Those sodas, cookies and candy bars add up to more than a big waist—they may also be harming your face, your liver and your heart.
Sugar was once known as white gold, but lately the reputation of this formerly precious ingredient has become tarnished. Health experts have long complained that the sweet stuff makes Americans fat; now some charge that it also contributes to such problems as heart attacks, liver disease—even our sagging jawlines.How harmful is sugar? Is it as bad as those dietary demons saturated and trans fats that we’ve been told to cull from meals? Or is it merely the villain du jour, the latest in a long line of foods (eggs, for instance) that are indicted only to find redemption?
The Fructose Factor
The answer is important, because sugar has become an increasingly large part of our diet: From 1991 to the present, the average 40- to 59-year-old American went from downing 220 calories a day in added sugar to a whopping 350.Most of that sugar comes to us via the beverage aisle, says Barry Popkin, PhD, director of the University of North Carolina’s Inter-Disciplinary Obesity Center, in Chapel Hill. “Soft drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks and juices—the amount of sugar Americans get through liquids has truly gone off the charts,” he says. It all began when beverage manufacturers switched from cane sugar to the less expensive high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which allowed them to super-size drinks while keeping prices low, says Richard J. Johnson, MD, chief of renal disease and hypertension at the University of Colorado Denver and author of The Sugar Fix.
HFCS, which is also added to packaged foods, now accounts for half of our daily sugar consumption. Because this syrup is created in labs—a liquid is formed when enzymes convert half the glucose in corn into fructose—some consumer activists accuse this “franken-syrup” of being more damaging than conventional cane sugar. Perhaps in response, some companies recently switched from using HFCS to table sugar in their products, which include Pepsi Natural, Pizza Hut’s The Natural, and Log Cabin “real sugar” pancake syrup.
But experts say that HFCS and cane sugar are chemically similar—and have similar effects on the body. “Both high fructose corn syrup and table sugar are roughly equal parts fructose and glucose,” Johnson says.
