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The more and more evidence we find, the more we have to wonder: how did we ever eat sugar in the first place?
Scientists have now discovered that cutting sugar from your diet can make a visible difference in your health in just ten days.
Just a few decades ago, we were all replacing fat with sugar, seeing it as a healthier option. But almost instantly, diabetes and obesity ran rampant.
But it’s been difficult to prove that sugar has been the sole cause. This study doesn’t prove it, but it certainly strengthens the argument.
The study was done on 43 overweight Hispanic and African-American children between the ages of 8 and 18, and there were several elements to it that made it different from all other previous studies about a sugary diet.
The study only changed one thing about these children’s diets—their sugar intake. Everything else, from amount of calories to content of all the other food they ate, remained the same. They just replaced their sugar calories with starch calories.
If the children lost weight on their specialized, no-sugar diet, thy were told to eat more of the food given to them to stay at a consistent weight.
The results? Every child in the study saw improvement. Some children already had insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes, and their resistance went down.
Dr. Robert Lustig, of the University of California, San Francisco, is the lead author of the study. He told Time that the changes to their diets were not even necessarily better foods.
“We took chicken teriyaki out, and put turkey hot dogs in. We took sweetened yogurt out, and put baked potato chips in. we took pastries out and put bagels in. So there was no change in weight and no change in calories.”
And yet, after only nine days of a 10% sugar diet, their blood sugar levels dropped by 53%, and their triglyceride and LDL levels declined. They also showed less fat in their livers.
But this isn’t to say that there aren’t other problems in a Western diet. Dr. Mark Corkins, professor of pediatrics at University of Tennessee Health Science Center, said, “Too much calorie intake is still the biggest problem. It’s an important study, and the facts coming out of it are very important…but I worry that people are going to hang everything on this when we still need to reduce consumption.”
