Cutting Sugar Intake Improves Obese Kids' Health in Ten Days

A recent study published in Obesity has found that cutting the amounts of sugar being consumed daily significantly improves the overall health of obese kids, in just ten days.

"This study definitively shows that sugar is metabolically harmful not because of its calories or its effects on weight; rather sugar is metabolically harmful because it's sugar," said the study's lead author Robert Lustig, MD, MSL, pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco, in a press release.

"This internally controlled intervention study is a solid indication that sugar contributes to metabolic syndrome, and is the strongest evidence to date that the negative effects of sugar are not because of calories or obesity," Lustig added.

Metabolic Syndrome, according to the United Press International, is a group of diseases that happen together. Diseases include high blood pressure, high blood glucose levels, excess waist fat, and abnormal cholesterol levels.

Diseases that were formerly unknown in the pediatric populace are also occurring now in young children. Such diseases include non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and type 2 diabetes.

The researchers wanted to find out whether metabolic disease could be blamed on either obesity, calories, or something in the diet, and worked with 43 children between the ages of nine to 18. These kids were obese and had at least one chronic metabolic disorder such as hypertension or high triglyceride levels.

The kids were fed for nine days. Their sugar intake, however, was restricted, and sugary foods were substituted with starchy foods (bagels, cereals, pasta) to maintain the same amount of proteins, fat, carbohydrates, and calories that they usually consumed. The food choices were “kid food”—turkey hot dogs, baked potato chips, and pizza, from local supermarkets. Total sugar was reduced from 28 to 10 percent, and fructose from 12 to 4 percent.

The kids were tasked to weigh themselves each day during the study duration. Should there be weight loss (an average of one percent loss happened), additional food was given.

After nine days, the researchers found amazing results. Diastolic blood pressure lowered by 5mm, triglycerides by 33 points, LDL cholesterol by 10 points, fasting blood glucose was 5 points lower, and insulin levels were cut by one-third. Liver function tests also improved, all without losing body weight.

"I have never seen results as striking or significant in our human studies; after only nine days of fructose restriction, the results are dramatic and consistent from subject to subject. These findings support the idea that it is essential for parents to evaluate sugar intake and to be mindful of the health effects of what their children are consuming," said Jean-Marc Schwarz, PhD of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Touro University California and senior author of the paper.