Too much sugar increases heart disease risk

High cholesterol a dangerous side effect to extra sweeteners

 

CHICAGO - Eating a lot of sugar not only makes you fat. It may also increase a person's risk for heart disease, U.S. researchers said.

They said people who ate more added sugar were more likely to have higher risk factors for heart disease, such as higher triglycerides and lower levels of protective high-density lipoprotein or HDL cholesterol.

"Just like eating a high-fat diet can increase your levels of triglycerides and high cholesterol, eating sugar can also affect those same lipids," Dr. Miriam Vos of Emory School of Medicine, who worked on the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said in a statement.

The study adds to mounting pressure on U.S. food companies to make their foods healthier as newly passed U.S. health reform legislation shifts the nation's focus on ways to prevent, rather than simply treat disease.

A report by the influential Institute of Medicine released on Tuesday recommended that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration start to regulate sodium intake in foods.

And several states, including New York and California, have weighed a tax on sweetened soft drinks to defray the cost of treating obesity-related diseases.

The addition of sweeteners to prepared foods and beverages in recent decades has sharply increased Americans' daily intake of sugar and overall calories, according to Vos and colleagues.

But no major studies have looked at the impact of too much sugar on levels of fat in the blood.

The researchers asked 6,000 adults what they ate and then grouped them by sugar intake and cholesterol levels.

On average, nearly 16 percent of people's daily calories came from added sugar.

The highest-consuming group ate an average of 46 teaspoons of added sugar per day, while the lowest-consuming group ate an average of only about 3 teaspoons daily.

"It would be important for long-term health for people to start looking at how much added sugar they're getting and finding ways to reduce that," Vos said in a statement.

Too much sugar not only contributes to obesity, but also is a key culprit in diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, according to the American Heart Association.