Bad Cholesterol Levels Linked To Sugar Intake

Remember when everyone told you that eating fatty foods was going to give you high cholesterol?  Turns out, the story may be more complex than that.  Recent research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that the higher your intake of sugar, the worse off your cholesterol levels are.

This is actually a really interesting article on a couple of levels.  First off, let’s just talk about the cholesterol thing.

It’s kind of a big deal that somebody bothered to check this out, because as I mentioned before, for a long time the assumption was that eating foods high in cholesterol makes your blood cholesterol levels higher.  In this study, researchers questioned over 6,000 people on what they ate and then used that information to estimate sugar intake.

Blood samples were also drawn from all of the subjects, and the researchers found that with increasing sugar intake, the blood profiles got worse. Specifically, low sugar intake correlated with lower LDL (bad cholesterol) levels, lower triglycerides (this is also bad stuff) and higher HDL (good cholesterol).  So low sugar intake= better cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Interestingly (to me, at least) this correlation was strongest for HDL levels (again, that’s the good cholesterol).

There’s some potential confounding variables (big words for “a monkey wrench”) in this study.  For starters, if you’ve read any of my other posts concerning scientific studies, you know my stance on the dubious nature of self-report.  Simply put, PEOPLE LIE.  They fib about everything.  In fact, they even lie to themselves, when there’s nobody else looking!

Self-report is simply very, very unreliable.  Even if someone isn’t lying, they may over or underestimate whatever you’re asking them about.  So it would’ve been better to have these participants fill out a food diary as they actually ate throughout the course of a week (or whatever time frame you like).  That way you know they aren’t under or overestimating by trying to remember just what they ate last week.

Try that out yourself, by the way.  Think back over what you ate last week.  I’ll bet you forget at least something.  Even harder would be to remember portion size.  So filling out a food diary would’ve been better (but logistically harder to do).  Of course, you still would have the problem of people lying on their self-report, but there isn’t much you can do about that, unless you’re planning on forming some sort of Food Self-Report Justice League (if you do, I’ll join if there’s a cool badge involved).

Anywho, the point is, self-report is a problem. But, considering the typical tendency of an individual is to UNDERestimate sugar intake… or really, underestimate any sort of unhealthy behavior (people hate to admit just how bad their diet is), then the problem of self-report isn’t as bad.  In fact, it may lead to the researchers underestimating just how important sugar intake is… in other words, the effect of sugar on cholesterol may be even GREATER than they measured.

So, I’m willing to accept their findings as valid.  But there’s actually some more interesting facts that the researchers found out that I don’t think they planned on finding.

Namely, this: almost TWENTY PERCENT of the subjects were getting at least a quarter of their daily calories from sugar.  Not “carbohydrates”, SUGAR.  That’s almost 50 teaspoons of sugar a day.  Hang on.  Let me do some googling and calculating here.

Okay, I’m back. Fifty teaspoons of sugar translates to about eight ounces, or ONE FULL CUP of sugar!  EVERY DAY!

Gee, I wonder why we’re all so freakin’ fat?

One more reason to cut out the sugar, folks.  Start switching over to a whole foods diet and stay healthy!

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/20/added.sugar.lipids/