Sugar (And Not Fat) Causes Diabetes

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For years, the prevailing medical opinion is that eating more sugar means having more calories and it is the resulting weight gain that leads to diabetes. Me too, I have always thought that if you were fat you were more likely to get diabetes.

After I had my bike accident  I was afraid of putting on weight. I have always eaten what I wanted (all the junk food of course), I drank lots of Coke and other sodas, but the saving grace is that I have always been fairly active, even after I stopped racing competitively. However, with my head and back broken, I was definitely not going to be able to exercise for a while.

Something miraculous happened, I stopped drinking Coke in the first few weeks after my accident. My wife (God bless her) who has always been an advocate of eating healthily bought a juicer and made my son and I drink more vegetable and fruit juices and also bought and cooked more organic food (thanks, dear).

And you know what, my friends and colleagues who saw me a few weeks after the accident actually said I lost weight. Well of course some of that is from muscle wasting due to my inactivity. But definitely the healthy eating (and not drinking soda) helped.

Now coming back to the post I was going to write about sugar and diabetes. Like I wrote earlier, I always thought that if you were overweight you were more likely to get diabetes. I guess I may be wrong. A recent published study shows there may be more than meets the eye.

The authors of a recently published study shows that it is sugar and not obesity that causes diabetes. Their study controlled for poverty, urbanization, ageing, obesity and physical activity. In short, it controlled everything that can be controlled. The authors looked at sugar consumption in 175 countries over 10 years.

Sugar was 11 times stronger than total calories in explaining rates of diabetes around the world. They found that the more sugar found in the food supply, the higher the rates of diabetes in that country, no matter what the obesity rates were.

In fact, they found that for every 12 ounces of sugar-sweetened drink introduced per person per day into a country's food system, the rate of diabetes went up by 1 percent.

The authors found that 20 percent of obese people have completely normal metabolic signatures while up to 40 percent of people with normal weight have the exact same metabolic problems that the obese do (just that they are not fat). The warning here is that you can be of normal weight, but if you eat a lot of sugar you can be "sick" and not know it unless you get examined.

Scary for me especially because I tend to consume lots of sugar before. Now that I am definitely healing, I have gone back to some (but not all) of my bad sugar habits. I definitely need to make sure I do not go back to my previous levels of consumption.

And so do you, if you have a bad sugar habit now that you know.

Reference

Basu S, Yoffe P, Hills N and Lustig, RH (2013). The Relationship of Sugar to Population-Level Diabetes Prevalence : An Econometric Analysis of Repeated Cross-Sectional Data. PLoS ONE 8(2): e57873. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0057873.

*Picture from Sugarstacks.com