14 DAY TRIAL // According to specialists working with the Department of Agriculture in the United States, people who get 25% tops of their daily calorie intake from sugar need not worry about their health.
Researchers at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City disagree, and argue that this so-called maximum safe level for sugar consumption might not be as safe as most people think.
The scientists have recently finished work on a series of experiments on mice.
Their goal was to document sugar's impact on the rodents' overall health condition and behavioral patterns, Nature reports.
The mice used in these experiments were not administered high doses of sugar.
On the contrary, the amounts of sugar that they were allowed to eat on a daily basis were the equivalent of what numerous people in the US presently consume throughout the course of an entire day.
The rodents stayed on this diet for 26 weeks in a row. After that, they were set loose in a relatively large habitat that looked fairly similar to the animals' natural environment.
Mice that had not been fed sugar were also released in this habitat.
The scientists monitored the rodents for about six weeks, and noticed that the ones that had been eating what was considered to be a safe amount of sugar had trouble adjusting to life there.
Thus, female sugar-eaters died at nearly twice the rate of the females that had eaten a healthy diet, and male sugar-eaters produced roughly 25% fewer offspring.
Besides, males that had regularly consumed sugar before being released into the habitat had trouble acquiring and guarding territory.
The researchers say that, although mice and humans have different anatomies, their findings indicate that sugar consumption can prove detrimental even when one's daily intake is labeled as “safe.”
“If I show that something hurts mice, do you really want it in your body before we’ve determined whether it’s a mouse-only problem?” specialist Wayne Potts asks.
Further investigations are expected to shed more light on this issue.