Sugar is bad for you - no really ?!

Saturday's paper has an article that discussed how poor diet can effect your body even if you don't gain weight. I firmly believe that weight gain is not the problem. It is one of the symptoms of a poor diet. I believe you can have a poor diet, not put on any weight, and still have high risk of heart disease, cancer etc. etc.

My uncle was a very tragic case in point. Skinny and athletic, but died of heart attack while his two children where still teenagers. This is the problem that most of the medical fraternity now understand the connection between being over weight and risk of Western disease. However they don't understand that the diet is the root problem and the weigh it only a symptom. This is why I am slightly dubious about weight reduction operations like gastric banding. Sure they work and you eat less. However if your percentage of "bad" food stay the same I would argue that your risk factors stay that same as you are still eating a low nutrient diet.

Back to the article in point. It found that rats feed a high sugar diet for a 12 week period developed signs of heart disease. To put this in context rats live for 2 - 3 years. So this was 1/8th to 1/12th of their life span. So this would equate to about 10 years for a person. (assuming that this transformation holds across species).

The article goes on to say that high sugar is bad for you. No surprise to anyone interested in nutrition. However there are significant numbers of people who think high fat = bad and high sugar is ok.