Today's article begins with a secret conversation that has been sealed for 50 years:
We are well aware of your particular interest, and will cover this as well as we can.
(We take your opinion very seriously, and we will try to "fix" this matter as much as possible.) ）
Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind, and we look forward to its appearance in print.
(I'm pretty sure that's what we want, and look forward to getting it published and printed as soon as possible.) ）
The first sentence came from Dr. Hegsted, a prominent nutrition professor at Harvard University at the time, and the second from John Hickson, an executive at a sugar company.
Apparently, the Harvard professor wrote a "soft paper" that sugar executives wanted.
The advertorial was published in neJM (New England Journal of Medicine), a top medical journal, so much so that dietary advice for cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment was "biased" for decades.
The scandal was not disclosed until 2016 by the Journal of Internal Medicine of the American Medical Association, but the potential health harm caused is immeasurable.
How did all this happen? What are the health hazards of sugar?
Whitewashing the "Sugar Crisis" with Money
Image source: Stand Cool Helo
Let's go back 50 years, to the United States at the beginning of the article.
It can be said that the United States is the "most unhealthy diet" in all developed countries, and high sugar, high fat, and high calories are the dietary characteristics of Americans, which also leads to a high incidence of obesity, coronary heart disease, and diabetes in the United States.
In order to maintain the market sales of the huge sugar industry empire, since the 1960s, the sugar industry associations organized by major sugar giants have used their "money" influence to continuously infiltrate nutrition experts.
The most direct and effective way is to get top nutrition experts to publish the idea that "sugar is harmless" in top magazines. So they found several professors at Harvard Medical School, and the new England Journal of Medicine, the best in the field of medicine.
At that time, each professor received a commercial bribe equivalent to the current $50,000, so they cheered for the sugar industry for decades to come.
One such scientist was none other than Dr. Mark Hegsted, who became head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's nutrition division and helped draft the federal government's first dietary guidelines in 1977; and Fredrick J. Stare, dean of harvard's School of Nutrition.
In the decades that followed, neither academic articles nor official dietary guidelines pointed out the dangers of sugar.
Until the 2007 HEARING OF the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, there were no warnings about sugar related to heart disease and diabetes.
In 50 years, I don't know how many people have suffered from sugar. In 2012 alone, there were 702 308 cardiovascular and metabolic disease-related deaths in the United States, of which 10.8% of coronary heart disease deaths and 14.8% of diabetes deaths were related to sugary drinks.
Several of the professors mentioned above have passed away, but the truth was only discovered in 2010 and released last year, and they have also been forever nailed to the column of academic shame.
What are the dangers of sugar?
According to the latest research, in addition to being a risk factor for coronary heart disease, sugar is also closely related to obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, gout and other diseases.
Clinical studies have found that if the saturated fatty acids in the diet are replaced with sugars with the same energy (sucrose or fructose syrup, commonly used additives in sugary drinks), it will be found that low-density lipoprotein, triglycerides are increased, and high-density lipoprotein is reduced, and these changes are associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease.
In other words, eating sugars of the same energy has a greater impact on blood lipids than saturated fatty acids.
In a study of more than 170,000 people that explored the relationship between sugary drinks and coronary heart disease, researchers found that drinking more than 1 sugary drink per day (1 serving = 330 ml, about one drink) increased the risk of coronary heart disease by 16%, and the more they drank, the higher the risk.
It seems that eating too much sugar will really be "sad".
Eating as much sugar as you want is harmful
The answer is that even drinking a 600 ml bottle of sugary drink can cause damage.
Drinking sugary drinks regularly can lead to coronary heart disease, which has been demonstrated in previous studies. But unexpectedly, a 600 ml bottle of sugary drinks can also do a lot of things.
This conclusion comes from a study published in atvB, an authoritative journal in the field of cardiovascular, which included healthy volunteers with an average age of 31 years, each of whom was given a 600 ml sugary drink (containing 72 grams of sugar and 1 200 kJ energy), and then compared with drinking purified water.
The results showed that after drinking 600 ml of sugary drinks, the microvascular function and large blood vessel endothelial function of the volunteers were significantly impaired, which may be related to the reaction caused by increased blood glucose.
What to limit is "bad sugar"
Although a small bottle of sugary drinks is "lethal", we don't have to keep all sugar out.
Because sugar is one of the three major nutrients that the human body must have, it should be consumed in a balanced manner. What really needs to be restricted is "added sugar," which is not contained in the food itself.
The World Health Organization recommended in its 2014 nutrition guidelines that adults' daily intake of added sugars should be controlled below 5% of total energy, that is, about 25 to 30 grams per day.
When it comes to the types of sugars, the extra "bad sugars" are mainly sucrose or fructose syrup, rather than "polysaccharides" such as starch and cellulose.
If you pay attention to the packaging of beverages, you will find that most sugary drinks are added with white sugar, and more than 95% of the components of white sugar are sucrose, and a small part is added to the fructose syrup.
A large number of studies have found that compared with "polysaccharides" such as starch, sucrose and fructose can induce elevated blood lipids, insulin resistance, platelet dysfunction, and eventually lead to obesity, coronary heart disease, and diabetes.
If the intake of sucrose and fructose can be restricted, the above abnormalities can be significantly reversed.
Drink more boiled water and less sugary drinks
In sugary drinks, in addition to the common cola, there are many members, such as juice drinks, sports drinks, functional drinks, iced tea, yogurt, herbal tea, sour plum soup and so on.
Taking the World Health Organization's "daily intake of no more than 25 grams of added sugars", drinking 1 bottle of drink may exceed the standard.
After turning a large circle, we found that for the Chinese people, the healthiest drink is still boiled water.
This article is co-authored by experts
McCity
Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University - Department of Cardiology and Internal Medicine
Deputy Chief Physician / MD / Master Supervisor
This article is reviewed by experts
Li Liangli
The first batch of registered dietitians in China
Master of Nutrition, School of Public Health, Fudan University
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Planning and production
Planner: Tagay | Editor-in-charge: feidi
Author: Mai Yiting | Cover image source: Stand Cool Helo