A rigorous new study has found that 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.
The new research may help shed light on a question scientists have long debated: Is sugar itself harming health, or is it the weight gain that comes from consuming sugary drinks and food mainly what contributes to illness over the long term?
In the study, which was financed by the National Institutes of Health, scientists removed foods with added sugar from a group of children’s diets and replaced them with other types of carbohydrates so that the children’s’ weight and overall calorie intake remained about the same.
After 10 days, the children showed dramatic improvement, 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.
Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Benioff Children’s Hospital of the University of California, San Francisco said, “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.”
The study authors paired the subjects with dietitians. “Wherever there was food with added sugar in their diets, we took it out and we replaced it with a no-added-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.
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.”
nytimeshealth.com
October 27, 2015