In a new study, researchers found that the impact of sugars on heart health depends on the dose and type of sugar consumed.
Higher intake of total sugars, fructose or added sugars was linked to increased death from heart disease, whereas a higher intake of sucrose was linked to decreased death from heart disease.
The research was led by a team at St. Michael’s Hospital.
The team examined the link between total and added sugars that contain fructose on cardiovascular disease incidence and mortality.
Fructose is a naturally occurring sugar in many fruits and vegetables and makes up about half of the sugars in added sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup.
The team says people tend to think that sugars irrespective of the source are all bad, but this isn’t always the case.
Sugars behave differently depending on the type, dose, and food source. Different sugars in varying amounts from different sources can have different effects on our health.
The team wanted to find out whether there were harmful associations of fructose-containing sugars with heart health.
To do this, they conducted a review of previous studies investigating the association between reported intakes of fructose-containing sugars derived from all reported sources and heart disease incidence and mortality.
The team found that different types of sugars showed different associations with cardiovascular disease.
Higher intake of total sugars, fructose or added sugars was linked to increased death from heart disease, whereas a higher intake of sucrose was linked to decreased death from heart disease.
The sugars that were linked to harm also showed thresholds for harm below which increased death from heart disease was not observed, ranging from 58 grams for fructose to 133 grams for total sugars.
Given the limitation that their data is largely observational in nature, the team stressed that the certainty of their evidence is generally low and there is still a long way to go before fully understanding the relationship between sugars and heart health.
Next, the team plans to look at whether the differences seen by the type and dose of sugars can be explained by their food sources.
The lead author of the study is Dr. John Sievenpiper, a staff physician in the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism.
The study is published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
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