14 DAY TRIAL // The latest study on the effects that sugar has on the human body have shown that the substance should be cataloged as a toxic chemical, similar to how tobacco and alcohol are currently designated. The bad part is that sweeteners aren't any better for us.
The number of researchers arguing that this is the way things should be has been growing steadily for the past few years, with no signs of abating. The body of evidence associated with this point of view is also steadily growing.
What some are suggesting is not that sugar is bad for you because you eat too much of it. They are saying that the substance is bad in itself. It is rich in calories, can easily lead to obesity, and has the ability to set in motion a cascade of hormonal events that boosts risks of several other conditions.
The latter include cardiovascular diseases, strokes and type II diabetes, among others. The new investigation was carried out by nutritionists at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF), who published the results of their study in the February 2 issue of the top scientific journal Nature.
To make matters even worse, scientists also provide no way out of our dependency on sugar. They say that artificial sweeteners may be just as bad as the real thing. They are also a fast-growing, multi-billion dollar product that companies are not likely to give up without a huge fight.
When the idea to replace sugar with sweeteners first appeared, experts listed a number of benefits that should have been made immediately apparent after renouncing sugar. Needless to say, these proposed benefits failed to materialize.
“That’s the $64,000 question. There are several epidemiological studies showing increased risk of metabolic syndrome in coincidence with the consumption of diet sodas,” Purdue University Ingestive Behavior Research Center researcher Susan Swithers explains.
“But how they should be interpreted is not really clear right now. Because they’re correlational studies, they don’t tell us what caused what,” she goes on to say. Swithers adds that diet sodas are some of the most important sources of artificial sweeteners.
This issue is bound to cause a new wave of research into the actual health effects of sugar and sweeteners in the body. These investigations are bound to come up with causal relationships between these two classes of substances and various medical conditions, Wired reports.