by Matthew Kady, MS, RD for IDEA Fitness
Harvard report urges nutrition education in medical schools. Although diet can be a significant factor in many chronic health conditions, surprisingly, U.S.-trained doctors receive little or no formal training in nutrition. (Estimates are that, on average, students in medical schools spend less than 1% of lecture time learning about diet.) Staff and students at the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic would like to see that knowledge gap rectified.
In the report Doctoring Our Diet: Policy Tools to Include Nutrition Training in U.S. Medical Training, the group issued recommendations for improving nutrition education in undergraduate, graduate and continuing medical education. The report says that nutrition education should be required in medical school and that physicians should be required to take continuing education courses in nutrition to maintain medical licenses. The end goal? Supporting better health outcomes for patients.
This Is Your Body On Sugar from Eat This, Not That
Oh, you don't recall slurping down any of the hyper-sweet corn extract in one sitting? Well, you did—about eight teaspoons' worth, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In fact, the average American consumed 27 pounds of the stuff last year.
But while 8 teaspoons of artificially manufactured syrup may seem like an awful lot, it's only a drop in the sugar bucket. The USDA's most recent figures find that Americans consume, on average, about 32 teaspoons of added sugar every single day. That sugar comes to us in the form of candies, ice cream and other desserts, yes. But the most troubling sugar of all isn't the added sugar we consume on purpose; it's the stuff we don't even know we're eating.
In recent years, the medical community has begun to coalesce around a powerful new way of looking at added sugar: as perhaps the number one most significant health threat in America. What exactly is "added sugar," and why do experts suddenly believe that it's the Freddy Kreuger of nutrition? Read on to find out!
The Deal With Added Sugar: When they talk about "added sugar," health experts aren't talking about the stuff that we consume from eating whole foods. "Added sugars are sugars that are contributed during the processing or preparation of foods and beverages," says Rachel K. Johnson, PhD, RD, professor of nutrition at The University of Vermont. Lactose, the sugar naturally found in milk and dairy products, and naturally occurring fructose, the sugar that appears in fruit, don't count. Ingredients that are used in foods to provide added sweetness and calories, from the much-maligned high fructose corn syrup to healthier-sounding ones like agave, date syrup, cane sugar, and honey, are all considered added sugars.
That's because naturally occurring sugars, like what you find in an apple, come with their own balanced health posse—fiber and micronutrients, which slows the digestion of the sugar and prevents it from spiking insulin response and damaging your liver, two serious side effects of added sugar.
Fortunately, giving up added sugar has been shown to have several dramatic and rapid impacts on your health. In a newly released study, children who cut added sugars from their diets for just 9 days showed dramatic improvements in cholesterol and blood sugar levels.
On the flip side, adding sugar to your diet can quickly put your health into a spiral: people who consumed beverages containing high fructose corn syrup for 2 weeks significantly increased their levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol (the unfavorable kind), plus two proteins associated with elevated cholesterols and another compound, uric acid, that's associated with diabetes and gout—this comes from a 2015 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
In fact, in a 2014 editorial in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, the authors made a bold statement: "Too much sugar does not only make us fat; it can also make us sick.
The editors of Eat This, Not That! took a look at the most recent research and discovered just how much harm added sugars are doing to us:
Your Belly--Added Sugar Causes Your Body To Store Fat Around Your Gut: Within 24 hours of eating fructose, your body is flooded with elevated levels of triglycerides. Does that sound bad? It is.
Triglycerides are the fatty deposits in your blood. Your liver makes them because they're essential for building and repairing the tissues in your body. But, when it's hit with high doses of fructose, the liver responds by pumping out more triglycerides; that's a signal to your body that it's time to store some abdominal fat. In one study, researchers fed subjects beverages sweetened with either glucose or fructose. Both gained the same amount of weight over the next 8 weeks, but the fructose group gained its weight primarily as belly fat, thanks to the way this type of sugar is processed in the liver.
What's unique to fructose is that it seems to be a universal obesogen—in other words, every creature that eats it gains weight. Princeton researchers recently found that high-fructose corn syrup seemed to have a unique impact on weight in their animal studies. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese—every single one, across the board," psychology professor Bart Hoebel, a specialist in appetite and sugar addiction, said in a report from the university. "Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain weight." Fructose is the freak show of fat.
Your Blood Sugar--Added Sugar Is The #1 Factor In Your Risk Of Dying From Diabetes: The link between increased sugar and diabetes risk is right up there with "smoking causes lung cancer" on the list of immutable medical truths— despite what soda manufacturers are trying to tell us. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have come right out and said that added fructose—either as a constituent of table sugar or as the main component of high-fructose corn syrup—may be the number one cause of diabetes, and that cutting sugar alone could translate into a reduced number of diabetes deaths the world over.
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