"Sugar is a completely nonessential part of our diets," says Kimberly Stanhope, a research nutritional biologist at the University of California, Davis. On the other hand, the health risks of getting too much sugar are fairly well established. So here we have a "food" that does us no good at all and causes us a long list of harms, and yet we can't seem to put it aside.
For starters, sugar offers us nothing but nutrition-free calories. The weight gain from these useless calories increases the risk for type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke and several types of cancer. Even if sugar did not pile on the pounds, it is an important factor in fatty liver disease, tooth decay, cellular inflammation, anxiety and depression, age-related cognitive decline, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Starting in January, 2020, food nutrition labels were required to list added sugar in grams. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that added sugars make up no more than 10% of your total daily calories. That comes to 50g for a 2,000 calorie diet. The American Heart Association recommends that added sugars be no more than about 30g. But seriously, why should an utterly worthless food make up any of our diet?
Artificial sweeteners come with their own problems. There is very little evidence that replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners results in much if any sustained weight loss. "The goal is not to get people to switch from sugar to diet drinks," says Vasanti Malik, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "Its to get them to switch from sugar to water." Sweeteners may be useful as a temporary bridge while making that transition, but they are not a permanent solution.
Cutting back on added sugar and artificial sweeteners is your best bet to avoid the ill health effects of this utterly worthless "food".
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