WebMD Health News – A new compilation of nearly all research to date on the health impacts of sugar offers dozens of reasons to cut back now.
Researchers from China and the U.S. rounded up 8,601 scientific studies on sugar and combined them to evaluate its impact on 83 health outcomes.
The studies accounted for decades of research on the topic, stretching back to the beginning of the largest electronic databases for scientific papers.
The result is a list that cites the world’s most common health problems like heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, heart attack, high cholesterol, cancer, and depression. The findings were published this week in the journal BMJ.
Researchers looked at studies that evaluated the impacts of consuming free sugars, which means any food that contains processed or naturally occurring sugars like table sugar, honey, or maple syrup. Sugar found in whole fruits and vegetables and in milk is not free sugar.
U.S. dietary guidelines recommend getting no more than 10% of daily calories from added sugars. For a typical 2,000-calorie-per-day diet, that equals no more than 200 calories, or about 12 teaspoons … READ MORE.
