New Study Highlights Harmful Effects of Sugar for Children

New Study Highlights Harmful Effects of Sugar for Children

According to the following Washington Post article by Ariana Cha published on 10/28/15, cutting sugar from kids’ diets appears to have a beneficial effect in just 10 days. 


American kids consume an insane amount of sugar — often double or triple the federal recommended dietary guidelines — and these empty calories are often blamed for everything from obesity to hyperactivity in the schools. What happens when we take it away?




The transformation in the kids was almost immediate.

“All of the surrogate measures of metabolic health got better, just by substituting starch for sugar in their processed food — all without changing calories or weight or exercise,” study author Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, said in a statement.

After 10 days, the researchers saw a reduction in diastolic blood pressure, triglycerides and LDL, or “bad” cholesterol. Glucose tolerance and the amount of excess insulin circulating in the blood improved.



The average participant’s blood pressure went down by 5 mmHg. The researchers noted that this would “normally trigger a compensatory increase in [heart rate to maintain cardiac output], but it did not.” They also found that uric acid, which is created with the breakdown of certain foods like anchovies, increased unexpectedly, and they weren’t able to explain why this happened.



The study “demonstrates that a calorie is not a calorie,” Lustig explained.

“Where those calories come from determines where in the body they go. Sugar calories are the worst, because they turn to fat in the liver, driving insulin resistance, and driving risk for diabetes, heart and liver disease,” he added. “This has enormous implications for the food industry, chronic disease and health care costs.”


Calling the study “flawed,” the Sugar Industry Association said that the fact that so many of the participants lost weight during the study “makes it impossible to separate the effects of weight loss from dietary changes on the health variables measured.” The group, which represents major sugar companies, such as Domino Sugar and C&H Sugar, also questioned the study’s short duration and the fact that the baseline diet data was self-reported which can make it unreliable.

In addition, the industry group said the lack of information that the authors provided about what the children actually ate “raises serious concerns about the legitimacy of the study’s hypothesis.”