The American Heart Association held a conference in Orlando Florida over the weekend. Many sessions were held during the event and new research was presented during some of them. The conference topics were broken into large core groups and one of them, Epidemiology and Prevention of CV Disease: Physiology, Pharmacology and Lifestyle contained several presentations regarding sugar sweetened beverages and added sugar. A particular session titled, You Are (mainly)What You Eat, regarded a new (not yet published) study, by Christina Shay. Dr. Shay is from Northwestern University. The findings that she reported at the conference have been making headlines all over the place in the last two days. I have read the abstract and you can too, as well as some of the news stories themselves.
There is a little bit of a disconnect between the two and as I LOVE to share truth - I will do so now.
I will start by deciphering my title. SSBs you should know from reading my blog. It stands for Sugar Sweetened Beverages. For the study in question, the researchers compared the number of sugar sweetened beverages a person consumed in an average day to cardiovascular risk factors they later developed. I will spell those out in a moment. The amount of SSBs was determined through self report in a Food Frequency Questionnaire. A sugar sweetened beverage was defined as sodas, teas and coffees - a health professional interviewed by one of the news agencies referred to the coffee drink as a dessert more than a beverage. (I am not sure what they did about fruit, energy and sports drinks)
The people involved in the study were part of a bigger study but we won't get into that just now. For this analysis, the study included men and women of several ethnic backgrounds (US). All were between the ages of 45 and 84 at the beginning of the study which lasted from 2002 to 2007.
At the start (or baseline), none of the participants had been diagnosed with heart disease (HD). They were evaluated or measured at two additional times. Associations between a person's intake of certain nutrients was compared with incidence of several outcomes. (I imagine that SSB was not the only thing they looked into, but it is the only behavior they made associations with in this report).
The outcomes for which they found a statistically significant difference between groups include WC or waist circumference, IFG or impaired fasting glucose (a sign of insulin resistance and possible risk for diabetes), and TG or triglycerides (blood fats).
They compared groups by SSB status. The group that they considered a reference included persons who had one or less SSB per day. Compared to that reference group, women in the study who drank 2 or more SSB a day, had more of an increase in waist size (WC), IFG and TG. One of the results that is getting a lot of attention is that the 2+ a day SSB group was 4 times more likely to have clinically high TG. Triglycerides are blood fats and it appears that excess sugar in the diet can lead to increased TGs.
I am not sure what the news stories were trying to articulate, but the emphasis they made was on increasing TG levels related to sugary beverage consumption, "even in skinny girls." This may be related to the finding in the actual study or the truth that the 2+ group had increased waist size whether or not they had increased weight. Increased WC is the risk factor for heart disease not increased weight - so the headline is misleading.
It is also worth reminding people that sugar consumption is one of the main contributors to obesity because it is easy to consume more calories than you need or even realize your consuming with sugar products.
It is also important to note that refined sugar, in drinks or sweets, spikes the blood sugar. Having this type of action in the body several times a day every day is a great risk for insulin resistance. Diabetes is a cardiovascular (heart) problem. We do not often think of it that way, but the condition leads to heart damage.
The soft drink case is especially pronounced in women.
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