This article will barbecue an important sacred cow: sugar. If you have the mindset of “I believe sugar is the devil, evidence be damned, and nothing you can say/no research you can show me will change my mind”, do yourself a favor – close this page now.
However, if you believe sugar is bad for you, but are open-minded enough to dive into the nuances of when it’s really bad for you and when it isn’t, this is the article for you. I realize that after decades of indoctrination that “sugar is the devil”, it may be hard to see the truth. However, for this article, I brought my evidence – scientific evidence.
Myth #1: Sugar is inflammatory
Actually, it’s not. Too much sugar is inflammatory. And it’s not because of the sugar – it’s because of the calories. Excess calories are inflammatory, regardless of where the calories come from. If you are getting too many calories from dietary fat, then dietary fat is inflammatory.
In my inflammation booki show how a meta-analysis evaluated 13 studies. The studies compared 4 different sugars with each other: fructose, glucose, sucrose (this is table sugar) and “the devil” – high fructose corn syrup. When dieting made people fat, sugar increased inflammation. When the diet didn’t make people fat, none of the sugars increased inflammation (even though the sugar doses were often 50-100 grams/day, which is pretty high). This is true for all inflammatory markers studied: hsCRP, IL-6 and TNF-α.
So is it really the sugar that causes inflammation or just the excess calories? Well, if you’re eating 50-100 grams of sugar a day within your calorie limit, it’s not inflammatory. If you eat the same amount of sugar, but it’s over your calorie limit, it’s inflammatory. So it’s not really the sugar that causes inflammation. Of excess calories that are inflammatory;.
Yes, sugar is delicious and often makes us eat beyond hunger – in this case, it will increase inflammation. But there are also those people who can just have a small piece of chocolate and be done. Calling sugar inflammatory is not accurate.
Another meta-analysis looked at sugar from different sources.
- The sodas didn’t increase any inflammatory markers, as long as people didn’t gain weight.
- 100% fruit juices lowered hsCRP by an average of 1.09 as long as people did not gain weight.
- Dark chocolate actually reduced IL-6 by 8.79 pg/mL.
Another instance where sugar is indeed inflammatory is in diabetics. In a studydiabetics and non-diabetics were fed the same amount of sugar. In diabetics, sugar was inflammatory. In non-diabetics, it was not. Speaking of diabetics, this brings me to another sugar myth…
Myth #2: Sugar causes diabetes
On the surface, you’d think so eating sugar raises your blood sugar to the point of developing diabetes. Totally reasonable, but not right.
As I explain in my diabetes bookin a healthy person, when you eat sugar, your pancreas releases insulin and lowers blood sugar to normal levels. No problem.
Also, when the sugar you consume is within your caloric limits, it’s not that big of a problem. This is not just my opinion. A study concluded that “excess sugar can promote weight gain, thus type 2 diabetes [my note: T2DM stands for “type 2 diabetes mellitus”]through extra calories, but it has no unique diabetogenic effect at physiological levels.”
In another studythe researchers divided the participants into 2 groups:
- Group 1: given sugar.
- Group 2: given an equivalent amount of calories as group 1, but in bread.
During and after that meal, there was no difference in blood sugar levels between the 2 groups.
And there are many other studies like this that basically show that Dietary sugar has no special diabetes-causing chemistry. Sugar is only responsible for diabetes in its ability to add excess calories to the diet.
I can hear some readers thinking “but wait – what about all the studies that say sugar is linked to diabetes?” Sure, sugar is associated with diabetes, but that doesn’t mean it causes diabetes. Sunscreen sales are correlated with drowning, but that doesn’t mean sunscreen causes drowning. It’s very simple – the warmer the temperature, the more people buy sunscreen. And the warmer the temperature, the more people go swimming. Same with sugar – higher sugar is associated with diabetes. And higher calories are associated with diabetes. But that doesn’t mean that sugar alone causes diabetes. Remember – correlation is not causation.
Don’t get me wrong – sugar isn’t exactly good for diabetics (or non-diabetics for that matter). But blaming it on diabetes is not accurate.
Myth #3: Sugar increases body fat
Inaccurate. I know, I know – so far, I’ve banished sugar from inflammation and diabetes, but we need to find something it’s bad for. Let’s go with body fat. Too bad the scientific evidence doesn’t support it.
In a studythe researchers divided the participants into 2 groups: one group followed a low-sugar diet (10% of daily calories) and one group followed a high-sugar diet (25% of daily calories). But both groups had the same number of calories. It’s just that the composition of those calories was different. After 6 weeks on this diet, there was no change in weight between the high sugar group and the low sugar group.
Another study found the same thing: that as long as calories were the same, there was no difference in weight between people who ate a lot of sugar or little sugar.
So it’s not really the sugar that causes fat gain. It’s too many calories. If those extra calories come from sugar, it will cause fat gain. If you have a lot of sugar, but it’s within your caloric limits, it won’t cause fat gain.
When is sugar bad?
So far, we have shown when sugar is neutral. He is not the devil he is made out to be. But it’s not exactly a health food.
One case that is actually a bit bad is in people who have pre-existing high cholesterol;. As I talk about in my book on cholesterol, at a meta-analysiswhen sugary drinks were removed from the diet of people with dyslipidemia, their triglycerides decreased by 10-20%, LDL-C decreased by 5-10%, and HDL-C increased by 5-10%.
So, yes, cutting out sugar does have a small positive impact on cholesterol profiles – just not enough to call it a nutritional hero. However, if someone is eating sugar and wants to keep eating sugar, there are 4 other nutritional strategies I talk about my cholesterol book which can improve cholesterol profiles without removing sugar. The benefits of eating “good stuff” outweigh the downsides of eating “bad stuff.”
Why is sugar to blame?
So if the scientific evidence shows that sugar is mostly neutral and only slightly harmful in a few cases, why are its negative effects so out of proportion? A bunch of reasons:
- Many studies are done in mice or rats. But a very basic principle of science is that you can only generalize based on the population studied. You can generalize from mice to other mice. But you can’t generalize from mice to humans.
- Many studies associate sugar with bad health consequences. But you are a reader of my newsletter – you are smarter than the average person. You know this correlation is not causation. You cannot draw cause-and-effect conclusions based on observational research. To infer cause and effect, you need to do interventional research (randomized controlled trials). And the randomized controlled trials I showed you in this article show that sugar is somewhere between neutral and slightly harmful.
- It’s trendy to blame sugar. Very few people read the research. They rely on others. It’s a long chain of broken phone. This results in a scenario where the blind lead the blind.
- Sugar tastes good. If it tastes good, it can’t be good for you. Yes, sometimes, thinking is that simple.
Sugar in the frame
Now we know that sugar is not the devil. Most of the time, it is neutral – neither harmful nor beneficial. In a few cases, it’s mildly harmful, and you can easily overcome these mild impairments with a few simple nutritional strategies (the simplest is to simply combine a sugary snack/meal with fiber).
Nutritionally, there are no benefits to sugar and there is no nutritional requirement for it. So no, you’re not doing anything wrong by cutting it. But if you choose to include it, just know that it won’t kill you, give you diabetes, and raise your car insurance rates.
