
without changing weight – just by taking the added sugars out of their diet,” he said. “From a clinical
standpoint, from a health care standpoint, that’s very important.”
Added sugars — the extra sweeteners food companies put in their products, not the sugar that occurs
naturally in foods like fruit – are a topic of growing debate. In February, the federal government’s
Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recommended that Americans limit their intake of added
sugars to no more than 10 percent of daily calories.
In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration proposed that food companies include a line on their
nutrition labels listing the amount of added sugars in their products. After the dietary guidelines
committee issued its report earlier this year, the agency expanded on its 2014 proposal, saying that
companies should also list a “daily percent value” for added sugars on their labels in line with the 10
percent recommendation.
The proposed changes have been strongly opposed by the food industry as unscientific. The Sugar
Association, a trade group, said the F.D.A. was “making assertions that lack adequate scientific
evidence,” and the Grocery Manufacturers Association criticized the standards the agency used to
establish the daily value as being “inadequate.”
The newly released study is timely in part because it lowered sugar intake among children to roughly 10
percent of daily calories, the amount recommended by the dietary guidelines committee. For their
study, the scientists recruited 43 children between the ages of 9 and 18 who were considered at
particularly high risk of diabetes and related disorders. All the subjects were black or Hispanic and
obese, and had at least one or more symptoms of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors that
includes hypertension, high blood sugar, abnormal cholesterol and excess body fat around the waist.
On average, the subjects had been getting about 27 percent of their daily calories from sugar. By
comparison, the average American takes in about 15 percent, though children typically consume much
more than this in part because they have the highest intake of sugar-sweetened beverages. The study
authors paired the subjects with dietitians. They then replaced the sugary foods in their diets with other
foods purchased from local grocery stores. The goal was not to eliminate carbohydrates, but to reduce
sugary foods and replace them with starchy foods without lowering body weight or calorie intake.
“Wherever there was food with added sugar in their diets, we took it out and we replaced it with a noadded-sugar version,” Dr. Lustig said.
So instead of yogurt sweetened with sugar, the children ate bagels. Instead of pastries, they were given
baked potato chips. Instead of chicken teriyaki – which typically contains a lot of sugar – they ate turkey
hot dogs or burgers for lunch. The remaining sugar in their diet came mostly from fresh fruit. Because
the scientists were working on a tight N.I.H. budget, they could only carry out the costly intervention for
nine days. But in that short space of time, they saw marked changes.
On average, the subjects’ LDL cholesterol, the kind implicated in heart disease, fell by 10 points. Their
diastolic blood pressure fell five points. Their triglycerides, a type of fat that travels in the blood and
contributes to heart disease, dropped 33 points. And their fasting blood sugar and insulin levels –
indicators of their diabetes risk – likewise markedly improved. One expert who was not involved in the
new research, Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that the study
“strengthens the existing evidence on the relationship between added sugar intake and metabolic
disease.”
“This kind of study is very difficult to do,” he said. “But it provides a proof of concept that in a high risk
population, reducing consumption of added sugar can have multiple metabolic benefits.” Dr. Sonia
Caprio, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics at Yale Medical School, said that although
the study was small, “it addressed the issue in an original way and tried to isolate the effect of sugar on
metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance.”
“This is an important area of research that might solve some of the metabolic issues that we are facing
in children, particularly in adolescents,” she said. “This study needs to be taken seriously, and we need
to expand on it.”
Source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/cutting-sugar-improves-childrens-health-in-just-10-days/