Consuming added sugar has been consistently linked to a laundry list of health maladies. Thanks to an eye-opening new study, we have fresh, new insight on how added sugars do their dirty work. 

For this study, scientists had 94 healthy young males consume a single daily drink sweetened with one of three types of sugar– fructose, glucose, and sucrose (table sugar). The scientists used specialized tracers to monitor how drinking the daily sugary beverage impacted the production of fat in the liver. 

The results? Study subjects consuming the daily sugary beverage containing fructose and sucrose experienced a 2-fold increase in liver fat production relative to baseline. What’s more, the boost in liver fat production remained for more than twelve hours! 

Given that fat build up in the liver leads to fatty liver disease, as well as the entire family of metabolic diseases—type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease—these findings are illuminating. 

Be sure to keep the added sugars in your diet under wraps! For women, limit to 6 tsp. or less a day and for men, 9 tsp. or less a day.

Journal of Hepatology, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.jhep.2021.02.027