Researchers say this suggests sugar does not necessarily lead to weight gain

Oct 29, 2013 21:06 GMT  ·  By

Obese women who consume noteworthy amounts of soft drinks eat less and thus compensate for most of the extra energy their bodies get from said beverages, a new paper published in the British Journal of Nutrition says.

Professor Marie Reird with the University of Hull believes that, all things considered, these findings indicate that sugar does not necessarily lead to weight gain, and that it should not be frowned upon as much as it is.

EurekAlert reports that, in order to determine how soft drinks consumption influences a woman's dietary habit, specialists carried out an experiment with the help of 41 volunteers.

The women taken into consideration for this study all qualified as obese, and they were all asked to drink 1 liter of soft drinks on a daily basis for a period of 4 weeks.

Unknown to the volunteers, 20 of them were given soft drinks containing sugar, whereas the remainder were offered beverages sweetened with aspartame.

During these for weeks, the women were asked to also write down the things that they ate, take notes about their mood and even keep an activity diary.

It was thus discovered that the women who drank sugar-sweetened soft drinks throughout the duration of this experiment had reduced their average daily intake of calories from food by about 1,584kJ (378kcal).

This meant that they had compensated for roughly 88% of the energy they got from the soft drinks.

By comparison, the women who drank soft drinks sweetened with aspartame did not reduce their daily intake of calories, the researchers detail in their paper.

Commenting on these findings, study co-author Professor Richard Hammersley said that, “This line of research suggests that sucrose (sugar) given blind is compensated for elsewhere in the diet and does not lead to weight gain.”

“The women ate fewer carbohydrates from other sources, and also reduced their intake of energy from other parts of the diet. Sucrose does not cause weight gain any more than any other type of food,” he went on to argue.