10 days to improving kids health by cutting sugar
Cutting sugar can have a magical improvement in obese children health profile in just 10 days, a new study has found.
Blood pressure and cholesterol reading showed marked improvement.
It is hoped that the new research may provide answer to the question: Whether sugar itself harms health, or is the weight gain that comes from consuming sugar (in drinks and foods) that contributes to illness over the long term?
In the study, scientists designed a clinical experiment to attempt to answer this question. They removed food with added sugar from a group of children’s diets and replaced them with other types of carbohydrates so that the subjects’ weight and overall calorie intake remained roughly the same. After 10 days, the children showed dramatic improvements, despite losing little or no weight. The findings add to the argument that all calories are not created equal, and they suggest that those from sugar are especially likely to contribute to Type 2 diabetes and other metabolic diseases, which are on the rise in children, said the study’s lead author, Dr Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Benioff Children’s Hospital of University of California.
‘This paper says we can turn a child’s metabolic health around in 10 days without changing calories and without changing weight -just by taking the added sugars out of their diet’, Dr Lustig said.
Added sugars are a topic of growing debate in the US. In February 2015, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recommended that sugar intake should be limited to around 10% of daily calories.
The study was financed by the National Institutes of Health and published in the journal Obesity.
