Sugar Belly

Headnote

How Much is Too Much Sugar?

You've heard of a beer belly. Now there's new evidence that the fructose in added sugars may send more of your extra calories to that bulge where your waist used to be.

For years, researchers have found a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, gout, and weight gain in people who consume more sugar-sweetened beverages. Now a flurry of new studies suggests that our out-of-control sweet tooth is connected to our out-of-control belly fat.

And it's that kind of fat that may cripple the body's ability to use insulin, setting the stage for diabetes and heart disease.

Soft drinks, sports drinks, fruit drinks, energy drinks, coffee drinks, cupcakes, cookies, muffins, doughnuts, granóla bars, chocolate, ice cream, sweetened yogurt, cereal, candy. The list of sweet temptations is endless.

The average American now consumes 22 to 28 teaspoons of added sugars a day - mostly high-fructose corn syrup and ordinary table sugar (sucrose). That's 350 to 440 empty calories that few of us can afford.

How much added sugar is too much? Cutting back to 100 calories (6V2 teaspoons) a day for women and 150 calories (91/2 teaspoons) a day for men might mean slimmer waistlines and a lower risk of disease.

OBESITY

Do sugary foods and drinks deserve more blame for America's obesity epidemic than other foods?

"There is strong evidence linking sugar- sweetened beverages to weight," says Vasanti Malik, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health

For example, when she and her colleagues tracked more than 50,000 women for four years, they found that weight gain was greatest (about 10 pounds) among women who went from drinking no more than one sugar-sweetened drink a week to at least one a day.1

"But most industry-funded studies have reported no association," she notes. "This back-and-forth with industry has been muddying the waters."

For example, a 2009 meta-analysis by scientists with industry ties found no link between soft drinks and weight in children.2

"But there were some errors the way they scaled the data," Malik explains.

What's more, some studies in the industry-funded analysis only compared soda drinkers to non-soda drinkers who the same number of calories.

"It doesn't make sense...