Do not sugar cane!

Do not sugar cane!

In recent years, several investigations have blamed the excessive consumption of sugar in the global epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

Source 

The particular crusade of the dentist Cristin Kearns began in 2007, when he attended the conference of a guru named Steven G. Aldana, who affirmed that the consumption of sweet tea was very healthy. For a dentist, this statement was shocking. Our grandmothers used to tell us that sugar is not good for teeth, but Kearns already suspected, when working as a director of a dental clinic that catered to families with few re-courses, that the ravages of sugary drinks went much further and linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes. When he approached Aldana to explain himself, the guru limited himself to answer: "There is no research that sustains that sugar causes chronic diseases". That gave him so much to think that Kearns left his job and dived for fifteen months into an investigation to examine more than 1,500 internal documents from various sugar companies.

He found that the sugar lobby had sponsored research favorable to his interests and, what was more worrying, that he had hidden results that could jeopardize its benefits. On the one hand, the efforts were aimed at presenting sugar as an innocent nutrient and, on the other, they sought to publicize and intensify its consumption.

It was known, for example, the relationship of this product with caries and that a bacterium, Streptococcus mutans, was responsible for demineralizing the teeth, by taking advantage of residual glucose to make acid. The scientists financed by the sugar companies tried to develop a vaccine against this microorganism. It was more profitable to inoculate them to the little ones than to urge them to eat less sweet. The immunological preparation in monkeys was even tested with some success. But the matter did not prosper.

Increase in cholesterol and triglycerides

Then, Kearns came across another document, called Project 259 and sealed as confidential, which was in the file of the chemist Roger Adams, of the University of Illinois and former member of the advisory committee of the Foundation for Research on Sugar (SFR). There, the researches of the biochemist W. F. R. Pover, of the University of Birmingham, paid for by the foundation between 1968 and 1969, were detailed. When reading it, the researcher knew that she had found something fat.

One of Pover's goals was to determine the influence of what is eaten in blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Some previous studies suggested that rats fed a diet rich in starch had lower cholesterol levels, compared to those that were fattened with foods heavily enriched with sugar.

Pover suspected that the microorganisms that lived in the intestines of animals had much to say. A group of rodents modified to be free of them was fed with sugar, and another group of the same class, with a conventional diet. Pover found that the blood of the former contained high levels of cholesterol and that the triglycerides had dropped significantly. However, the intake of sugar in animals with their intestinal flora intact caused an increase in cholesterol and triglycerides. If something like this happened in people, the results could be a real catastrophe for the SFR.