Low-fat recommendations have led to a dramatic increase in sugar consumption, and excess sugar is a primary dietary factor in countless chronic disease states, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.
By removing fat and adding sugar, the processed food industry has created a smorgasbord of made-to-order disease. The sugar, processed food, and beverage industries have been extremely reluctant to admit the health hazards associated with their sugar-laden products.
On the contrary, large sums of money have been spent, and scientific integrity has been tossed by the wayside, in order to convince you that sugar is fine, and if you have a weight problem, it’s because you’re not active enough.
To counter the propaganda provided by profit-driven industry interests, dozens of scientists at three American universities have created a new educational website called SugarScience.org, aimed at making independent research available to the public.
Sugar by Any Other Name Is Still Sugar...
The researchers point out that many are unaware of just how much sugar they’re consuming, as it’s oftentimes hidden under other less familiar names, such as dextrose, maltose, galactose, and maltodextrin.
According to SugarScience.org, added sugars hide in 74 percent of processed foods under more than 60 different names! For a full list, please see SugarScience.org’s “Hidden in Plain Sight” page.
Mislead by shrewd advertisers, many are also still unaware of how too much sugar can disrupt your health and well-being. As reported by the New York Times:
“The scientists who started SugarScience.org say they have reviewed 8,000 independent clinical research articles on sugar and its role in metabolic conditions that are some of the leading killers of Americans, like heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and liver disease.
The link between sugar and chronic disease has attracted increasing scientific scrutiny in recent years. But many studies have provided conflicting conclusions, and experts say part of the reason is that biased studies have clouded the debate.”
Have You Been Mislead by Biased Science?
A report published in PLOS Medicine in December 2013 looked at how financial interests influence outcomes in trials aimed to determine the relationship between sugar consumption and obesity.
The report concluded that industry-funded studies end up reaching very different conclusions compared to those done by independent researchers... In all, studies that had financial ties to industry were five times more likely to present a conclusion of “no positive association” between sugar and obesity.
One of the researchers involved in the creation of SugarScience.org is Dr. Robert Lustig, a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at UC San Francisco.
He’s been on the forefront of the movement to educate people about the health hazards of sugar (and fructose in particular), for a number of years now. He believes the new website will help empower consumers by providing objective data. Dr. Lustig told the New York Times:
“The goal of this is to provide just the unbiased science in a way that the public can come to its own conclusions.”
