Cutting Sugar from Kids' Diets Improves Health in Just Days

By Juliana Bunim, UCSF.edu

Note:  Funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), UCSF Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and Touro University.

Reducing consumption of added sugar, even without reducing calories or losing weight, has the power to reverse a cluster of chronic metabolic diseases, including high cholesterol and blood pressure, in children in as little as 10 days, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco and Touro University California.

“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 lead author Robert Lustig, M.D., MSL, pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco. “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.”

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