Is sugar making you fat?

For a very long time, dietary fat has been associated with excessive weight gain, and many people avoid fat in an effort to maintain a healthy body weight.  Ironically, however, at the same time that consumers became aware of fat content in foods, and the food industry responded by providing “fat free” processed foods, we saw the obesity problem rise to epidemic proportions.  This is not just a coincidence. 

In order to continue to make food taste appealing, the food industry had to replace the fat content with something else.  And they turned to sugar.  However, increased consumption of added sugars, in particular sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup, correlate closely with the rise in obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndromes over the last 100 years.  The physiological response to fructose, in particular, causes a stress on the body which stimulates fat accumulation, regardless of whether there was a simultaneous excessive intake of calories.  So this means that even where there is a calorie controlled diet in place, due to the way that our bodies process fructose digestion, fat cells can still be created and stored, leading to obesity. 

Even in cases where the consumption of fructose does not have the effect of fat accumulation, it may cause other metabolic syndromes.  A diet which includes high sucrose consumption, even with calorie restriction, has been shown to lead to fatty liver, hypertriglyceridemia (high levels of fat in the blood, leading to heart disease) and insulin resistance (Type 2 diabetes). 

Due to the reality of the modern diet, we are now at a greater risk of developing non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes than we are of contracting infectious diseases, and these non-communicable diseases contribute to 35 million deaths each year.  Even normal weight people are at risk, in a situation often referred to as “skinny-fat”. 

The only real way to avoid this is to remove processed, sugar-laden foods from our diets.  Consuming whole foods, lots of fruits, vegetables and grains and avoiding all sugar-sweetened beverages is the best known protection against metabolic syndrome.  The next time you are in the supermarket and you see products promoting their “fat-free” status, take a minute to look at the ingredients.  Just because they don’t contain any fat, does not mean that they are not making you fat, either in your liver or just in general.