Sweet hearts

Sweetness has a special place in human psychology and vocabulary. Victory is “sweet”, depression takes the “sweetness out of life” and we fall in love with a “sweetheart”. This is all rooted in an evolutionary path that saw sweetness as a rare but benign sign of easy kilojoules. Today sweetness abounds and the excess of sugary sweetness in the modern diet is causing an array of problems. Of all the linguistic misnomers in this regard, perhaps the greatest is the one that refers fondly to a “sweetheart” because, as new research has shown, sugar is not good for your heart at all. This might not sound like revelatory news given the relationship between sugar and weight gain, and then between weight gain and heart disease. What is new, though, is that it appears sugar is bad for your heart independent of you putting on weight.

The research involved an analysis of intervention trials published in English-speaking journals over the 48 years between 1965 and 2013. The researchers looked for studies that looked at dietary effects on blood fats and blood pressure where the only difference between subjects was the amount of sugar and “non-sugar carbohydrate” they consumed.

They found 37 trials that met their criteria for blood fats and 12 for blood pressure. The findings from all the trials were combined and the results examined.

It emerged that eating sugar had modest, but significant, effects on blood fats and blood pressure and that relationship existed independent of body weight. Interestingly, the researchers also made the point that, if they excluded trials that were funded by the food industry, then sugar showed a greater tendency to increase both blood pressure and blood fats.

Since high blood pressure and blood fats are both risk factors for heart disease then the researchers conclude that reducing sugar intake might reduce the global burden of heart disease. It might not be sweet news for sugar lovers, but the bitter pill we have to swallow is that too much sugar is not just a guilty pleasure, it is bad for your health.