Cutting sugar added to 6 teaspoons a day can help improve health
After conducting a comprehensive review of the evidence, the researchers recommended reducing added sugar consumption to about 6 teaspoons daily and limiting sugary drinks to less than 1 weekly serving.
DOIs: 10.1136/bmj-2022-071609
A significant harmful association was found between sugar consumption and 45 health outcomes, including depression, certain cancers, obesity, diabetes, asthma, heart disease and death.
It is generally known that consuming too much sugar can have a negative impact on health and this has led WHO and other health organizations to recommend reducing added sugars to less than 10% of total daily energy intake. .
The researchers conducted a review to evaluate the quality of evidence, potential biases, and validity of all available studies on dietary sugar consumption and health outcomes.
The review included 67 meta-analyses of observational studies and 6 meta-analyses of randomized controlled studies addressing 83 health outcomes.
The quality of the evidence was assessed and rated for each outcome as very low, low, moderate, or high quality.
A significant adverse association was found between dietary sugar consumption and 18 metabolic or endocrine outcomes including obesity, gout and diabetes; 10 cardiovascular outcomes including stroke, heart attack and hypertension; 7 cancer outcomes including pancreatic, prostate, and breast cancers; as well as 10 other outcomes including depression, tooth decay, asthma, and death.
Evidence of moderate quality shows that sugary beverage consumption is significantly associated with greater body weight for the highest intakes than for the lowest intakes, whereas any intake Compared with no added sugar, both were associated with more fat accumulation in the muscles and liver.
Low-quality evidence shows that each incremental weekly intake of 1 sugary beverage is associated with a 4% increased risk of gout, and each additional 250 mL/day consumption of a sugary beverage are related to the rates of 17% and 4%. increased risk of coronary heart disease and mortality.
Low-quality evidence also indicates that each additional 25 g/day intake of fructose is associated with a 22% higher risk of pancreatic cancer.
No association was found between dietary sugar consumption and any beneficial health outcomes, other than mortality from cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, total cholesterol, brain tumors, and tumors. glial nerve. However, the researchers caution that these favorable connections are not supported by strong evidence.
These results suggest multiple health benefits by reducing sugar intake to less than 25 g/day (about 6 teaspoons daily) and limiting sugary beverage consumption to less than 1 weekly serving ( about 200-355 mL/week).
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