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.

Here, charge by charge, is the case against all the different kinds of sugar. And the verdict isn’t always “guilty.”


CHARGE | Sugar gives you wrinkles 
EVIDENCE A few studies have found that excess fructose, consumed over a long time, attaches to collagen and other skin proteins and modifies their structure. The resulting advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, may weaken the proteins, causing sags and wrinkles. “Think of healthy collagen as a rubber band. The sugars can tie it all up in knots,” explains Daniel Maes, PhD, senior vice president, research and development worldwide at the Estée Lauder Companies. Sugars may also deactivate anti-oxidant-protecting enzymes in the skin, making you more prone to sun damage, he says. The effects of AGEs start to show at about 35, according to a study in the British Journal of Dermatology that examined skin under a microscope. “Before then, your skin is better able to make new collagen to compensate; once aging slows the collagen-producing process, any damage would be more apparent,” says Fredric Brandt, MD, a dermatologist in New York and Miami, and author of Ten Minutes/Ten Years.