After just 9 days on the sugar-restricted diet, virtually every aspect of the participants’ metabolic health improved, without change in weight.
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Monitoring 43 children with pre-existing health problems related to obesity, the study replaced any sugary foods in the children’s regular diets with non-sugary calories such as pizza and crisps.
So after nine days, “everything got better” according to Lustig.
Fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes, diseases associated with metabolic syndrome, are now also being found in children, researchers said, because of obesity and other conditions potentially caused by poor diets.
Their blood sugar and blood pressure levels were assessed before and after.
Children were given a scale and told to weigh themselves everyday, with the goal of weight stability, not weight loss.
The association added that the study had insufficient data on what types of sugars – fructose especially – were contained in the children’s diets, and the study relied on self-reported information, which the association called “unreliable”.
While other researchers were critical of how the study was done, they said it does open a few important questions about how sugar affects metabolism.
Writing in the Guardian today, lead researcher on the project Robert Lustig, who wrote the anti-sugar book Fat Chance, said the study proved “that all calories are not the same”.
A few researchers said that because the study didn’t have a control group of children, the changes in the health of the children studied can’t be fully linked to a reduction in sugar intake.
But Lustig countered that other studies have shown that sugar can have bad metabolic effects outside of promoting weight gain through additional calories.
Senior author of the paper and PhD of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Touro University California, Jean-Marc Schwarz said, “I have never seen results as striking or significant in our human studies; after only nine days of fructose restriction, the results are dramatic and consistent from subject to subject”. Fasting blood glucose went down by 5 points, and insulin levels were cut by one-third.
Although the study is small, the team believes they have illustrated that calories are not the same, and of all the sources, sugar could be the worst. “We took pastries out and put bagels in”, said Lustig.
“This has enormous implications for the food industry, chronic disease, and health care costs”. If they started to drop weight drastically, they were given more low-sugar foods so that weight loss could be discounted as a factor in any positive health effects that might occur.
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Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist and advisor to Action on Sugar, said: “It’s time to abandon the outdated notion that a calorie is a calorie theory that continues to damage public health”. According to a press release from the University of California, San Francisco, reducing added sugar intake was shown to reverse a number of metabolic diseases like high cholesterol and hypertension in obese children in as little as 10 days.
